Bass Goes to the Movies

Well, according to Carol Kaye herself: the studio musicians she worked with never called themselves the “Wrecking Crew,” and there was no such name back then, it was just a name cooked up much later by Hal Blaine, the drummer who wrote a book ca. 1990 in which he used the “Wrecking Crew” term. Then the film used it, and it took off.

I believe that she feels she was interviewed for the film under false pretenses, and for sure she has bad things to say about the film and those involved with it. It just irks her that this name “Wrecking Crew” got started, when the musicians never used it, and were never known by it. And now it is out there and referred to often, as if it really was a thing.

Since there really was no Wrecking Crew, it would seem there was no Wrecking Crew to “change” to the T-Bones. It’s just that the term Wrecking Crew is used as shorthand for “studio musicians,” who played on recordings unidentified, and in the case of “No Matter What Shape” etc., LIberty Records had to put a name for a group on the record, so came up with T-Bones.

It seems to be rather a convoluted story. Wikipedia has details, but who knows how accurate that Wikipedia article is. It states that there apparently was a U.S. group called the T-Bones, and when they had a hit in 1966 with “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In)” on Liberty Records, the company made hay by using studio musicians to record a full album with the same name as the song. (see the next link: Liberty also apparently got a group together who would go on tour; the studio musicians had no desire to tour. Liberty called that touring group the T-Bones; the members of that group had not recorded the hit song).

BUT - the Wikipedia article references a Songfacts page, which instead states that studio musicians, including Carol Kaye (she lists it as one of her electric bass hits), actually did the recording of the instrumental hit song (the so-called T-Bones on the 45 rpm record label), and also references a .pdf which shows the other studio musicians who worked on the other songs on the resulting album of the same name.

It’s all somewhat confusing, but I gather that the studio musicians had nothing to do with being in a group as T-Bones, rather it was just a name at that point to have to put on the record. To the studio musicians, it was just another recording date among many. It just happened to be a hit, and went from there.