Hal Blaine
Drummer who played on more than 150 Top 10 hits and helped create Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’
HAL BLAINE, the drummer, who has died aged 90, was one of the most prolific and highly regarded session musicians in the history of popular music. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Blaine claimed to have played on almost 6,000 recordings, including more than 150 Top 10 hits and at least 40 No1s. These included Strangers in the Night, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Macarthur Park, the Carpenters’ Close to You, Wichita Lineman, I Got You Babe, California Dreaming by the Mamas & the Papas, Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, Mr Tambourine Man by the Byrds and The Way We Were by Barbra Streisand.
Indeed, for a period in the 1960s and 1970s there was hardly a hit record made in Los Angeles that did not feature Blaine on drums, in addition to the countless television and film themes and commercials that he also played on.
Blaine became the rhythmic linchpin for a group of session musicians that would become known as the Wrecking Crew – a name that Blaine himself coined – that first came to prominence in the early 1960s working with the producer Phil Spector. Foremost among them were the guitarists Tommy Tedesco and Glen Campbell; keyboard players Don Randi, Al De Lory and Larry Knechtel; bass players Carole Kaye and Ray Pohlman, and drummer Earl Palmer.
Crammed together in the cramped Gold Star studios, the Wrecking Crew provided the building blocks for what became known as Spector’s “Wall of Sound”, playing on a string of hits including He’s a Rebel, Da Doo Ron Ron, Then He Kissed Me, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling and River Deep – Mountain High.
Spector took an unforgiving attitude to the young singers on his records but he revered his session musicians, rewarding them with double rates and spot bonuses. “A Phil Spector session was a party session,” Blaine recalled.
“Phil would have a notice on the door of the studio, ‘Closed Session’, and anyone who stuck their head in he’d grab them and give them a tambourine or a cowbell. There’d sometimes be more percussionists than orchestra. I used to call it the Phil-harmonic. It was an absolute ball.”
The “on the 4” drum beat that Blaine played on the Ronettes’ Be My Baby became one of the most instantly identifiable opening shots in pop music history. Blaine would later admit that the beat was an accident – for the first two or three takes of the song he had played it 2 and 4 – but when Spector heard the slip he told him to play it the same way again.
“From a drummer’s standpoint, here’s what’s funny about this song,” Blaine said. “The beat I played on Be My Baby is the same beat I played on Strangers in the Night. Boom-boo-boom-bang! Boom-boo-boom-bang! – exactly the same, only much softer. Everybody loved it. It fit the mood of the song perfectly. I didn’t tell Frank [Sinatra] that I was using the Be My Baby beat. He never asked, so I didn’t think he had to know.”
In various permutations, the Wrecking Crew went on to provide the backing for much of the pop music made in Los Angeles. “Any combination of those guys, and you had something good happening,” Blaine once recalled. “You’ll never get music like that again, and you won’t get a group of musicians like the Wrecking Crew together again. The business just doesn’t work that way anymore.’
Following a common practice of the time, Blaine was frequently called upon to play on records by groups that had a drummer who producers didn’t think was accomplished enough for recording. He played on Mr Tambourine Man, the first hit for the Byrds, hits by the Monkees, the Association, and Paul Revere & the Raiders, and from 1964 was on all the Beach Boys’ hits, as well as the album Pet Sounds, with other Wrecking Crew personnel.
Blaine always maintained that Dennis Wilson, who was ostensibly the group’s drummer, was perfectly happy with the arrangement. “While I was making Beach Boy records, he was out there surfing or riding his motorcycle. He was thrilled because he had all the girls.” Blaine also played on all the Carpenters’ records, in lieu of Karen Carpenter, who played in the group’s live performances.
Harold Simon (Chaim Zalman) Belsky was born on February 5 1929, the youngest of four children to Jewish Eastern European immigrants, Meyer and Rose Belsky, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and grew up in Connecticut.
His father worked at the Connecticut Leather Company in Hartford, directly across from the State Theatre, and every Saturday, to keep his son entertained, he would give Hal the money for a front-row ticket. “I saw every band, every singer, every vaudeville act. I saw Frank Sinatra as a child, never realising that someday I would be playing with him.”
When Blaine was 14 the family moved to Santa Monica in California, where they ran a convenience store and where Hal played drums in an assortment of groups with school friends. After serving in the Korean War, he took his GI Bill and studied at the Roy C Knapp School of Percussion in Chicago under Knapp, “the Dean of American Percussion Teachers”.
Returning to California, he played in small jazz combos, as well as a stint with Count Basie, before he started playing on rock’n’roll sessions on the recommendation of his friend and fellow drummer, Earl Palmer. His first session was for a young rockabilly singer named Tommy Sands, whose marriage to Frank Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy would cement a connection between
Blaine and the Sinatra clan that saw him work regularly on Frank
Sinatra recordings.
“A lot of drummers I knew wouldn’t touch rock,” Blaine said. “They thought it was dirty and disgusting. To me, playing rock’n’roll was no different than any other form of music. You’re just playing a big backbeat, that’s all.” It would also prove considerably more lucrative. Talking of the Wrecking Crew, he once recalled: “We were a group of nightclub musicians making a hundred to a hundred and a quarter a week, then all of a sudden you’re making 1,500, 2,000 a day. It was like falling into a vat of chocolate!”
Blaine enjoyed a reputation not only as a versatile and nuanced drummer across a variety of musical styles, but also for his talent for improvisation. For the Beach Boys’ Caroline, No, he banged Sparkletts water jugs, and on Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water he achieved the desired dramatic effect by dropping a set of snow chains, retrieved from his car, on a concrete floor in the studio. “On the 2 and 4 count, I’d slam them down, and on the 1 and 3 I’d drag them across the floor. ‘Sliiiide-bang!sliiiide-bang!’ I was kneeling the entire time I did this. Luckily, they got a pillow for me so I didn’t kill my knees.”
Blaine won seven Grammy awards for Record of the Year, six of them in successive years
– an unparalleled achievement – for recordings by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Simon and Garfunkel (twice), the Fifth Dimension (twice) and Sinatra.
He also played on many Elvis Presley hits, including A Little Less Conversation, Return to Sender and Can’t Help Falling in Love. Presley, he told the journalist Kevin O’hare, was “really a southern gentleman. I never saw him as a ‘diva’ as such, except when he would mention the fact that he was a little bit thirsty, 10 guys would run at him with Coca-cola bottles in their hands, falling over instruments, knocking over microphones, to be the one to hand him the Coca-cola. He was hysterical.”
At the height of his activity Blaine was playing on up to seven sessions a day. “I could do a movie in one session and be playing with a complete symphony orchestra, three hours later be playing with a little rock band, and three hours later be playing jazz.”
So prolific did he become, that at one point he had a rubber stamp made, “Hal Blaine Strikes Again”, primarily to keep track of all the music scores he had used, but also to leave his imprimatur at studios and venues where he had played. Mike Botts, the drummer with the band Bread, recalled: “Every studio I went to in the late ’60s, there was a rubber stamp imprint on the wall of the drum booth that said, ‘Hal Blaine strikes again’. Hal was everywhere!”
Blaine’s industriousness made him considerably wealthier than many of the artists whose records he played on. He drove an antique Rolls-royce and bought a mansion in the Hollywood Hills from the actor Lee J Cobb, where he lived for nearly 30 years. But his relentless schedule exacted a toll on his personal life.
“I lived exactly five minutes from any studio. I could have dinner, I could kiss my daughter goodnight, I was always there for them, I paid every bill. It was a pretty nice life. Then one day you come home at lunch and there’s a sheriff telling you: ‘You can’t go in there, you’re being divorced’, and they’re handing you papers.” He would be married seven times.
In 2000 Blaine was one of the first five session musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with his friend and fellow drummer Earl Palmer.
He retired to Palm Desert, California, running the occasional drum clinic and playing on special sessions with friends. “I’m not a flashy drummer,” he once recalled. “All I ever wanted was to be a great accompanist.”
Hal Blaine leaves two sons, David and Aaron, and a daughter, Michelle.