The Wrecking Crew! Director Responds To Carol Kaye’s Complaints About The Documentary And Band Name

Joshua Blanchard/Getty Images for The Guild of Music Supervisors

Bassist Carol Kaye was part of a crack team of session musicians who played on hundreds of pop hits in the 1960s and ’70s by the likes of the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Monkees, Sonny & Cher, the Mamas And The Papas, and many more. Somewhere along the way, drummer Hal Blaine started referring to this unit as the Wrecking Crew, a reference to concerns among older session musicians that this rock-oriented group was going to wreck the music industry. Kaye has never liked this band name; she thinks it’s disrespectful and insists no one used it back in the day. So she was not happy that director Danny Tedesco, son of the group’s guitarist Tommy Tedesco, called his 2008 documentary about the band The Wrecking Crew!