The Wrecking Crew (30 page)

Naturally, none of this sat well with any of the four, especially Chater. His burning desire to be allowed to play bass on the songs the band recorded in the studio—and to have at least some of his compositions considered for release as singles—remained a major point of contention. He took pride in the quality of his musicianship and felt he could play alongside anyone, the Wrecking Crew included. After all, it was no fluke that he had long been the Union Gap's musical director on tour. That
had
to count for something.

But after more than a year of getting nowhere with Fuller (who had himself written or co-written several of the Union Gap's hits, a shrewd and lucrative move), Chater could take no more. He decided to schedule a one-on-one, sit-down meeting with Columbia's Vice-President of Artists & Repertoire, the man who happened to be Jerry Fuller's boss. Maybe this would finally help grease the wheels, Chater reasoned.

Sidestepping the label's carefully proscribed corporate chain of command, though, didn't come without potential fallout. Being branded a malcontent could quickly ruin a musician's career in the ultracompetitive Hollywood recording industry of the 1960s, where a hundred other guys were begging for a chance—
any
chance—to step in and take the instrument right out of your hands. For an increasingly angry and frustrated Kerry Chater, however, it was a shot he had to take.

A few days later, Chater found himself sitting in a chair in Jack Gold's office at Columbia, waiting on the other side of a large, cluttered desk as the busy head of the label's A & R department finished a call.

“Thanks for being patient,” Gold said at last, swiveling toward Chater as he hung up the phone. “So, what can I do for you?”

“Well, I'm a writer and a musician here at Columbia. Very few of my songs are making the albums and I'm not playing bass on them, either. I don't think I'm even being considered.”

Gold, squinting intently at Chater, paused for several seconds as if to scan his memory banks for the name of a long-forgotten girlfriend who had suddenly sidled up to him at a forty-year high school reunion.

“Ah … it's the Union Gap, right?” he finally said.

“Right.”

“Okay, good. Now, tell me, what was your first single and how many copies did it sell?”

“It was ‘Woman, Woman' and a million-four,” Chater replied.

“What about your second single?”

“‘Young Girl' and it did around two million–six.”

“And how many copies has your third single sold so far?”

“Roughly a million-two, I think.”

When a band's first three singles sell well over a million copies each, the last thing any record label wants to do is screw up a winning formula. Especially when it involves some no-name bass player who just wants a bigger role.

After a brief, intense silence—with Chater looking at Gold and Gold looking at Chater—the label exec let out a sigh and wearily rose to his feet. He gestured toward the door.

“Get out of my office.”

*   *   *

A number of months after Kerry Chater's dispiriting short-lived meeting with Jack Gold at Columbia, the musician decided to quit Gary Puckett and the Union Gap (just before they released their sixth and final Top 40 single, “This Girl Is a Woman Now”). Like Michael Clarke from the Byrds and Creed Bratton from the Grass Roots before him, Chater simply could take no more of being relegated to a bit role in his own band. Even with a new producer on board—Jerry Fuller having parted ways with Puckett over “artistic” differences—little room remained for Chater's contributions. His songs were still not being considered for the A-sides of singles and he found himself perpetually vacating his position as the band's bassist to whichever Wrecking Crew player the latest producer wanted to use in the studio.

With his unerring belief in his own abilities proving to be well founded, the multi-talented Chater, having cannily saved his money along the way, subsequently forged a highly successful career as a songwriter, penning a variety of hits for major country acts. For Kerry Chater, the agonizing days of watching from the sidelines were finally, mercifully, over.

*   *   *

Wondrous things can sometimes happen in a recording studio when inspiration becomes contagious.

As Glen Campbell and Al DeLory worked on setting up the “Wichita Lineman” session inside Capitol A, something kept bothering bassist Carol Kaye. One of Campbell's longtime Wrecking Crew friends, the gifted player was on hand to help him cut this most important of records.

Having looked at the basic chord sheets, the experienced Kaye could see that the song lacked an identifiable lick to really kick things off, an attention getter. The biggest hits always had something to catch the listener's ear right up front. Just like she had created a couple of years before for Sonny Bono on “The Beat Goes On.”

Drawing on her considerable jazz background, where less almost always meant more, Kaye worked out a simple six-note intro she thought just might do the trick.

“Glen, what would you think about opening the tune with something like this?”

As Kaye played the series of notes on her bass, Campbell thought it the perfect suggestion, immediately adding it to the song. Another great idea from a great player, one of the reasons he loved having her on his solo projects whenever possible.

But Campbell also loved the
tone
of her bass. It was a Danelectro, a solid-body electric bass guitar (made out of Masonite, of all things), often used in studios to add a “higher” sound than that of a standard Fender electric bass or an acoustic stand-up bass. In fact, some producers, like Brian Wilson, were well known for recording all three basses simultaneously, thereby “stacking” the distinctive qualities of each in order to provide the fattest possible bottom end.

In his own moment of inspiration, Campbell asked Kaye if he could borrow her Danelectro to play a “guitar” solo during that middle section Jimmy Webb had never finished. An unconventional but brilliant choice, the deep, resonant passage scored a direct hit, giving the song just the right quavering, tremolo-fueled melancholic interlude.

Almost like rural neighbors joyfully gathering at an old-fashioned barn raising, Jimmy Webb, too, chipped in with some delightfully appropriate inspiration of his own. Showing off his vintage Gulbranson church organ to Campbell one afternoon up at the house (during a few days off from the recording process while DeLory wrote the orchestral score), Webb mentioned how he thought the keyboard's unique bubbling sound evoked what he imagined to be the noise of signals passing through telephone wires. Campbell was so taken with the idea that he had a cartage company immediately come over and dismantle the monstrous keyboard and then reassemble it in the studio. Webb himself came into Capitol and played just three notes on it, over and over, during the song's fade. It proved to be the final piece to a masterfully executed production puzzle.

With Glen Campbell's plaintive vocals adding just the right touch of wistfulness and heartache, “Wichita Lineman” did indeed become the smash he had so desperately sought. There would be no more anonymous guitar playing on everybody else's hit records for this country boy. No more wondering whether he really had what it took to break out, to headline his own shows. The proof was all over America's radio dial.

As “Wichita Lineman” rocketed to number three on the national pop charts (and number one on the country charts), it became Glen Campbell's springboard to more success than even he dared to dream possible. The erstwhile Wrecking Crew guitarist with the off-the-chart skills and sunny, down-home disposition had finally crossed over into that rarefied realm where no session player had gone before: stardom.

16

MacArthur Park

I'll have that, Jimmy Webb.

—R
ICHARD
H
ARRIS

As thirty-four-year-old Bones Howe zipped his way through morning Hollywood traffic one day during the fall of 1967 in his red Alpha Romeo convertible—an unexpected, middle-of-the-night Christmas gift from the four members of the Mamas & the Papas—the tall, rail-thin onetime Georgia Tech engineering grad had a lot on his mind. Having recently ventured out on his own as an independent producer, after years of being one of the best studio soundboard men in the business, Howe had just started work on the all-important second album by the 5th Dimension,
The Magic Garden
. Not wanting any kind of sophomore jinx to happen on his watch after their breakout success with the
Up, Up and Away
LP, Howe had been mentally mapping out each song, and he was eager to get to Western Recorders to continue cutting all the basic tracks with the Wrecking Crew.

Stopping off en route to pick up the songwriter Jimmy Webb, who had composed all of the music for the project, Howe saw Webb motioning for him to come inside.

“Bones, I've got the greatest idea for the Association,” Webb said excitedly, sitting down at the piano in his living room. Howe's first solo production effort had been for that very band several months before, and the resulting album,
Insight Out,
had gone gold, with two Top 5 singles leading the charge (“Windy” and “Never My Love”). Juggling several projects at once, he was now in preproduction on their next LP, to be called
Birthday
.

“Listen to this,” Webb enthused as he began to play. “It's written to be the entire side of an album. I'm calling it
The Cantata.
”

As Howe followed along, he found himself knocked out by the beauty and intricacy of the piece. Compositions like this just didn't come along every day. Not in a pop context, anyway.

“That is
fantastic,
Jimmy.” Howe said as Webb finished. “I have a meeting later this week with the guys in the band at the studio. I'll take you over there and I want you to play it for them.”

With the talented tandem of Webb and Howe firmly behind the song, it seemed as though the Association's next hit record was all but assured. Now the band members just needed to give it their approval.

*   *   *

As Jimmy Webb sat down at the Steinway Grand in Western 3 to demo
The Cantata
for the Association, expectations were running high. Earlier that day, Bones Howe had told the band about Webb's marvelous new composition, that it would perfectly match his vision for their voices. And they were looking forward to hearing it. But they were also leery.

By this, their fourth album, the six members of the Association were becoming ever more restive and resentful; they wanted to record as many of their own songs as possible. They also wanted to play their own instruments as a band in the studio, something they were never permitted to do. Howe considered them to be excellent singers, specifically in terms of their vocal blend. He did not, however, consider them to be excellent instrumentalists. They were capable enough for playing live gigs but not for the exacting demands of cutting a record. “I have to run the sessions my way, with my musicians,” Howe had made clear to the Association's manager when they all started working together.

When the red light went on and the tape started rolling, Howe wanted his favorite Wrecking Crew rhythm section of Hal Blaine, Joe Osborn, and Larry Knechtel laying down the groove, no substitutions allowed. He also wanted some combination of Dennis Budimir, Al Casey, Mike Deasy, and Tommy Tedesco on the guitars. Howe's job, as he saw it, was to create a hit record. And to that end, only the best would do.

While Webb played the roughly twenty-minute musical arrangement on the battered and scarred yet exquisite-sounding old piano that had been in the studio for years (the same one Webb had so nervously sat behind two years before on Johnny Rivers's version of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”), he carefully explained along the way where the instrumental interludes and the vocals should be inserted. Howe, for one, was enthralled. This is going to be great, he thought. It's the ideal vehicle to showcase the Association's unique harmony-singing abilities.

But the boys in the band had other ideas. At the conclusion of Webb's mini-concert, one of the guys politely said, “Okay, Jimmy, thanks very much. Could you wait outside? We'd like to talk it over as a group.”

With Webb safely out of earshot, Terry Kirkman, the group's leader and the talented songwriter behind “Cherish,” their number-one hit from the year before, along with the rhythm guitarist, Russ Giguere, were the first to offer their opinions.

“Man, any two guys in this band could write something better than that,” Giguere said, with Kirkman adding that it was “too long.”

Howe was stunned. He was sure the suite of interconnected songs would be an automatic. Looking at the half-dozen faces in front of him, however, he could see that they were all in assent. The producer's standing agreement with the band was that if either he or they didn't like a piece of material, then it wouldn't be recorded. And for reasons that he couldn't fully comprehend, the Association had just voted him down, six thumbs to one.

Breaking the news to the anxious Webb waiting outside in the hall, Howe tried to soften the blow as much as possible.

“Well, you know,” he offered, “the group just doesn't want to give up a whole side of an album.”

A dejected Webb said he understood, though his eyes indicated otherwise. Sensitive by nature, most songwriters can't help but take rejection personally. Especially when the work is so heartfelt and autobiographical, as with
The Cantata.
Still pining for his ex-girlfriend Susan—the one who had inspired him to write “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—Webb had created this Baroque-style song cycle about her, too. And it needed to somehow find a good home.

“Thanks anyway, Bones,” he said. “At least you tried.”