Unlike that sprawling collective of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew (a moniker many of them disliked) who played on practically every record that came out of Southern California in the 1960s, the Immediate Family, a mere five guys who did pretty much the same thing during the 70s, became pretty well known by name as individuals to aficionados of West Coast MOR rock/the Laurel Canyon sound simply because record companies were giving credit where credit was due on album jackets by the time they were working steadily. So it’s sort of rich to hear fans like actor/musician Billy Bob Thornton refer to them as unsung heroes who “nobody knew about.” Even I knew their names, and I wasn’t a fan of everything they played on. 

To be specific, they’re guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, and Steve Postell; drummer Russ Kunkel; and bassist Leland Sklar. Except for Postell, they mainly started as the backing band for James Taylor, whose pianist on his first major tour was fellow singer-songwriter Carole King, so, of course, they played on her best-selling album Tapestry, thus cementing their legacy even before supporting people like Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Phil Collins, Don Henley, and even Keith Richards. They were as much the creators of FM radio as the DJs who soft-peddled their wares. The documentary director Danny Tedesco, who previosly made a movie about the Wrecking Crew, here has much fewer personnel to cover, and sometimes you get tired hearing these same five dudes verbally high-five one another about some riff they invented that has since become rock gospel. Also, each member gets enough time to explain his background in detail, but except for Kortchmar’s, which involved meeting Taylor as a preteen during summer vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, they all kind of blend into one big amorphous success story achieved through ambition, luck, and what Nicolas Cage once termed “the enormous weight of massive talent.” It’s the same old story: the unmistakably accomplished talking at length about their accomplishments.

And it’s terribly entertaining, especially when they discuss flawed geniuses like Warren Zevon and Neil Young (they proudly cop to playing behind Shakey on his certifiably worst album, Landing on Water), but for the most part they sell their brand with slightly off-putting vigor. That they inevitably formed a touring/recording group called the Immediate Family comes across not as valuable intelligence important to their legacy but a commercial gambit that will see them through their dotage, as if they hadn’t made enough money as it is. 

Opens June 19 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Yebisy Garden Cinema (0570-783-715). 

Immediate Family home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Thunk Enterprises, LLC