BOOK: ‘You’ve Heard These Hands, From the Wall of Sound to the Wrecking Crew and Other Incredible Stories’ by Don Randi
As the title of this book indicates, even if you don’t know the name Don Randi, you’ve “heard” his hands. Randi was one of the keyboard players for the famous “Wrecking Crew,” the group of superb studio musicians who played on hundreds of hit records in the 1960s and early 70s. If you don’t know much about them, let me suggest you view the trailer below for the recent documentary. (Better yet, see the film.) You can find it on Netflix and YouTube, and if you are into 60s and 70s music you’ll find that watching it is time well spent.
Over the course of the last decade, as the Wrecking Crew has come more and more into the public eye, members of the group and biographers have started to tell their sides of the story. You’ve Heard These Hands, From the Wall of Sound to the Wrecking Crew and Other Incredible Stories is Don Randi’s account of those glory days, written with the assistance of Karen Nishimura. One of the first things he addresses is the use of the name “The Wrecking Crew.” I should mention here that superb drummer Hal Blaine said the term was applied to them because other musicians said this group of professionals would “wreck the business,” while the great bassist Carol Kaye said the term was never used at all during their heyday, and was a term invented by Blaine decades later to sell his story. Randi offers yet another explanation:
The name “Wrecking Crew” came about to describe how we could destroy a date (recording session). What that meant was, we’d start joking around, and God help you if you were on the other end of the joke!
How is it that three such prominent members of the same group can have such disparate stories about the origin of their name — or if they had a name at all? It doesn’t seem as if that controversy will ever be settled, but it’s interesting to note that Randi doesn’t dispute the use of the term “Wrecking Crew” and even uses it in the title (a clever marketing ploy, actually, because it was enough to make me want to review the book!)
In any event, Randi and Nishimura launch into a series of unconnected chapters about working with different artists. Nancy Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, Darlene Love, Sonny and Cher, Neil Diamond, Dean Martin, Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Elvis, and many others make an appearance here. Some of the stories about them are good and quite interesting, but others seem there almost as a reminder that Randi knew the person — a type of musical name-dropping. For example, of Cass Elliot, he mentions that he played with her and that it’s sad she died so young… and that’s about it. There are a couple of those mentions that are sort of thin and I’m not sure they merited inclusion.
On the other hand, some of the stories are quite intriguing, and Randi’s tales about working with the likes of Raquel Welch on a television special are very interesting. He makes no secret of the fact that she seemed to dislike him from the start (apparently because he was aware she couldn’t sing worth a rip), and that theirs was an acrimonious relationship. Even more interesting was that Bob Hope apparently didn’t care much for her either. Randi says Welch was “smacking her gum while telling lame jokes to Bob Hope,” and Hope pulled him aside and said, “Look, I have to go to party for Bing Crosby, but I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t have her around when I get back, okay son?” Hope later returned and Welch was, in fact, gone by then, and they sat around drinking scotch while Hope told stories. Oddly enough, as I read this, I thought about the Seinfeld episode where Welch is such a diva that the director of her show talks Kramer into firing her (it’s a long story — and if you are a Seinfeld fan you know where I’m coming from). After reading this book, I’m convinced that the Seinfeld plot line was firmly based in truth.
Despite the presence of a few good stories, the book has some problems. One is that the structure is really odd. For the first 36 chapters, it appears that this is just a book of anecdotes about the people Randi worked with and the projects he worked on; however, we suddenly get chapters such as “The Catskills – My Early Life” and “Stock Boy and Promo Guy for a Day.” The problem is that some of the information in the early anecdotal chapters would make more sense if we knew more biographical details about Randi before we read them, rather than afterward. I know why they did this: they wanted to get to the meat of why people are reading the book, to those “brushes with big-name celebrities” stories. It really would have made more sense, though, if the book followed a logical chronological format and was more linear in style. For instance, he talks a great deal about his club, The Baked Potato, throughout the early chapters, but isn’t until 44 chapters in that you discover why he had a club (and the meaning behind the unusual name). Those were questions I had 40 chapters before I even got the answers.
It is a somewhat engaging book, and worth a read if you are into the whole “Wrecking Crew” cultural mythology, which I am. It might also be a book you’ll like if you don’t know anything at all about the Wrecking Crew and this is your first exposure to them. It doesn’t compare quite so well to some of the more general, less individual-centric books that have come out (or the documentary) but it’s still not a bad project and worth a look if you want a quick and easy read, and a primer on an important part of music history.
You’ve Heard These Hands is available for purchase on Amazon.
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George L
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Csbm guy