Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

Yesterday we lost a giant in music history, one of the greatest drummers in pop, a hitmaker, a true legend – and most people don’t even know his name. Hal Blaine was the fulcrum of The Wrecking Crew, that great collective of LA-based session musicians that played on an incredible number of pop classics, backing anything from Pet Sounds to The Partridge Family.

Blaine’s death comes just four months after that of bassist Joe Osborne, which means that the trio of musical masterminds who helped Simon & Garfunkel create masterpieces like Bridge Over Troubled Water or The Boxer are now gone (keyboardist Larry Knechtel die in 2009).

I posted two mixes of songs on which Hal Blaine played, with some background on him, in 2014. It might be worth revisiting them:

The Hal Blaine Collection Vol. 1 

The Hal Blaine Collection Vol. 2

Other session musicians’ collection:
The Joe Osborn Collection
The Jim Gordon Collection Vol. 1
The Jim Gordon Collection Vol. 2
The Ricky Lawson Collection Vol. 1
The Ricky Lawson Collection Vol. 2
The Jim Keltner Collection Vol. 1
The Jim Keltner Collection Vol. 2
The Bernard Purdie Collection Vol. 1
The Bernard Purdie Collection Vol. 2
The Steve Gadd Collection Vol. 1
The Steve Gadd Collection Vol. 2
The Steve Gadd Collection Vol. 3
The Larry Carlton Collection
The Bobby Keys Collection
The Louis Johnson Collection
The Bobby Graham Collection
The Ringo Starr Collection