Tommy Tedesco died on November 10, 1997, in Northridge, California, aged 67. The guitarist was part of the Los Angeles session community later widely known as The Wrecking Crew. His working life moved between pop records, television themes and film scores, with each job demanding that he adapt his playing to someone else’s song or scene.
Born July 3, 1930, in Niagara Falls, New York, Tedesco built a career in Los Angeles that put him inside some remarkable recording sessions. On the Ronettes’ 1963 recording “Be My Baby,” he played guitar alongside Bill Pitman in Phil Spector’s ensemble at Hollywood’s Gold Star Studios. The arrangement brought together guitars, multiple keyboards, basses, brass and percussion. The single’s instrumental B-side, “Tedesco and Pitman,” put the two guitarists’ surnames on the record itself.
Those sessions depended on a network of individual players. In a 2015 Radio Milwaukee interview, Tedesco’s son Denny explained that the musicians were freelancers, with different combinations hired for different dates. He remembered his father keeping a Telecaster, acoustic guitars, a mandolin and a banjo in the car, ready to move between studios. That collection was working equipment: the next booking could call for a very different instrument from the last.
The television work gave Tedesco plenty of opportunities to make a brief part distinctive. His credits included the themes for Bonanza, Batman and Green Acres. In a 1986 interview with journalist Steve Newton, he singled out the wah-wah guitar on Three’s Company as an especially recognizable contribution. He also explained that the rough fuzz guitar at the opening of Green Acres was intended to suggest a pig. A session assignment could involve giving a particular character to just a few seconds of music.
Film sessions could demand both precise reading and invention. “I am whatever they want me to be,” Tedesco told Jon Leonoudakis in a 1985 interview published by Mix in 2008. For John Williams’ score to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, he played electric sitar during the banquet scene. Tedesco recalled that the passage wasn’t written out; he watched the scene and developed a part to fit it. He also described the pressure of Williams’ sessions, where he expected challenging music and usually encountered the score when he arrived. The ability to respond in the room was central to the work.
Tedesco shared that practical experience with other guitarists. His “Studio Log” column in Guitar Player described recording assignments through the problems he faced, the instruments he used and even what the job paid. By 1986, he was directing the studio guitar program at Hollywood’s Guitar Institute of Technology. Alongside the finished recordings, those lessons left an account of how the work actually happened, including decisions listeners would never see on a record sleeve.
In 1996, Denny began filming his father and fellow session musicians for the documentary The Wrecking Crew. Writing in MovieMaker in 2015, he described gathering four players around a table and capturing their conversation. Tommy died before seeing any of that footage. Denny continued the project, borrowing equipment and drawing on friends’ help, but the cost of licensing the recordings complicated its path to distribution even after festival screenings in 2008. Magnolia Pictures released The Wrecking Crew in theaters in 2015, bringing Tedesco and his colleagues to the screen to tell their own stories about the sessions behind the records.
