Carol Kaye session musician

[john]

From Carol Kaye's FAQ (https://www.carolkaye.com/www/library/faq.htm)

Q. I always thought the groups of the 60s recorded their own music, and just recently found out it was your bunch of studio musicians who recorded my favorite hits. Was our baby-boomer generation scammed about our 60s music, since studio musicians were never credited with recording the 60s music we grew up with and lived our lives by?

A. From posting on many Boards on the Web, I sense a feeling at first of one of disbelief, then real anger, and finally total acceptance of how things went down about the way that music of the 60s was recorded, advertised and written about. There is always a certain amount of wrongful data getting out. It's not a science, it's the music business.

The Earl Palmer Story" by Tony Scherman (and Earl Palmer, publisher: Smithsonian) is the most comprehensive to date as well as the one by Bob Keane, producer of note ("La Bamba" other big hits) for many decades. Others to come out soon as well as more-factual documentaries than the phony one out right now. I'm also working on my own auto-biography.

To say it was a "scam", in some sense, yes....when the Monkees kept repeating in news releases that they "cut their own music" (when we all knew we did their musical tracks for them in the 60s), well...that's show-biz, and others too, same way.

[...]

But as one matures, it's easier to see the discrepancies and it's this fact that is the hardest to accept if you've been close to music of the 60s, the background of which was hidden because of prejudices of blacks and whites working together back then (and now).

The 60s sales distribution force was interested in sales, not truths as to how the product was "made", that was immaterial and some even knew about us and told others about us. But in-general, we were not widely known as the studio musicians who recorded everyone's hits for them. So you were led to believe certain untrue things and the visual touring groups weren't going to say "it wasn't us on our records."

One thing, to look at our 60s group of musicians together in photos, do you think the music would have been bought as much in the turbulent 1960s had everyone known mixed races, people as old as the parents of the boomer generation, mostly jazz musicians with one blonde white lady on bass had done all those recordings?

It's up to people to believe things with a grain of salt in the news media which gets it wrong more than right sometimes. Music is a very personal thing to most people, and that's wonderful, it's a beautiful art-form, but to make it a sort of "god" is not right either.

Some people get carried away as their belief system cannot accept "new" ideas, new isms and you'll find plenty of zealots posing as "historians" taking advantage of any confusion to get their agendas across too.

Studio musicians, mostly, were NOT interested in becoming "stars"....we were part of the process in business to make people into "stars". We knew the ropes on that, saw the whole thing from the inside, something the general public, including many live musicians have little or no idea of.

It's a business, but a tough competitive business - you had to be extremely great on your instrument and very self-disciplined, having a multitude of all kinds of musical skills, and be totally reliable as well as totally experienced to succeed..

We were very content making a great living recording music (howbeit, sometimes very boring, playing very mundane music styles maybe we didn't like to personally play, but that's got nothing to do with it, our personal likes and dislikes do not enter into this at all. It was a business and we were all grateful to do it, and enjoyed making the recordings we did yes!).

We took care of our families by insuring that we would have work "next year" by doing an excellent job in all styles of music: rock, surf, blues, pop, funky stuff, soul, latin-soul, gospel, commercial music of all kinds inc. some commercial jazz....jazz was not much of a money-maker for record co's tho'....and saw what a grind being a "star" was, how fragile, how much work to be "on-stage", dealing with managers, record co's, accountants, road managers, back-up traveling musicians, repertoire, rehearsals, and yes, the press and PR stuff.....it was unbelievable!!

No, we were content just to be "in the background", recording (and in most instances at first, helping to create) their hits for them, having the respect of all of LA, and making more money than any musician could possibly make altho' it took a toll on our health to play intensely all those hours, drink so much coffee, smoke so many cigarettes and be alert up to more than 16 hours a day when we did it...playing probably more hours than 10-20 other musicians ever would in their lifetime, yes it was a GRIND!

But it paid the bills, helped us raise our kids and we still played music, better than traveling on the road, making 1/4 as much, and being away from our families. Our Musicians Union insured our pension and re-use benefits...if they chose not to insist that our names be on the back of the record albums back in the 60s (as they were from 1973 on), then that didn't bother us at all.

But the new music of the rock and roll led people to believe in the 60s a certain way...and that's too bad as it coincided with heavy drug uses ("to be like my idols") I believe, and that was unfortunate. Most of the studio musicians were never into drugs and booze, you couldn't do your job on drugs, no way, and we didn't want to use drugs, why do that?

It was known as stupid back then-- most of us saw what happens to live musicians on drugs as we played jazz in clubs for many years before studio work.

So yes, in a sense it was a "scam" to the "credit-conscious" world, but the world is full of scams...you just have to be aware and as you get older. .

It's wonderful to admire people who do something beautiful like create music - enjoy it but know there'll always be some arguments about music credits -- the record co's only want to sell records, other people have their agendas.

Remember that, and remember to question who is making a lot of money by presenting controversy too...it's a shame to defame people to do that, sometimes it happens..

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The Wrecking Crew studio muscians



While it was widely known that bands like the Monkees did not record there own music, exploring this material shows that there were a number of bands that did not do the studio work. In some cases a bit stunning actually.

Carol Kaye doesn't like the Wrecking Crew -- feels it was invented by Hal Blaine in a later movie he made to promote himself.


There is some squabbling about who played what on which songs since these players were not credited. Carol Kaye has gone as far as posting check stubs (redacted to not show the $) to prove her participation in various recordings.