The Wrecking Crew (2008) (SIFF) - A

"The Wrecking Crew" is an excellent documentary about a little known group of artists that dominated the rock music scene in the 60's. What if one band performed all of the hit music of the 60's? It turns out that's not as ridiculous as it sounds. A group of studio musicians informally known as The Wrecking Crew played on a huge number of hit albums starting in the late 50's through the early 70's. A shocking number of well known bands didn't play on their own albums. For example, The Beach Boys didn't play any of the instruments on their albums. Very early on, Brian Wilson decided that he wanted the Wrecking Crew to play on their albums because they were simply better than the members of The Beach Boys. There was a scandal when the public found out that The Monkees didn't play any of their instruments, which was confusing to Davy Jones because he was aware that a bunch of other bands were doing the exact same thing. Listening to the songs featured in the movies is like listening to a soundtrack of the 60's. Some of the bands I was surprised to find out didn't play on their own albums included Simon and Garfunkel, The Righteous Brothers, Sony and Cher, and The Mamas and Papas, to name just a few. The Wrecking Crew also worked with Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Sam Cook, and Elvis Presley.

The movie is a well done mixture of archival footage showing The Wrecking Crew playing in their primes and interviews with several of the surviving members. A lot of interesting tidbits come out during the movie. For example, the Wrecking Crew was so much in demand that several of the members became multimillionaires purely through being paid scale (or occasionally double scale) with no royalties of any kind. The worked that much! Hearing the musicians describe how in a lot of cases the producers or writers would only come in with an outline of the music and let the individual musicians create riffs to personalize the music was fascinating. It was also interesting to see how different the life was for the studio musicians. They didn't tour at all, so they had much more normal lives.

I want to make it clear that you don't need to be a fan of the music they played to appreciate this documentary. I'm not really a big fan of the music of that period. If you have any appreciation for music at all, you'll enjoy "The Wrecking Crew."

Final Grade: A