The drummer of a generation of hits
Arguably the greatest success story of the 1960s rock music era belonged to a man most people don’t recognize by name.
Certainly not by his given name — Harold Belsky — nor even by his professional name — Hal Blaine.
Since his death last week at age 90, you may have learned his name by reading any of the multiple articles, in print and online, that cataloged his extraordinary accomplishments. He has been recognized in his industry (and now, increasingly, by the public at large) as an unparalleled titan among that breed of musician that worked diligently behind the scenes, in the proverbial shadows. In the recording studios of Los Angeles, he played the drums in thousands of recording sessions between roughly 1960 and 1980, anonymously providing the backbeat for the hits of many hundreds of popular singers.
Name a hit single from the Sixties, and it’s very likely he was working the drum kit on the recording. The Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda”? Yep. Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life”? Sure. Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe”? Check. Elvis Presley’s “Return to Sender”? You bet. The Mamas and The Papas’ “California Dreamin'”? Uh-huh. The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”? One of his best.
It’s truly unbelievable, the pervasiveness of Blaine’s work during that period. His skillful drum work can be heard (and, sometimes, barely heard, when called for) on records by a broad cross section of American musical artists, from The Fifth Dimension to The Byrds, from The Partridge Family to Elvis Presley, from The Grassroots to Neil Diamond, from Barbra Streisand to Jan and Dean.
It’s estimated that Blaine played on more than 6,000 songs, 150 of which became Top Ten hits on the Billboard charts, and 40 of which reached Number One.
Here’s an especially remarkable fact: Blaine’s drums were featured on six consecutive Record of the Year Grammy winners — “A Taste of Honey” by Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass (1966), “Strangers in the Night” by Frank Sinatra (1967), “Up, Up and Away” by The Fifth Dimension (1968), “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel (1969), “Aquarius (Let the Sunshine In)” by The Fifth Dimension (1970) and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel (1971).
How did this happen? How could one drummer end up manning the skins on so many hit records? To comprehend this, you have to understand how the record-making process worked during that era:
An artist’s manager and/or record label rep would learn of a song, usually as a demo tape submitted by a songwriter, and wanted their artist to record it and release it. (This often had to happen quickly, before someone else beat them to it.) Studio time would be booked, and a producer would be hired to oversee the recording session.
The producer was usually the guy holding all the cards. It was up to him to decide the arrangement, the tempo and, most important, the musicians to use in order to get the best recording in the most efficient use of time. This usually meant hiring guitarists, bass players, keyboard players and drummers who were known for their ability to intuitively 
know exactly what was called for in a given song or recording.
In Los Angeles studios between roughly 1962 and 1972, that meant the producer wanted Hal Blaine on the drums. There was, quite simply, no question about it. Whether you wanted a snappy 4/4-time backbeat, a syncopated jazz touch, or just some subtle brush work, there was no one easier to work with, no one better qualified.
How did Blaine feel about this? Last year, as he was receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys for his extraordinary body of work, he said, “I felt at the time as If I had fallen into a vat of chocolate. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to be asked to play drums for so many different singers and bands. I was truly living my dream.”
Blaine was, by all accounts, the unofficial ringleader of an unofficial group of LA-based studio musicians who came to be known as The Wrecking Crew. Several dozen top-notch players could justly claim informal membership in this confederation, but the core group consisted of Blaine (drums), Carol Kaye (bass), Larry Knechtel (keyboards, bass), Tommy Tedesco (guitar), Glen Campbell (guitar), Steve Douglas (sax), Earl Palmer (drums), Mike Rubini (keyboards), Joe Osborn (bass), Louie Shelton (guitar), Jim Gordon (drums), Leon Russell (keyboards), Billy Strange (guitar) and Jack Nitzsche (arranger/conductor).
There had been an older version of The Wrecking Crew in the 1940s and 1950s — a more buttoned-down group of studio musicians who liked the nickname “The First-Call Gang.” They were, indeed, the first ones called when a top performing artist wanted to record a new song or album. These were typically the “easy listening” singers who offered the more standard, strings-laden torch songs of those days — Vic Damone, Pattie Page, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como.
The studio pros who provided musical backing then were “the blue-blazer-and-necktie, 
by-the-book, time-clock-punching men who had cut their teeth playing on Big Band records, movie soundtracks and early TV shows,” as writer Kent Hartman put it in “The Wrecking Crew,” his authoritative 2012 book. “They loathed everything about rock and roll. To them, this new music was appallingly primitive, and most refused to play it. In their minds, their careers had been built on decorum and sophistication, not on wearing T-shirts and blue jeans to work while bashing out what they felt were simplistic three-chord rhythm patterns over and over. ‘That kind of thing is surely going to wreck the business,’ they would say.”
Blaine, known for his easygoing manner and infectious sense of humor, chuckled when he heard this. “They think we’re wrecking the industry? Well, okay then, we’ll call ourselves The Wrecking Crew!”
They worked tirelessly, sometimes up to eight sessions a day. They recorded movie and TV theme songs and film soundtracks, and played the music for some TV commercials as well. Mostly, though, they recorded lots and lots of hit singles, and lesser-known album tracks, for the era’s biggest stars.
In some cases, their involvement was meant to be kept secret. The Beach Boys, for example, had played their own instruments on their earliest records (1961-1963), which had basic, simple arrangements. But once Brian Wilson heard what producer Phil Spector was accomplishing with studio musicians on his “Wall of Sound” recording process on tracks like The Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel” and The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” he wanted Beach Boys tracks to have that same degree of professionalism. On Wilson’s 
more sophisticated compositions like “California Girls,” “Good Vibrations,” “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” he brought in Blaine and his compatriots to substitute for his Beach Boys cohorts in the studio, and the listening public was none the wiser.
“Hal Blaine was such a great musician and friend that I can’t put it into words,” Wilson said the other day in a tweet that included an old photo of him and Blaine sitting at the piano. “Hal taught me a lot, and he had so much to do with our success. He was the greatest drummer ever.”
Blaine had wanted to be a professional drummer since he was a boy. With every musical act that passed through his Massachusetts home town, young Hal would position himself close to the bandstand so as to watch every movement the drummer made. These were typically Big Band drummers — Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Dave Tough — and they were his heroes, the coolest “hepcats” around.
In his late teens, Blaine learned drums in Chicago from the great Roy Knapp, who had taught Krupa and others, and in his early ’20s, Blaine played in Chicago strip clubs and with small jazz combos, eventually touring and recording with Count Basie’s outfit, Pattie Page and teen idol Tommy Sands. Unlike his jazz drummer counterparts, Blaine took a liking to rock and roll, not only because the studio sessions proved lucrative but because he enjoyed it and understood the kind of drumming parts the producers were looking for.
Blaine’s acumen was not in showiness but in capability. “I was never a soloist, I was an accompanist,” he told Modern Drummer magazine in 2005. “That was my forte. I never had Buddy Rich chops. I never cottoned to the Ginger Baker drum solos.”
He always seemed to know what a song needed, and sometimes he stumbled on to it by happenstance. One of his signature moments — the attention-grabbing “on the four” solo (bum-ba-bum-BOOM) that launched the 1963 Phil Spector-produced hit “Be My Baby” — 
came about when he accidentally missed a beat while the song was being recorded and improvised by only playing the beat on the fourth note.
“And I continued to do that,” Blaine recalled. “Phil (Spector) might have said, ‘Hey, do that again.’ Somebody loved it, in any event. It was just one of those things that sometimes happens.”
Another iconic contribution Blaine made was during the recording of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” in 1969. “I was going for what I later called a ‘cannonball-like’ sound, something to bruise the song, which I felt was too sweet, too much like a lullaby. The producer, Roy Halee, heard it and had an idea. He set me up with my kit in an empty elevator shaft. When the music got to the ‘Lie-la-lie’ part, I hit the drums as hard as I could.” The resulting effect was indeed like a gunshot, a cannonball blast.
By the 1970s, producers began losing some of their authority as rock bands rightly insisted that the group’s members should be the ones to play the guitar, bass, keyboard and drum parts on their records. There would still be the prominent singers (Streisand, The Carpenters, John Denver) who needed studio musicians to provide the professional instrumental backup on their records, but by the 1980s, demand for studio musicians dwindled. The advent of electronic drum machines and other techno options made guys like Blaine all but obsolete.
He continued to appear occasionally at symposiums and workshops, and on TV talk shows, well into his ’80s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 with four other Wrecking Crew partners, and he was prominently featured in the 2008 documentary “The Wrecking Crew,” directed by Denny Tedesco (son of Tommy Tedesco), and in Hartman’s 2012 book.
But I keep coming back to the head-shaking list of songs on which Blaine is listed as drummer. “Mr. Tambourine Man” (The Byrds). “These Boots Are Made For Walking” (Nancy Sinatra). “Half-Breed” (Cher). “You’re the One” (The Vogues). “Secret Agent Man” and “Poor Side of Town” (Johnny Rivers). “Johnny Angel” (Shelley Fabares). “Another Saturday Night” (Sam Cooke). “Windy” and “Along Comes Mary” (The Association). “Wedding Bell Blues” and “One Less Bell to Answer” (The Fifth Dimension). “River Deep, Mountain High” (Ike and Tina Turner). “Love Will Keep Us Together” (The Captain and Tennille). “Let’s Live for Today” (The Grassroots). “If I Were a Carpenter” (Bobby Darin). “MacArthur Park” (Richard Harris). “Ventura Highway” (America). “Dizzy” (Tommy Roe). “Annie’s Song” (John Denver). “This Diamond Ring” (Gary Lewis and The Playboys). “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston” (Glen Campbell). “Kicks” (Paul Revere and The Raiders). “The Way We Were” (Barbra Streisand). “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena” (Jan and Dean). “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and “Top of the World” (The Carpenters). “Monday Monday” and “I Saw Her Again” (The Mamas and The Papas). “Everybody Loves Somebody” (Dean Martin). “Cracklin’ Rosie” and “Song Sung Blue” (Neil Diamond).
Are you kidding me?!
Blaine himself always loved to tell the story about the day he met Bruce Gary, drummer for the late ’70s British pop band The Knack (“My Sharona”). “He was telling me how much he loved American pop songs of the 1960s, and he had started researching who the different drummers were on the various records. He told me he was almost disappointed when he discovered that a dozen of his favorite drummers were me!”
break-up songs, heartfelt tributes and bittersweet odes.
It took a while, but in 2014, Stevie Nicks indeed confirmed what had been rumored for quite some time — that this 1979 song from Mac’s “Tusk” LP is about an aborted child she and lover Don Henley chose not to have. “Had we gotten married and had that baby, and if it had been a girl, her name would have been Sara,” Nicks said. “It’s a very special name to me. One of my very best lifelong friends is named Sara.” The recording reached #7 as a single in early 1980, and Nicks still performs the song, both with the band and as a solo act.
In 1977, when The Police were performing in dive clubs around Europe, Sting was inspired by the prostitutes who worked outside the seedy hotel in Paris where the band was staying. He wrote this sympathetic tune, urging the girl to give up the hard life she had chosen. He decided to call her Roxanne after seeing a movie poster in the hotel lobby featuring the old film “Cyrano de Bergerac,” whose female lead is named Roxanne. The song peaked at only #32 in the US in 1978, but it remains one of The Police’s signature songs.
Van Morrison said that he wrote “Gloria” in the summer of 1963 as he was turning 18. The song is as simple as it gets, only three chords, and he would ad-lib lyrics as he performed, sometimes stretching the song to 15 or 20 minutes. Gloria was a real person, a girl he was infatuated with, and his desire to seduce her made it harder for conservative ’60s radio programmers to include the song in Top 40 formats. Indeed, when an obscure group called The Shadows of Knight had a Top 10 hit with their cover of “Gloria” in 1966, it eliminated the reference to “coming up to my room.”
In the leadoff song on The Kinks’ criminally underrated 1969 LP “Arthur,” Ray Davies’ satirical lyrics juxtapose the grim realities of life in Britain during the 19th century (“Sex was bad, and obscene, and the rich were so mean”) with the empathetic hopes of the British Empire in the Victorian age (“From the West to the East, from the rich to the poor, Victoria loved them all”). Through it all, Queen Victoria was beloved even by the downtrodden working class (“Though I am poor, I am free, when I grow, I shall fight, for this land I shall die”).
How peculiar that one of the loudest and most bombastic of all Seventies heavy metal bands would have their biggest commercial success (#7 on the charts) with a ballad, sung by the drummer with limited instrumental accompaniment. “Beth” was actually born in 1971 as “Beck” (short for Becky) in reference to the girlfriend of a former band member who would nag him to leave rehearsal and come home. Drummer Peter Criss later changed it to “Beth” at the suggestion of Kiss’s producer, and even though the rest of the group didn’t want to record it, it helped boost sales for their “Destroyer” LP that year.
Parton’s solo career was just gathering momentum when she penned this evocative song about a simple gal who pleads with a stunningly beautiful woman named Jolene to leave her man alone: “Pretty girl, please don’t take my man just because you can.” So many country music fans could relate to that woman’s desperate feeling that the song soared to #1 on the country charts (although only #60 on there pop charts). It became one of Parton’s most loved tunes, and many cover versions have been recorded since, as well as a 2017 tune (“Diane”) that was a heartfelt apology from the beautiful woman.
Craig Fuller was the chief singer-songwriter in the original lineup of the country rock group Pure Prairie League, and he wrote song great down-home songs on those classic but largely overlooked first two albums in 1971 and 1972. One song, “Amie,” didn’t do much at first but eventually earned listeners through FM and college radio stations, and by 1975, it was a #27 hit nationwide. The narrator and Amie have one of those on-again, off-again relationships, and it’s never clear whether they end up together. As Fuller said later, “The protagonist of the song is just laying it out and then it’s up to her.”
Cohen said “Suzanne” was inspired by his platonic relationship with a woman named Suzanne Verdal, who had been the girlfriend of his contemporary, famed sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. The lyrics poignantly describe the rituals they enjoyed in Montreal, where they lived near each other. Contrary to some interpretations, Cohen insisted he and Suzanne were only friends, not lovers. “I admit I imagined having sex with her, but there was neither the opportunity nor the inclination to actually go through with it,” he admitted.
From the 1970s to the current day, Waits has been known for his distinctive deep, gravelly singing voice and song lyrics that focus on the underside of U.S. society. Many of the characters who populate his music are unpleasant ne’er-do-wells and unsympathetic outliers, but a few reek of pathos, such as Tom Frost, the elderly guy who places a phone call to “Martha,” an old flame with whom he is meekly hoping to rekindle something. It becomes clear that that’s not going to happen, but we listeners feel supportive of Tom’s wistful trip down memory lane to speak with her once again.
Berry wrote and recorded this prototype rock and roll song as an adaptation of the Western swing fiddle tune “Ida Red,” recorded in 1938 by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Leonard Chess, owner of the legendary Chess Records label, loved Berry’s sprightly lyrics about a hot rod race and a broken romance, but told him he felt the woman’s name needed to be something less rural than Ida Red. He spied a bottle of Maybelline mascara in the studio and said, “Well, hell, let’s name her Maybellene,” altering the spelling to avoid a potential suit by the cosmetic company.
This #4 hit single, among Simon and Garfunkel’s last, began life as a cacophony of rhythms pounded out on coffee tables and kitchen counters in Simon’s apartment. He later wrote the lyrics as a lament about anguish and jubilation regarding an untrustworthy lover. “Cecilia,” Simon has noted, refers to St. Cecilia, patron saint of music in the Catholic tradition, and he conceded that the song also refers to the frustrations and joy he has experienced in the songwriting process, as musical inspiration comes and goes quickly.
Almost everyone can recall the difficulties one encounters during the early teenage years, when friendships and early encounters with the opposite sex seem fraught with uncertainty and insecurity. My daughter Emily’s song “Josie,” based loosely on the challenges her cousin was facing at the time, offers tender words of encouragement on how best to navigate the rocky waters of young love and be true to yourself. “It’s about slowing down, enjoying your youth, and knowing that, in time, the person meant to be in your life will find their way to you.”
During the sessions for The Beatles “White Album,” John Lennon was burning with a desire to write a song about his mother, Julia Baird. “I lost her twice,” he said, “once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie, and then again when she physically died when I was 17.” He borrowed phrasings from Kahlil Gibran’s “Sand and Foam” in which the original verse reads, “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.” Lennon performed the song alone on acoustic guitar with no other Beatles present.
When the Stones reached #1 on the charts yet again with the ballad “Angie” in the fall of 1973, speculation was rampant about the identity of the woman in question. Some said Jagger and Richards were writing about David Bowie’s first wife Angela, with whom they had been spending time during that period. Others assumed it was a tribute to Fichards’ newborn daughter, Dandelion Angela. In his 2010 autobiography, Richards said that he had chosen the name at random when writing the song, before he knew that his baby would be named Angela or even knew that his baby would be a girl.
This Grammy-winning single from 1982 was written by David Paich, who has said that the song is a composite based on numerous girls he had known. During recording sessions, Toto band members initially played along with the common assumption that the song was based on Rosanna Arquette, who was dating keyboard player Steve Porcaro at the time. Arquette herself played along with the joke, commenting in an interview that year, “That song was about my showing up at 4 a.m. at the studio to bring them juice and beer.”
“Peggy Sue,” perhaps Buddy Holly’s best known song, was originally entitled “Cindy Lou,” named after Holly’s niece, the daughter of his sister, Pat Holley Kaiter. The title was later changed to “Peggy Sue” in reference to Peggy Sue Gerron (1940–2018), girlfriend and future wife of Jerry Allison, drummer for Holly’s band The Crickets, after the couple had temporarily broken up, and Allison asked Holly if maybe he could rename the song in an attempt to woo her back. “And it worked,” Allison recalled, although Holly’s premature death not long after the song’s release overshadowed that romantic angle.
John’s longtime lyricist partner Bernie Taupin penned one of the most poignant character studies in his voluminous catalog on this deep track from the 1992 LP “The One.” Taupin recalled writing “Emily” after an afternoon walk through the streets and cemeteries of Paris, France, where he couldn’t help but notice a lone elderly woman paying respects at various gravesites as she walked haltingly among the headstones. “Elton wrote such a glorious melody to accompany this one,” Taupin said. “It’s one of my favorites”: “The old girl hobbles, nylons sagging, talks to her sisters in the ground…”
Grace Slick had temporarily left the band in 1978 when the Jefferson Starship brought in Mickey Thomas as the new lead vocalist on the album “Freedom at Point Zero.” Bass player David Freiberg wrote most of the music and lyrics for what would become the album’s single, “Jane.” He said, “She’s no one in particular, just the kind of girl who is insincere and manipulative in the way she behaves in a relationship. I think we all have known women, and men, like that”: “You’re playing a game called ‘hard to get’ by its real name, you’re playing a game you can never win, girl…”
David Gates wrote almost all of soft-rock group Bread’s many hit singles, which were mostly sentimental, romantic ballads that resonated with Top 40 listeners in the early 1970s. There are two interpretations as to what the sad truth is behind “Aubrey,” the 1973 Bread hit from their “Guitar Man” LP. One said Gates wrote it about a woman he pined for from afar but never had the self-confidence to approach. The more likely story is that it’s about a baby girl Gates and his wife were anticipating who died in a tragic miscarriage. Either way, it’s certainly a tearjerker.
Songwriters Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have been notoriously tight-lipped about the meading behind their often cryptic lyrics, but Fagen once allowed in an interview that “Peg,” a #11 hit song in 1978 from the platinum LP “Aja,” referred to Peg Entwistle, a star of Broadway theater in the 1920s and 1930s. Fagen and Becker found her suitable fodder for a place in the Steely Dan cast of offbeat characters because, in 1932, she jumped to her death off the famous Hollywood sign (when it was “Hollywoodland,” an advertisement for a new housing development) before her first film was ever released.
Hack's Back Pages 