THE WRECKING CREW
The Wrecking Crew was a nickname coined by drummer Hal Blaine for a group of studio and session musicians that played anonymously on many records in Los Angeles, California during the 1960's. The crew backed dozens of popular singers, and were one of the most successful groups of studio musicians in music history. (More from Wikipedia)
Glen Campbell handled the lead guitar on the first single by the Rip Chords, "Here I Stand". Most people know of Campbell's string of fine hits in the mid-1960's – "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", "Gentle on My Mind", "Galveston", and many more – but might not realize that he was one of the best session guitarists around for many years previously and had the most successful individual career among the loose aggregation of session players known as the Wrecking Crew. Campbell recently embarked on a farewell tour after acknowledging that he is suffering from Alzheimer's.
(July 2011)
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By 1969, Jim Sullivan's friends in the L.A. scene pooled their money and invested in getting his first album produced. Called U.F.O., the music is an amalgam of folk, country and rock and has a real spiritual side. It might have been just one more lo-fi singer-songwriter album, except that Sullivan had several musical heavyweights from the legendary Wrecking Crew backing him up: Don Randi (keyboards), Earl Palmer (drums), and Jimmy Bond (bass), plus Bond handled the string arrangements that lent a haunting quality to songs that were conceived as being purely acoustic. At times, there were 15 or 20 musicians in the studio.
(October 2011)
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MFSB was basically the house band for the Gamble and Huff production team – it is analogous to the famed group of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew – and was based at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios. To the public, MFSB stood for “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother” and was a reference to how MFSB was like a family; the “other” name used among the musicians, however, was Mother-F--kin Sons of Bitches, “referring to musical prowess” according to Wikipedia.
(September 2016)
