The drummer on "Be My Baby" is Hal Blaine. The bassist on "Good Vibrations" is Carol Kaye. The guitarist on "Wichita Lineman" is Glen Campbell, before he was Glen Campbell the country star. These are the Wrecking Crew — the Los Angeles session musicians who played on more hit records in the 1960s than any other group of people, and whose names appeared on almost none of them.
Hal Blaine estimates he played on 35,000 recording sessions over his career. He played on eight consecutive Grammy Record of the Year winners. He played on records by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, and hundreds of others. His name is on almost none of them.
This is not unusual. Session musicians are hired labor. They play the part, they cash the check, they go home. The record belongs to the artist. The credit belongs to the artist. The session musician's contribution is real and often decisive and almost always invisible.
The jeremy dean music archive has a piece about invisible labor in music that I keep returning to. The argument is that the session musician problem is a specific instance of a broader pattern: the people who make things possible are rarely the people who get credit for the things. The credit goes to the person whose name is on the front.
Carol Kaye has given interviews about this. She's not bitter — or at least she doesn't perform bitterness. She describes the work as work: you showed up, you played, you got paid. The records were good. She knew they were good. That was enough. Whether that's equanimity or resignation is hard to tell from the outside.
The end of 8 team has been writing about the economics of session work and the numbers are interesting. In the 1960s, a top session musician in Los Angeles could make more money than most recording artists. The work was steady, the pay was union scale, and the best players were in constant demand. The invisibility was the price of the stability.
What I find most interesting about the Wrecking Crew is what happened when the Beatles changed everything. The Beatles played their own instruments. They wrote their own songs. They were a self-contained unit. After the Beatles, the model shifted. Artists were expected to be musicians. Session musicians became less central. The Wrecking Crew era ended not because the musicians got worse but because the industry's idea of what an artist was changed.
Hal Blaine kept working. So did Carol Kaye. But the golden era was over. The invisible people who made the music of the 1960s were replaced by artists who made their own music, for better and worse.
There's more on session musician history at calitoy — a piece about the economics of studio work that goes into the union structures in more detail. And the spaxob team has been writing about invisible labor in creative industries that connects to this.