A number of musicians have been able to get their work onto the pop music charts.
A few of them have had multiple hits, and a very select number have been on the charts many times.
And then there’s drummer Hal Blaine, born today in 1929, who was on over 350 hit records, spanning decades.
Blaine was born in Massachusetts, but he got his first dose of drumming inspiration when his family lived in Connecticut.
He was attending a Jewish school which was across the street from a Catholic school, and that institution had a fife and drum corps.
The priests noted the kid across the street who was mesmerized by the drums, and they invited him to come over and join in on the music.
Back then Blaine also spent a lot of time at local theaters, seeing great big band drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich perform.
He served in the Army during the Korean War and then used the GI Bill to get formal drum training.
Blaine did some nightclub work, including a few fill-in performances with Count Basie, but it was in the studio that he really made his mark.
In the 1960s, southern California was full of young bands who were bringing new sounds to pop and rock music.
They had no shortage of ideas, but some of these up and comers were better musicians than others.
So record producers were looking for capable, reliable and versatile musicians to play on these artists’ sessions.
Blaine was at the core of a group of session players who he would eventually nickname the Wrecking Crew, so named because, as he said, an earlier generation of musicians seemed to think they would wreck the music industry.
Not so. Blaine played on tens of thousands of sessions, including just about every hit out of LA in the 1960s.
He came up with the signature drum beat in the Ronnettes’ big hit “Be My Baby.”
It was Blaine’s drums that powered Richard Harris’s monster hit “MacArthur Park,” and he was on virtually all of the Beach Boys’ classic songs.
And he played on records by the Monkees, Simon and Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, the Supremes, the Byrds, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and so many more.
He was so prolific that he would mark the sheet music for each session with his own personalized stamp, which read “Hal Blaine strikes again!”
Because Blaine wasn’t a member of any of the groups with whom he worked, he kept a pretty low profile.
But his drumming shaped an entire generation of popular music.
In fact, Bruce Gary, drummer for The Knack of “My Sharona” fame, once joked that after a while he realized that his 10 favorite drummers were all Hal Blaine.
Today in 1999, the first major online livestream.
Back then it was called a webcast; this one brought something like 1.5 million users together to watch a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
And I’m sure that was the last time large numbers of people tried to watch lingerie models on the internet.
Remembering Hal Blaine (Drum Magazine)
February 5, 1999: First Major Webcast in Victoria’s Secret (This Day In Tech History via Archive.org)
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