Hal Blaine

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hal Blaine ranked as Los Angeles’s most in-demand studio drummer, supplying percussion—according to his own tally—across tens of thousands of sessions. Those dates ranged from Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions through Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys recordings and extended to nearly every pop and rock artist working in the city during the decade, among them Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. In 1990 Blaine issued his memoir, Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew.