The Wrecking Crew vs The Funk Brothers…Is There A Winner?

From the birth of the recording industry in the early 1900’s and up though the late 1950’s, New York City was the mecca for the music business. Everything related to creating a record could be found there including songwriters, publishers, recording studios, agents, lawyers, sheet music companies, album cover design & printing shops, influential radio stations and probably most importantly, record labels. But, beginning in the late 1950’s, the music business experienced a seismic transformation, moving away from its long standing New York City-centric dominance to having it permanently replaced by the West Coast sound (Los Angeles), Detroit (Motown), the British Invasion (London), and to a lesser extent Nashville. The latter had its first proper recording studio, RCA Studio B, built in 1957 and it was a much smaller city than today, focusing almost exclusively on coutry music.

Depending on readers response to this article, I may choose to review Muscle Shoals (Alabama) although I personally don’t believe their impact was in the same ballpark as these 2 power hitters from LA and Detroit. As for London, I've published numerous articles specific to Abbey Road and the Beatles on Medium.com. You can easily find them by searching with my name.

The change began in the late 1950’s as the Los Angeles music market began to gel. The iconic Capitol Studios tower and Sunset Sound Studios were opened during this period which were followed by many smaller independent recording businesses.

It was in this blossoming new music culture that a loosely formed group of professional musicians sometimes referred to as the “First Call Gang” and later called “the Clique” and much later would become much better known as “The Wrecking Crew” began to record together regularly. These were well respected session players whose previous backgrounds were based in jazz, pop and classical music and had little to no experience in the newest music popular genre, Rock ’N’ Roll. The group ranged in size from anywhere between 30 and 40 first-call musicians and they recorded at a variety of different studios on the contract basis.