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RIP Hal Blaine

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My wife made note of his passing while she was scanning the internet earlier this evening. I had known of him as a premier session player and prominent member of the Wrecking Crew, but when I looked at his Wikipedia page I was stunned by the volume and breadth of his credits. This guy seemingly played with every big act extant between the mid '50s and the mid '80s -- rock, pop, jazz, soul, "easy listening", the whole magilla. If people were listening to it in those years, chances are Hal Blaine got the drum credit. Just amazing.

RIP.
 
Absolutely one of the greatest drummers, ever.

Funny story - the opening to "Be My Baby" was an accident according to Hal. Like all the best, he recovered so well nobody knew. Here's the story -

Hal Blaine opened the Ronettes' early '60s anthem, "Be My Baby," with the confident kicks and snare that are as familiar now on the dance floor as they are in the movie theater. As confident as that opening salvo sounded, Blaine said it was born of a misstep.

"As I recall, we rehearsed it with a regular backbeat on 2 and 4. But then when we did the first take, I dropped my stick and missed the 2," he said once, in a quote attributed to him by the Percussive Arts Society, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2012. "So being the faker than I am, I just played the 4, and one of the things you learn is that when you make a mistake, if you do it every four bars it becomes part of the song."

Classic!

Thanks Hal. Godspeed.
 
Another great quote from Hal about where the name "Wrecking Crew" came from.

"In the late '50s, we started playing rock 'n' roll," Blaine recalled in a 2001 interview on WHYY's Fresh Air. "A lot of people said it was a dirty word. They didn't want to hear that kind of music. They thought the musicians were just rank amateurs. They had no idea that we were all well-learned and studied musicians with degrees and so forth playing music.

"And the old-timers, the guys that we kind of replaced, used to say these kids are going to wreck the business," he continued. "And I just automatically started calling us the Wrecking Crew."

When musicians would give him a call and ask him to round up his crew for a studio session, "I'd say, 'OK, the Wrecking Crew, here we go. And I'd make calls.' "
 
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