Wrecking Crew

The amount of work that they were involved in was tremendous. They were also involved in groups that I like to call the Milli Vanillis of the day. A producer would get the guys in and lay down some instrumental tracks. If it became a hit, they would record an album and put a group together to go on the road. This happened many times with groups lik... e the Marketts, Routers, and T-Bones. The next day they would do the same thing and call it another name. Same musicians, but different group name. The record industry was primarily in New York, London and Detroit in the late '50s and early '60s. Then there was a surge towards the mid-60s that pushed the recording to the West Coast. So these musicians were recording around the clock for a good 8 years. The heyday for this group was in 1967 when the charts turned to the West. When did you start this project? I started this project in 1995 when my father, Tommy Tedesco, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I guess it was a way of me dealing with what was going in our lives and at the same time wanting to let the world know about what impact he and his friends made in musical history. Is it true that you actually stayed away from making a documentary about your father? I had already done a 30-minute piece on my father with my producer Jon Leonoudakis when we were at Loyola Marymount. It played on KCET and I felt that I didn't need to do it again. But after a few years, my friends started to pull me aside and encouraged me to find a personal point of view. I was very reluctant at first and it took many years before I felt I could find a voice that made sense. I was so determined at first to actually say to the interviewees, "Please say 'Tommy' instead of 'Your Dad'. I really wanted to keep myself out of the picture, but in the end I came around and embraced it. The hard part was to tell the story of The Wrecking Crew and at the same time tell my father's story. Finally a friend said, "You really couldn't tell one and not the other, so you might as well literally ...Read More