The Wrecking Crew - Help or Hindrance

I've often wondered this myself - whether the faithful re-creation of Pet Sounds and Smile-era songs would have been an impossibility live without the larger touring band they later morphed into. Listening to the UM of the Today album - there are songs like When I Grow Up (To Be A Man) where the Beach Boys sans Wrecking Crew were struggling to nail it - 30 to 40 takes if I recall correctly. But what an album! 

For me, that depends. Live performances in general aren’t going to sound exactly like the original tracks done by the Wrecking Crew (take Windy as an example). For what it’s worth, the band tries very hard to get as close to the original as possible. It’s pretty much its own thing. However - to me at least - it’s still very good and definitely doesn’t leave me disappointed. To me, what matters is that they try and succeed. In some cases it’s easier because they actually use some Wrecking Crew members for touring (Simon & Garfunkel!!!).

Wrecking Crew or some functional equivalent - was an music industry standard. Anyone who sees the film will recognize the universal respect from those very prominent and successful musicians. And, it was time-efficient to help fulfill contractual obligations to the record company. They had to keep turning out releasable work.  Two months off the grid could kill a musician or band. Being on the airwaves, and on the charts, continuously, was the only way to remain viable.   

They were hardly incompetent playing on stage - I even saw Mike play the theremin (or a similar board) around the time they were adding support musicians. There is hardly any shame in prepping the instrumentals to add the vocals when the band returned from touring. They could hardly be on the road and in the studio at once.  

They were good but could hardly be in two places at once. I remember Ron Brown and The Captain (Daryl Dragon from late ‘67. I’ve seen the Paris show video (with Murry in the audience) - not the UNICEF show, but the one with Murry in the audience, had a pretty big group of musicians.  Were the songs stripped down or arranged for touring to ease them into the newer songs? In late November ‘67, they did Wild Honey, already a released single, and performed Darlin’ (not yet on the radio.) Live music performance is to theater, what filming a movie is to recording in the studio.  

Mikie - you would never know it he was nervous. Mike just got it done. He was handling the MC and having to fill time when guitar strings broke, and the band had to fix it on-the-fly right on stage.  There were no magic guitar techs handling that.   



Mikie - do you know who is on the congas?  Wasn’t there something type of provision in place in Europe where they had to hire local support musicians? 

Concert technology was still at its infancy in 1966-1967, with outdated/underpowered PA systems, lack of stage monitors, rudimentary mixing boards etc. so it didn’t matter who played on the studio material - if it was complex it just wouldn’t translate well to a live setting.  Check out other same-era pop/rock live albums for examples - The Rolling Stones Got Live If You Want It or The Kinks Live At Kelvin Hall for just two examples.  It wasn’t until The Stones tour of 1969 where rock tour audio was starting to be taken seriously.

Do you know who is playing drums?  Asking more because I find it curious he’s using Dennis’ kit.

So - how could the promoters or managers or the record company who snuck this Then I Kissed Her tour - so inappropriate in the Spring of 1967 - a whole year post Pet Sounds - not know the regulations for unions? Were they taking advantage of the chaos of Carl's arrest? 

Were they uninformed or did they just try to pull a fast one and get past the regs? They knew what a union curfew was in the States.  As between the record company execs who staged this tour - with the band (or Brian) pretty unawares, it seems pretty arrogant and disrespectful.  Derek Taylor did not know UK procedures for shows?  Sounds highly unlikely. Did anyone talk to each other?

Even local venue shows have provisions for "hiring the local stage union members."  

I don't know the details of precisely what happened with the 1967 tour, but I can tell you generally what kind of thing will have happened. Basically, there was sort of a cold war between the British Musicians' Union and the American Federation of Musicians for most of the middle of the twentieth century. In 1934 the Musicians' Union kicked up a fuss about Duke Ellington's band coming to the UK and taking "British jobs", and basically for the next several decades instrumentalists from one country couldn't perform in the other at all. So for example, when the 1930s British bandleader Ray Noble performed in the US, he could perform (because he was a conductor, not an instrumentalist) but he wasn't allowed to bring over his own orchestra -- he had to use one made up of American musicians (led by Glenn Miller). In the early fifties, Johnnie Ray could tour the UK, but had to be backed by British musicians, and when Lonnie Donegan had a hit in the US, he not only had to be backed by American musicians (in his case, Johnny Burnette and the Rock & Roll Trio) he wasn't allowed to play guitar himself either.
That started to change in 1955, when the AFM and the MU came to a strict one-in/one-out agreement -- musicians from one country could perform in the other, but only if they were special stars doing something that local musicians couldn't do, and only if there was a like-for-like swap, with one musician from the UK going to the US for every one US musician coming over here. So for example when Louis Armstrong came over to the UK in 1955, someone had to set up a US tour for Freddie Randall, a trumpeter from Devon.
This meant that American singer/instrumentalists like Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis could come and perform over here, but it generally still meant that their bands couldn't, because they weren't doing anything that British musicians couldn't do (which is why for example Eddie Cochran was backed by Marty Wilde's Wildcats, or Little Richard by Sounds Incorporated, when they came over here in the early sixties, and why so many American blues artists toured backed by Chris Barber's band).
That loosened up more as the sixties progressed -- which is one big reason why that's when the "British Invasion" happened, because that's when British bands were finally allowed to play in the US at all -- but until 1980 it was still technically on a one-in/one-out rule and still only for individuals for whom there was a specific audience demand. Obviously some arrangement was made to have the Beach Boys tour the UK in return for a similarly-popular British band being able to tour the US, but presumably that arrangement wasn't deemed by the union to cover the cellist and woodwind players.
It's quite possible that nobody involved realised any rules were being broken -- it's perfectly plausible that the people applying for Musicians' Union waivers thought that the waiver would cover all the musicians, while the MU thought they were only giving permission for the Beach Boys themselves. British tours by American rock bands, as opposed to singers performing with local hired backing bands, had basically never happened in 1967, other than the Beach Boys. There'd been the Crickets a decade earlier, and the Turtles toured the UK around this time, there was Dylan's first electric tour in 1966, and I think the Byrds played the UK too in 65 or 66. But that was basically it -- there might have been a handful more, but those are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. Everything else was Sam Cooke or Mary Wilson or Roy Orbison or someone coming over here and performing with local backing musicians.
It's entirely possible, then, that that 1967 tour was the first time ever that a rock band from the US had tried to tour the UK with additional musicians who weren't members of the band. If it wasn't the first, it was still something far, far, out of the ordinary. In that situation, it's not at all surprising that someone might have messed up.

Unions are all about "who does the jobs." That is 100% correct. That said, there are other issues, such as getting visas for entry.  But, what seems bizarre is that the support musicians almost become an indispensable part of the group, because it would seem that they would have rehearsed with the band, and knew the timing and the cues.

It is not a fungible thing such as a bag of wheat or a dollar where they are a direct exchange and considered an equal exchange. People are not fungible although they could have a similar skill set.  Thank you for that history. If the guys at the top of the food chain did not know the rules, they should have. Everyone was certainly not on the same page and it was somebody's job in the industry to do that.    

I don't know for sure, but I imagine that might be why. The other thing, though, is that it was paradoxically much easier for relative unknowns, because they wouldn't come to the union's attention. There was quite a lot of back and forth on the folk scene, for example, with Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Paul Simon, and Peggy Seeger all coming to Britain for extended periods of time (before Dylan and Simon became famous) and playing the folk clubs, with no union trouble that I know of, so as Hendrix was unknown at the time it may just have been that nobody bothered (until he became big, at which point of course he would qualify for the exceptional star rules). A tour by a band that was one of the two or three biggest in the world at that time would obviously be far more likely to come to the union's attention than some club gigs by a complete unknown.