They are legends but if you’re a normal everyday listener to music, their names may not be as familiar to you as the people they have played with and the hit records they have played on. Know that guitar part that intros Stevie Nicks’ “Edge Of Seventeen”? That’s Waddy Wachtel. Happen to hear Don Henley’s Grammy-winning “Boys Of Summer” on the radio today? That album, Building The Perfect Beast, was co-produced by Danny Kortchmar. Need more names? Try Carole King’s Tapestry, which won four Grammys in 1972, and James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. Kortchmar played guitar on both of those records. Wachtel has appeared on best-selling albums by Warren Zevon, Cher, Jackson Browne, Keith Richards, Henley and Nicks.
The accolades for these two men are endless. So much so, a new documentary by Denny Tedesco, who directed the highly-praised 2008 Wrecking Crew doc about the powerhouse session musicians behind many of the hits of the sixties and early seventies, is being made about them; as well as Immediate Family bandmates drummer Russ Kunkel, bass player Leland Sklar and guitarist Steve Postell. The Immediate Family has released a couple of albums but they are currently recording their first American-release album as we speak. They’ll be heading out to sea on the Rock Legends Cruise beginning February 27th with Roger Daltrey, Nancy Wilson, Jonny Lang and others. And Wachtel will be playing with Nicks at the New Orleans Jazz Fest on May 3rd. With all this going on, 2020 is looking to be a very good year for these guys.
I was able to talk to both Wachtel and Kortchmar recently about their past, their present and their future. While Kortchmar was running a few minutes late, Wachtel and I talked about, what else, guitars.
So what is happening in your world today, Waddy?
Waddy: I was wondering why a certain guitar wasn’t working (laughs)
What is wrong with your guitar?
Waddy: It’s a guitar I bought from England and it’s an old guitar and long ago they made the plugs a different size so I was waiting for them to send me the correct cable and they supposedly sent me the correct cable but it still doesn’t fit (laughs).
Are you wanting to use it now?
Waddy: No, I just wanted to hear it. I haven’t heard it electrically yet but I’m going to take it to somebody to put a regular plug on it so I can hear it.
What kind of guitar is it?
Waddy: It’s called a Wandre and you’ve probably never heard of them but they’re fascinating looking, unbelievable. They’re from the early sixties, Italian-made guitars that look like Salvador Dali made it. This one is called a Bardot, as in Brigitte Bardot, and you’ll see why cause it’s so curvy. It’s very wild. This guy was a psycho, I think, the guy who made these (laughs).
When you get it to working are you going to be using it anytime soon?
Waddy: I’m not sure yet. Till I hear it I can’t really judge it. But I hope to use it, yeah. I think it’s going to have a great sound. It’s just a bizarre looking thing. They’re very special items and normally I wouldn’t even go for one but the price came down far enough to where I said, I think I got to try one of these. I’ve never played one before. They’re very unusual instruments. I only know one person who uses a Wandre guitar and that’s a guy named Buddy Miller and he’s the only guy I could find that’s ever even seen one.
How many guitars do you actually have in your collection?
Waddy: I have quite a few but I’m not one of those collectors that has like hundreds and hundreds of guitars. I try to use all the ones I have but there’s plenty of them around here (laughs). I have about five Les Paul’s and three Gibson J-200’s and a couple of Fenders and different acoustic guitars and dobros; all kinds of stuff. But like I said, I’m not a collector so I don’t have a warehouse full of them. I’m not that kind of guy.
At this point, Kortchmar joins us
So Danny, what are you up to today?
Danny: We’re going to be in the studio together later. We’re working on our album. Waddy and I are in a great band called The Immediate Family and the other people in the band are another guitarist named Steve Postell and then Russ Kunkel and Leland Sklar make up the rest of the band. So that’s what we’re working on, our third album.
Waddy: It’s our first American release
How long have you been doing The Immediate Family?
Danny: At least two years, a little bit more than two years. We’ve done stuff for Japan, we did two albums for the Japanese market and a Japanese label, but now we’re making one for America, and the rest of the world actually.
Are they original songs?
Waddy: Oh yeah, they are
Who does most of the writing?
Danny: Wad and I do a lot of it, Postell does some of it. But it’s mostly Wad and I.
What about the documentary?
Danny: That’s really exciting. There is a documentary being made about all of us. Keep in mind that all of us have known each other a really long time, you know, fifty years. We’ve been playing together that long in various configurations. So at this point now, we were approached about doing a documentary that goes all the way back to the seventies, when we started, to the present, when we’re working on our bands now. They are interviewing a ton of people for this thing, people that we’ve worked for and with, and it’s quite a thrill.
Waddy: Yeah, Denny Tedesco, the director who did the Wrecking Crew movie, is the same man who approached Danny first about doing this film about us. So we are in really good hands, it’s a great team of people and we’re completely excited about it. Again, they’ve already compiled a lot of interviews, about thirteen or fourteen interviews have gone down already, and it’s just wonderful. It’s really coming along.
Are they coming into the studio with you right now while you’re recording this album?
Danny: We did the basic tracks already and they were in the studio. The documentary crew were there filming us and talking to us. So yeah, they were on board.
Have they given you a date for when it might come out?
Waddy: Hopefully before the end of the year but it could be next year. We don’t really know yet.
You mentioned somebody who is playing in your band and that’s Leland Sklar.
Danny: Yeah, Leland’s world-famous. Everyone knows him. He can’t go anywhere without people coming up to him.
Waddy: I’d say he’s the most famous musician on the planet, as far as a sideman, like one of us guys.
Danny: I think that anyone that is interested in music or any musician will know who he is.
Do you think session musicians are the hidden treasures in so many iconic songs?
Waddy: Yeah (laughs). It’s been like that forever. That’s why Denny, aside from the fact that his dad was one of the most famous and most employed session musicians [as part of the Wrecking Crew]. That bunch of guys made every record we grew up listening to just about. Every record that came out of California was played by those guys and for years and years and years nobody had an inkling of who they were. We grew up, fortunately, in the era where there were album credits.
Danny: Largely due to Peter Asher and Lou Adler, they put our names on the albums as opposed to the Wrecking Crew who never got any credit on the album notes. But we did.
Name me a perfect example of a song where session musicians made a record one of the greatest songs in the world.
Waddy: Larry Knechtel on “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the piano part. It is incredible and it’s this man Larry Knechtel, who was one of the Wrecking Crew. Nobody had a clue who that was. They just hear this unbelievable piano.
Danny: You could also put up Hal Blaine on all those Phil Specter records. Those absolutely definable fills and drum parts that he did. He was responsible for so many hit records, but especially Phil Specter records.
What was the first song that you played on that became a hit?
Waddy: Well, I remember the other night in the car we heard “That’ll Be The Day” by Linda Ronstadt and I believe that was the first time one of my solos was on a hit record. I’m pretty sure that was the first one for me.
Danny: Carole King’s Tapestry album. I played a solo on “It’s Too Late.” That might have been the first solo that I did that became a hit.
You both have toured, you’ve been in bands, you’ve written songs but when did you realize that being a session guy was your forte?
Danny: You know, I have to say, I never really saw myself as a session guy. I mean, I did sessions and tours for a while but I was always interested in doing, I don’t know, events, projects, rather than just doing dates for anyone that called. There are guys that are real session musicians that have spent their whole lives doing sessions. For instance, the great Dean Parks. He’s great at it. With me, I became a producer and was a songwriter and that’s what I kind of was aiming at mostly in my career.
Waddy: I came to Los Angeles with a band that never really got anywhere due to a lot of different factors. But at some point, I had met, through some of the producers I was working with, some session players that when I heard them playing I was going, I play as good as these guys, I think I can play as good as that guy and this band is going nowhere so I think that is what I want to do, I want to become a session player. So that is what I went for and thank God, luckily, got hired and a session turned into another and another and next thing you know, all of us were working two or three sessions a day. And before Danny was even doing the producer thing, he was working like crazy as a session player. We were constantly in the studios doing other people’s records. Then Danny got a shot to produce and then Jackson Browne gave me a shot to produce and from there on we realized, that’s a better seat for both of us. We were able to write and arrange and produce and deliver an artist’s work and it was a better-suited gig for us.
What’s the biggest challenge – when they bring in a bare-bones song or one that is pretty much done?
Danny: Our job is to come up with parts right away that is going to help the song and help the singer. For session musicians, that’s your job – to come up with something that is going to help the record, the entire program, especially the singer, the song and make the producer happy. You’re supposed to come up with stuff immediately, right now. And after awhile, you get really good at it and you start to think of parts real fast and it becomes instinctual. So I think that is really the role of a session cat.
Waddy: But the answer to that varies because sometimes someone will come in with a bare-bones, I just wrote this song, just guitar and voice, or they’ll come in with a preconceived arrangement. And sometimes that preconceived arrangement can be totally wrong so a lot of times you have to evaluate what you’re dealing with and either come up with a total arrangement for a bare-bones tune or take someone’s arrangement, which is perfect or if it isn’t, you’ve got to come up with something quickly, like Danny said, to rearrange it. There’s never one solution really. Things are always coming at you a little bit differently so you have to stay on top of it. That’s the challenge.
Both of you have been playing music since you were very young. When learning the guitar, what was the most difficult thing for you to get the hang of?
Waddy: I never saw it as difficult. I saw it as wanting to learn more and how quickly I could learn. I just wish I had taken less time to develop the things I wanted to learn. But reading for me was a little bit more of a challenge, mainly because my ear is very fast so my ear would lead through something once or twice, I’d learn it and that frustrated the teachers I was working with because they said, “You’re not reading.” And I said, “Well, too bad, I learned it.” (laughs) But I don’t think there was anything in the way between the guitar and myself trying to come together, really. What do you think, Danny?
Danny: Yeah, I agree with that completely. First of all, it was a joy to pick up a guitar. You’re married to it and it’s a joy. It’s not an arduous process of working. You go to it every day and you can’t NOT do it. So I don’t see it as being an effort or a problem, I just see it as something you work on all the time.
Waddy: It wasn’t like having your father telling you, “You’re going to practice that damn piano whether you like it or not!” (laughs) It wasn’t like that. It was something we both craved and needed to do, had to do.
Has anybody ever asked you to play something other than what you’re known for?
Danny: That’s an interesting question. In my experience, I was mostly called to play stuff that I already did play. They called me for my style and what I was comfortable doing already. I think the same is true with Waddy. They called him for his sound and what he was doing. But occasionally they’d throw stuff at you that you didn’t expect and of course that’s interesting cause you’ve got to find something right away and figure out the solution.
Waddy: It’s more like you’re there and all of a sudden someone goes, “This bass part is no good, can you play bass?” And you go, “Yeah, of course I can.”
Danny: You always say, “Yep, I got it, I’m on it.” (laughs)
Waddy: It’s like, for example, with me, I was on a session and there was someone there, I don’t remember who he was, but he was not good at slide guitar. He was playing this slide guitar part and it was terrible. And I had never in my life touched a slide, didn’t know how to do it, but I went to the producer and I said, “Look, I’ve never played slide guitar in my life but I promise you I can play it better than that guy.” (laughs) So he said, “Alright, give it a shot.” And I just put a guitar in my lap and used this bar he gave me and I felt my way through it and played in tune and he said, “Yeah, that’s good.” So you never know. But like Danny said, you always say yes.
Danny, what was it like working with Don Henley? [Kortchmar co-produced Henley’s first 3 solo albums]
Danny: Well, unlike with a lot of sessions and a lot of albums, there was no budget. We could whatever we wanted, there was no time constraint, no constraints whatsoever. Also at that time when we started working on that stuff, it was the early eighties and there was a big gear explosion. Drum machines and all this stuff started appearing on the market and we had privy to all of it. Whatever came out, Henley would say, “Get one!” and it would show up the next day. So we had all this different stuff. And that never happened after that, ever, or before it. So that was a unique situation.
The idea that there was no budget constraints and nobody was on our case saying, “You’ve got to finish this up! You’ve got to finish this up!” we could take our time and we did. We could call whatever musicians we wanted, even flying people in. Henley would find somebody, for instance Pino Palladino, the great bass player. He heard him on the radio and Henley calls Irving Azoff and says, “Find this guy and get him.” And the next day he was sitting in the studio with us. Stuff like that and that was certainly a unique aspect of working with Henley.
On “I Will Not Go Quietly” on The End Of The Innocence album, the drums are so upfront but that’s actually a drum machine I found out later.
Danny: He loved the track. It took at least a couple of days to get that drum program to sound like real drums and to have the impact that it had but he loved it and away we went. He never said, “Oh, I should play drums on it,” because what was there was really good already. When we did that particular track – by the way, Wad played on it too, acoustic guitar on that – at one point Henley decided he wanted Axl Rose to sing on it. You know Axl was, at the time, the most famous human being, certainly in Los Angeles, and sure enough, he showed up. There he was and he was listening to the track and he was completely fooled that the drums were a program. He was amazed and he said, “I have to rethink my whole attitude about program drums.” So he was fooled.
Waddy, what about being in the X-Pensive Winos with Keith Richards? What was he like as a bandleader?
Waddy: Well, he is tremendous as a bandleader and it was an extraordinary journey with the Winos. Every time we played, every record we made, it was challenging and rewarding at the same time and Keith is one of the sweetest people on the planet and one of the most gifted musicians that’s ever been around this planet. To be working with a guy who has written his life into music that way was a total thrill. It was just fantastic and the Winos was an extraordinary live band as well as a studio band. We would just have a ball every time we played, no questions asked.
What was it like working with Warren Zevon? Was that kind of the opposite situation?
Waddy: (laughs) That’s a funny way to put it. But Warren was an incredible musician and an incredible songwriter. When I worked with Warren, it was the height of, well, when we first worked together, cause we did a record later on where he was sober, but he wasn’t at all so it was a little bit of a rough road. But he wrote such great songs for that record, and we’re talking about Excitable Boy, really. We wrote “Werewolves” together but he wrote the rest of that record by himself or collaborated with a few other people. But his material was just so good. And that was an example of, as a producer, arranging his songs. I’d hear them and by the time I took them in the studio, I knew what to ask the band to play, because I had spent enough time with the tunes. I knew how they should go band-wise and Warren loved that about it and that made it easier for him. But it was rough but always rewarding too. When we’d sit back and hear something back, it was worth every struggle. Warren was incredible.
I’ll give you another example: we had that record, they said it was done. I thought there were two songs on it that stunk and needed to go away and they had arranged a playback party without me knowing it. I said, “What are you talking about? This record is not done.” But we had this playback party and Side 1 of the record is exactly the way it did when it came out so Side 1 is brilliant. Side 2 had these two duds on it and by the time Side 2 finished, the room was empty. The people that had come to the party, they left. And I looked at Warren and Jackson [Browne] and went, “Okay, come here, meeting time. See what happened in there? These songs have got to go. Warren, I need two more songs from you. I’m leaving town tomorrow to go play with Linda [Ronstadt] for about ten days and I need two more songs from you.” I came back to town, I called him up and said, “How you doing? You got them?” “Yeah, I got them.” I head over to his house and he played me “Lawyers, Guns & Money” and “Tenderness On The Block,” which are two of the greatest tunes ever. And that was it, we were in Heaven. As balls out drunk as he was, the man could write a song and deliver it. Fantastic.
Danny, what was happening in the Greenwich Village scene when you were there?
Danny: I think mainly what was happening was that all the folkies were going towards rock, they wanted to play rock & roll, because that was how you could get girls (laughs). So all the folkies were starting to pick up electric instruments and trying to figure out how to play and that was a big scene change right there. I guess after Dylan went electric, everyone figured it was okay. I’m not sure what the dynamic was but I do know after The Beatles, everything had changed and everyone wanted to be in a rock & roll band. So I think that was the big scene change down there at that time.
What about you, Waddy? In your earliest bands, were you playing popular music or were you going your own way?
Waddy: I was at the other end of New York. Danny was downtown and I was more in the uptown version of music, which was more like the Rascals music, which was you took songs and you did these big blown out arrangements on them. Sometimes you’d do like The Beatles song “No Reply” like a slow power ballad. You would do like when the Vanilla Fudge did that horrible version of that Supremes song. Sorry guys. And they came out of that same mold as well. That was the going thing uptown, was to do cover songs but do them originally, do them with different arrangements and stuff. That’s what I was caught up in doing and folk songs, Byrds sounding stuff. I had a Rickenbacker twelve string so we were doing a lot of Beatles and Byrds kind of sounding stuff. But we had an organ player too so we wound up in that New York City/Rascals kind of mold. That’s what I was doing before we got a chance to come out here [Los Angeles].
Who was the first real rock star you ever met?
Waddy: Danny Kortchmar (laughs)
Danny: I’m going to say Jimi Hendrix, I guess. It was a long time ago (laughs). But back in the sixties, he was on the set all the time, everyone knew him, everyone knew Jimi. He was down playing all the R&B circuit and then he went downtown and started his band down there. But he was well known in that circle before he went to England. And that’s when I met him. We all hung out. The first time I met him, my band the King Bees was playing at a dump called the Trude Heller’s, which was this dump on 6th Avenue. And his band came in to audition for a gig, to play there. It was Curtis Knight & The Squires and the organ player in our band, the King Bees, knew Jimi so we grabbed him and off we went to the drummer’s place, which was on Charles Street. We all went upstairs to his place and we hung out and listened to records and drunk cheap wine all day.
Waddy: I met Chuck Berry when I was a child but I didn’t sit down and have a discussion with him. I hung out at a music store called Manny’s, which was a very famous music store in New York City, so I would meet people in there. As a matter of fact, one of the Rascals, Gene Cornish the guitar player; I met Dion DiMucci one day in there; I met Al Kooper in there. As far as big name rock stars, not till I came out here. I met David Crosby like the second night I was in this town and embarrassed myself but I said to myself, am I going to let this moment pass like an idiot or am I going to make a fool of myself and introduce myself? So I grabbed myself by the shirt and stood up and introduced myself and made a fool of myself (laughs). But he was very nice. I wanted to meet Brian Wilson. That was my goal moving to California and I managed to meet him about three weeks later and that was an amazing event.
What is coming up for you guys?
Danny: We’re trying to get some more gigs. Right now we’re going on one of those cruises at the end of February, one of those rock & roll cruise things. But we don’t have anything else on the books at this moment.
Top photo by Peggy French Photography
One Response
Great Interview! Loved it!