Immediate Family: Keep On Truckin’

From Denny Tedesco, the director of the splendid music documentary The Wrecking Crew - released in 2015 - comes a new one called Immediate Family. Same idea, new subjects, just as interesting and also good fun. If you are familiar with the music of folks like Carole King, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley and others of that generation, whether you are a casual fan or a serious one, Immediate Family may be for you. And it’s available streaming. (See below).

The movie title, The Wrecking Crew, was the nickname for a collection of hugely talented West Coast studio musicians, revered inside the music industry, but whose names were largely unknown to the general public. On the other hand, the hit recordings they made in the sixties and early seventies - with some of the biggest names in the business - were known to almost everyone. Starting out as Phil Spector’s house band, on songs like The Crystals’  He’s A Rebel, The Ronettes’ Be My Baby, The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody, and Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep – Mountain High, members of The Wrecking Crew went on to underpin recordings such as The Beach Boys’  I Get Around and Good Vibrations, The Mamas & the Papas’ California Dreamin’, Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, Frank Sinatra’s Strangers In the Night, Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson, The Fifth Dimension’s Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, and many, many more. 

That  those session players were largely unknown was a result of the music industry custom in those days to not credit players other than the headliners on their records. That changed, however, in the singer-songwriter era, beginning in the early 1970s. Appreciative solo artists insisted on crediting the musicians who were backing them up, many of which were their friends. Pretty soon, music fans began to see a lot of the same musicians’ names listed again and again on album covers, individually and collectively: Russ Kunkel (drums) Danny ‘Kootch’ Kortchmar (guitar) Waddy Wachtel (guitar) and Leland ‘Lee’ Sklar (bass). Fans of the documentary Echo In the Canyon (2018) may already have some familiarity with these guys, all of whom became attached to the Laurel Canyon music scene; but that film, too, was mostly about the headliners. 

Immediate Family is about the session musicians themselves, telling their own story(ies). They areablyaided by the testimony of many of the luminaries they played for and with, among them James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Brown, Phil Collins, Stevie Nicks, Lyle Lovett, David Crosby, Linda Ronstadt and Keith Richards.  And of course, the film incorporates a bunch of fine music – which may make you pine for the good old days. 

 1 hour 42 minutes

Grade: B+

Available to rent or purchase on many streaming platforms, including AppleTV, Amazon Prime, Spectrum, Vudu and Microsoft.