Bill Pitman, revered studio guitarist, dies at 102

Bill Pitman, a guitarist who accompanied Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand and others from the late 1950s to the ‘70s, and who for decades was heard on the soundtracks of countless Hollywood films and television shows, died Thursday night at his home in La Quinta. He was 102.

His wife, Janet Pitman, said he died after four weeks at a rehabilitation center in Palm Springs, where he was treated for a fractured spine suffered in a fall, and the past week at home under hospice care.

Virtually anonymous outside the music world but revered within it, Pitman was a member of what came to be called the Wrecking Crew — a loosely organized corps of peerless Los Angeles freelancers who were in constant demand by record producers to back up headline performers. As an ensemble, they turned routine recording sessions and live performances into extraordinary musical moments.

Examples abound: Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” (1966). Presley’s

“Blue Hawaii” (1961). Streisand’s “The Way We Were” (1973). The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963). The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966). On “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” from the Paul Newman-robert Redford hit movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), Pitman played ukulele.

In a career of nearly 40 years, Pitman played countless gigs for studios and record labels that dominated the pop charts but rarely credited the performers behind the stars. The Wrecking Crew did almost everything: television and film scores; pop, rock and jazz arrangements; even cartoon soundtracks. Whether recorded in a studio or on location, everything was performed with precision and pizazz.

“These were crack session players who moved effortlessly through many different styles: pop, jazz, rockabilly, but primarily the two-minute-thirty-second world of hit records that America listened to all through the sixties and seventies,” Allegro magazine reminisced in 2011. “If it was a hit and recorded in LA, the Wrecking Crew cut the tracks.”