Everybody reading these words has heard these four guys perform.
You simply didn’t know it at the time.
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| Members of The Immediate Family — from left, Daniel "Danny Kootch" Kortchmar, Leland Sklar, Waddy Wachtel, guitarist Steve Postel (new to the group) and Russ Kunkel — stroll city streets like they own them. And, indeed, they do. |
Kootch, Wachtel, Sklar and Kunkel quickly became in-demand session musicians: the backing “shading artists” who brought memorable highlights to chart-topping tunes by this new crop of talent.
But as filmmaker Denny Tedesco makes clear in this thoroughly absorbing documentary — and you can’t watch it without constantly smiling — these guys weren’t overnight sensations. They’d all been honing their musical chops since early childhood.
Their histories unfold via a series of individual on-camera interviews, vintage clips, brief bits of cute animation, and playful banter between all four of them, seated together and inspiring each others’ memories.
Kootch, a native New Yorker, met then-unknown James Taylor when both were teenagers spending summers at Martha’s Vineyard. They subsequently formed a band dubbed The Flying Machine, which survived long enough to produce one album’s worth of songs (finally released, rather hypocritically, only after Taylor hit big with the album Sweet Baby James, on which Kootch also played backing guitar).
Taylor’s hit song, “Fire and Rain,” references this band with the phrase “sweet dreams and flying machines, in pieces on the ground.”
Kootch eventually gravitated to Los Angeles, where he became part of a trio dubbed The City, alongside Carole King. Following Sweet Baby James, Kootch backed King on her 1971 breakthrough album, Tapestry.
As a precocious New York 5-year-old, Wachtel saw some guy play a guitar on TV, and decided that was what he wanted to do. Period, full-stop. His parents finally relented when he turned 9, and young Waddy threw himself into guitar lessons; he formed a couple of bands and brought the final one — Twice Nicely — to Los Angeles, before giving that up and becoming a full-time session player.
His first coup: being hired by Warren Zevon to play guitar on The Everly Brothers’ Stories We Could Tell, and then touring with them. He followed that by playing behind Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, on their debut album Buckingham Nicks.
Wisconsin-born Sklar grew up in a household where his parents watched the syndicated Liberace Show on television every week; young Leland therefore trained as a classical pianist from an early age, before switching to bass as a teenager. He also began cultivating the Santa Claus-size beard that remains an affectation to this day. (“The last time I saw my upper lip,” he admits, “was my high school graduation, in 1965.”)
Like the others, Sklar was in numerous bands in the 1960s, sometimes up to five at the same time. One of them, Group Therapy, ultimately released a 1967 single that charted in the Billboard Hot 100, and was produced by 23-year-old Mike Post (a connection that later found Sklar working on all of the TV shows Post scored, from The Rockford Files to The A-Team and numerous others).
Sklar also was in Los Angeles by this point. He met Kootch and Kunkel in 1969, when still-unknown James Taylor sought him as back-up bassist for what all assumed would be a brief booking at the Troubadour ... and then Taylor’s career took off.
Pennsylvania-born Kunkel moved to Long Beach when he was 9, by which point he’d been encouraged by his older brother to play drums, and was fired up by Southern California’s surf music scene (notably the tune “Wipe Out”). Young Russ took to his drum kit with such enthusiasm that he was ejected from his fifth-grade orchestra class, for excessive volume.
Kunkel also swanned through numerous bands, until being noticed in 1968 while part of the opening band during a 19-week stint at Hollywood’s Whisky a Go Go (while still not old enough to drink). He and Kootch met while working on Taylor’s Sweet Baby James.
(Honestly, have you ever encountered so many overlapping serendipities?)
At this early stage in their respective careers, Kootch and the others kept their egos in check, and delivered only what was requested. That said, people who knew them — such as Taylor and King — expected riffs, improv bits and solos that would enhance the result.
“I wanted to please them,” Kunkel admitted. “My main goal was to not get fired.”
The four worked together for the first time on Carole King’s 1975 album, Thoroughbred, which was noteworthy for another reason: They were credited on the back of the album jacket. That immediately set them apart from their predecessors, The Wrecking Crew, a loose gathering of Los Angeles-based session musicians who — mostly in the 1960s — had backed hundreds of Top 40 hits, but never were acknowledged for doing so.
“The fact that they put our names on the album jacket,” Sklar notes, “had a profound effect on our careers.”
Between 1970 and ’75, the foursome — together, individually, or in pairs or trios — “went from nothing to working all the time.”
Indeed. Suddenly savvy musicians — notably Phil Collins, extensively quoted in this film — began buying albums based solely on the presence of Kootch, Wachtel, Sklar and Kunkel, regardless of the name performer.
Also important: All four quickly became in demand for themselves. It wasn’t a case of some performer (for example) asking Kootch to “sound like so-and-so.” They became character actors, hired for their unique abilities and contributions.
The other distinction: The Wrecking Crew was solely a studio-based outfit. When the pop stars they’d made sound great went on tour, they were accompanied by an entirely different “road band.”
That didn’t fly with the likes of Taylor, King, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne — all given extensive face time here, along with Don Henley, Lyle Lovett, Keith Richards and many others — who insisted on touring with the guys they knew, and who would make the live performance sound like the album.
(The film’s funniest anecdote took place during a lengthy road trip with Ronstadt, which involved a strip club.)
The Who’s Who of name acts these guys supported, cited as leaves on an animated tree behind the opening credits, is astonishing and jaw-dropping: everybody from B.B. King to Reba McEntire, Julio Iglesias to Billy Joel, The Beach Boys to Bob Dylan, Janis Ian to Santana, and hundreds more.
Tedesco’s film begins and concludes in the present day, as these four guys have reunited to tour as themselves, after releasing their own album as The Immediate Family. It’s a fitting finale for a quartet that has long deserved the acknowledgement that this film provides.
“Being a musician is a way of life,” Kootch observes, toward the end. “It’s like a religion.”
Amen to that.
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