Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 September 20 • Friday

Kent Hartman's The Wrecking Crew, about the session musicians who played on countless pop and rock records of the '50s, '60s and '70s, is an enjoyable collection of anecdotes aimed at a general readership. Knowledgable fans of the music would probably have preferred an oral history derived from various sources and from the numerous interviews Hartman conducted.

The Wrecking Crew is a novelistic and breathlessly enthusiastic compilation of stories, whose unrelenting giddiness and press-kit style writing gets wearisome after a while.

Just about every chapter—maybe actually every single chapter—ends with a cliffhanger, such as: "But in less than twelve hours following the unequaled exhilaration of playing for the one-and-only Frank Sinatra, Hal Blaine's fast-moving world would come skidding to a stop. One of the biggest stars in rock and roll—and Blaine's close friend—would tragically find himself lying near death".

That device got old for me after the first half a dozen chapters, as did the barrage of similes and metaphors, the excess of hyphens (as in "one-and-only" above) and Hartman's deployment of "ironic" and "ironically" to indicate the coincidental or the curious but not the ironic.

And somebody should have told Hartman that The Goon Show was a radio program, not a TV show. He got that wrong so what other mistakes did he put in the book?

Bottom line: it's a decent book to read in an airport, but a serious scholarly work or an oral history would have done more justice to the subject.