The Power, Groove, and Taste of Hal Blaine

"Hal was blessed," says Jim Keltner. "He had a touch and feel that were all his own."

The quote above is from a conversation I had this week about Hal Blaine, who was literally one of the two greatest drummers on Los Angeles’s busy recording-session scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. I was talking to Blaine’s protégé Jim Keltner, a legend himself from the generation following Blaine’s.

I’d spoken to Blaine in the late ‘90s (a brief but pithy audio segment of our interview is below), when he was pushing 70. One of our topics was what Hal called his “Red Book,” ie. his discography, which contained some 4,000 titles: the singles, albums, cartoons, radio and TV ads, and TV and movie soundtracks that Blaine played on since the late 1950s, when he arrived in Los Angeles. But the Red Book, Blaine told me, was far from complete. Not only was he still actively doing sessions, but there remained some 4,000 uncatalogued items that colleagues were tabulating as we spoke.

Hal Blaine in 1995, behind the massive rack of tom-toms he began using in his later years. (Photograph by Howard Thompson)

Hal Blaine played on 150 Top 10 Billboard hits, forty of which went to #1, and on more than 260 gold or platinum singles and albums. He played on an astonishing, and unequalled, six consecutive Grammy winners for Record of the Year: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s “A Taste of Honey” (1966), Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” (1967), The 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up, and Away” (1968), Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” (1969), the 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” (1970), and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in 1971.

When the 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up, and Away” won the 1968 Grammy for Record of the Year, the group famously invited Blaine, a mere sideman, onstage to share in the applause, as aware as they were that he’d played a signal role in the song’s success. Blaine’s contributions to the song are a subtle matter; listen to how deftly he switches between snare-drum hits and rimshots, and to his perfectly placed fills, especially towards the end. (The virtuosic nylon-string guitar playing, incidentally, is by another session great, Tommy Tedesco.)

For “The Boxer,” Simon and Garfunkel flew Blaine to Manhattan to play just one note: the thunderous drum hit on the song’s “Lie-la-lie” chorus. Simon and his indispensable engineer, Roy Halee, had worked out an ingenious setup whereby Blaine parked two big tom-toms (elsewhere, he has that that it was a single snare drum) in front of an open elevator door, and Halee hung mikes in the shaft. The result: what Blaine called the “cannonball-like” detonation that provided “The Boxer” with its unforgettable hook.¹

A handful of other songs that Blaine graced: The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” in 1966—most of the Beach Boys’ entire oeuvre, in fact—the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963), the Crystals’ propulsive “Da Doo Ron Ron”(also 1963), Richard Harris’s 1968 kitsch masterpiece “MacArthur Park,” and Elvis’s ‘Return to Sender’ (1962), ‘(You’re the) Devil in Disguise’ (1963), and the one Elvis song that unfailingly gives me goosebumps, ‘If I Can Dream,’ cut in 1968.

Blaine’s majestic fills add an anthemic quality to one of Simon & Garfunkel’s best songs, “America,” released in 1968, when the best lacked all conviction, while the worst were full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation was at hand, and the song’s two young lovers were seeking it.

What, I asked Keltner, made Hal Blaine great? We went around the block and back on that one. Blaine’s greatness is as ineffable as that of a Vermeer painting; in the end, all we could do was summarize, not specify. “Hal,” Keltner said, “could play a simple pop song and make it unforgettable. He just had the touch.” Another way of indicating Blaine’s stature is that in his peak years, he had only one competitor for productivity and excellence: Earl Palmer, the New Orleans transplant who arrived in Los Angeles the same year, 1957, that Blaine did. Palmer had a job waiting for him as Aladdin Records’ West Coast A & R man (“producer” had hardly emerged as a job description), so his feet were more solidly on the ground than Blaine’s.² “When I met Hal,” Earl told me, “he was drumming on the road for the Diamonds and I did the session. [Earl didn’t specify which session; the Diamonds had several hits in 1957.] Hal came over and said, ‘Mind if I sit by?’ He was very nice and paid good attention, read the part over my shoulder, thanked me and I said, ‘Aw no, man, it’s a pleasure.’ Somewhere or other I heard him play and I knew I could recommend him. I wasn’t Jesus but I wasn’t worried about nobody taking my job. Hal and I were competitors, not enemies. That made him prominent in my life, as I’m sure I was in his, unseen but prominent.”

Let me give Blaine’s story, and his colleagues’, a bit of context. “The original rock & rollers,” I wrote in my book Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story [see note 1]—Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and their ragtag backup groups—were amateurs, inspired tinkerers: folk musicians, really. By the late ‘50s, rock was too lucrative to be entrusted to untrained labor. The manufacture of hit records required a new worker, hip enough to understand the music, disciplined enough to crank out an album a day. Talented musicians streamed into late-’50s L.A., sleeping on floors, looking for angles into the studios.³ As Hal said, ‘I was working at some of the terrible country dumps in the Valley with Glen Campbell and Leon Russell [both of whom, of course, became major recording artists, accompanied by their former buddies]. We were doing these cheapo sessions we called twofers, two songs for twenty-five bucks. Sooner or later some of these songs got released and everybody wanted to know who the musicians were. And that’s how it all started for us.’

“The best of the new hired guns—Palmer and Blaine; guitarists Campbell, Tedesco, and Billy Strange; pianists Russell, Don Randi, and Larry Knechtel [who plays the gospel-style piano on Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’]; bassists Carol Kaye and Red Callender; arranger Ernie Freeman [who wrote the string arrangement for “Bridge,” which the very picky Simon disliked], and a handful of others became rock & roll’s Wizards of Oz: unseen, unsung, and essential to the evolution of the music. ‘It really was the studio musicians who created most of the Sixties golden oldies,’ Carol Kaye told writer Mark Cunningham, ‘not only in our performances, but [in] our creativity, creating instant arrangements or deviating from a corny arrangement to create a hit.’

“‘Earl and I produced our drum parts,’ Blaine said. ‘Producers and arrangers wanted to pick our brains, and any time Earl did a record, I’m sure he did as I did’: provide the extra fillips—Blaine’s thunderous snare and bass drum on the Mamas and the Papas’ triple-platinum single “California Dreamin’, Palmer’s brawny, contagiously syncopated fills on Sam Cooke’s #7 hit ‘Shake’ (the song is a rarity—the drummer is playing what is essentially the lead instrument) that nudged a song over the line into irresistibility.

“The studio pros went even further, into ventriloquy. Neither the Buckinghams, nor the Association, nor Paul Revere and the Raiders, nor many ‘60s groups, played their own instruments on their hits. The only Byrd to play on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the #1 record that ushered in folk-rock, was guitarist Jim McGuinn; the other “Byrds” were Blaine, Russell, guitarist Bill Pitman, and Knechtel. The Ventures, rock & roll’s first instrumental supergroup, were often augmented or replaced; the famous guitar part on their “Hawaii Five-O” was played by Tommy Tedesco.

“Beyond its dozens of record dates per day, Los Angeles had another attraction for musicians: movies and TV. Until the mid-’50s, the major studios—Warner Brothers, Fox, MGM, Paramount, and others—had permanent staff orchestras; at about the time that Earl, Hal, and the rest of the new breed arrived, the old contract system collapsed into a much more competitive freelance network. The veteran Hollywood players regarded [the] newcomers with scorn and disdain but were rudely jolted when the Wrecking Crew, as Blaine dubbed himself and his colleagues—'the older guys kept saying we were going to wreck the business’—quickly moved into film and TV⁴ and sent the “blue blazers,” as Hal called the old guard, packing.

“I modeled everything I did after Hal,” Keltner told me the other day. “To this day, I use the same Diplomat drum heads I saw Hal using when I started out.” Blaine, in fact, was present at Jim Keltner’s first rock session. Until then, Jim had been a jazz player, but Jerry Lewis’s son Gary, to whom Jim was giving drum lessons, invited him to play on Gary Lewis and the Playboys’ upcoming album, She’s Just My Style. Blaine was ostensibly there to play various percussion instruments; in fact, he was being paid to hang around in case Keltner couldn’t cut it. But Jim, aided by Hal Blaine’s warmth and encouragement, did just fine—the title song, a catchy shuffle, shot to #3. After the session, Leon Russell, the album’s producer, walked over to Keltner and said, ‘You’re gonna be a great rock drummer.” And a torch was passed, from Blaine and Palmer to Keltner, the tragic Jim Gordon (look up his story), Russ Kunkel, Jeff Porcaro and other young L.A. guns. Hal Blaine died in 2019, making it to 90, impressive for a lifelong heavy smoker. Jim Keltner is still out here at 82, sharing with the younger cats what Hal had passed on to him.

On a hard-to-find album, David Grisman’s Acousticity, Blaine ventures outside of pop/rock into Grisman’s jazzgrass. Hal’s playing fits Grisman’s fleet, syncopated sound as tightly as it did that of, say, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Included here is another rare item: a Hal Blaine drum solo. Play on, brother, play on.

1. Simon and Halee were two of the most thorough planners in the business, but they couldn’t prevent one unexpected moment. They’d scheduled the session for a Sunday, when they figured that the elevator at Columbia Records’ studios would not be in use. Blaine was poised to come crashing down on his drums when the elevator door suddenly closed. Simon, Halee, and Blaine stood around biding their time until the elevator door opened, and Hal pounded his tom-toms in the astonished, and terrified, face of an elderly security guard making his Sunday rounds. “It nearly scared him to death,” said Blaine. “He jumped back into the elevator, the door closed, and we never saw him again. But I think about his face every time I hear ‘The Boxer.’”

2. My biography of Palmer, Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, was published by Da Capo Press in 2000. Palmer’s groove, rooted in the parade-band tradition of his native New Orleans, was very different from Blaine’s, whose training ground was Chicago strip clubs and big bands such as Patti Page’s. In Backbeat, Earl Palmer talks at some length about Blaine, with whom he maintained a decades-long friendship.

3. “The very first day Glen Campbell came in town,” Earl recalled in Backbeat, “ he crashed on my floor…. My daughter Shelley was no more than two. She said, ‘Daddy, that man’s sleeping on the floor,” and she went and put a pillow under his head.”

4. Blaine’s term “the Wrecking Crew” (which he may have popularized rather than coined) became the title of a 2008 documentary by Denny Tedesco, Tommy Tedesco’s son, as well as a 2012 book by Kent Hartman. I’ve watched the movie several times; I have not read the book. The movie is a fascinating account of the lives and work of the L.A. session musicians of Blaine’s era; Blaine is one of the major talking heads. Perhaps because of what I’ll call availability—many of the greats were dead by the time the film was made—The Wrecking Crew emphasizes some musicians’ roles at the expense of others’. But I highly recommend it for the light it shines on a remarkable era.