Immediate Family director Denny Tedesco builds loving portrait of the 1970s' go-to session players
Stories span crash-landing a Cessna into an open field with James Taylor and doing 61 takes of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”
Immediate Family screens at VIFF Centre until December 29. On December 15, at 1:15 pm and 3:40 pm screenings, Russell Kunkel is on hand for Q&As
IN A FILM ALREADY brimming with incidental delights, one of the most amusing moments in Immediate Family comes with the appearance of a pot-bellied Neil Young, calling in via Zoom from what looks like a War Room built into an underground bunker.
This is Shakey, we assume, in his natural habitat, lending his voice to Denny Tedesco’s loving portrait of four musicians—guitarists Danny Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkle—who succeeded the fabled Wrecking Crew as L.A.’s go-to session players, most visibly during the singer-songwriter era of the early ‘70s when James Taylor and Carole King held dominion over the Earth. But it wasn’t until 1986 that Kortchmar joined Young on his much-maligned venture into new technology with the album Landing on Water. It’s a single line on the guitarist’s incredible résumé, but it prompts an interesting insight or two from the filmmaker, whose first documentary was a labour of love about his late father Tommy Tedesco’s work with the Wrecking Crew.
“My God, it’s the funniest thing ever. It’s great,” he says about Young’s admirable absence of vanity and the sheer practicality of the effort. “Listen, it’s COVID, I’m lucky enough to get Neil Young to call. I’m gonna take anything I can get out of him. Same thing with Stevie Nicks.”
Tedesco mentions that some early reviews have parted briefly from their praise to look askance at these lo-fi moments, but the intimacy of a Zoom call from Stevie Nicks suits the film, speaking volumes about the enthusiasm brought to Immediate Family by a cast that also includes, among others, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Phil Collins, Keith Richards, and Don Henley. If Kortchmar could trade his guitar for sequencers and drum machines, then Tedesco can be open to a scrappy video call.
“The biggest regret I had about my first film was not shooting my dad earlier,” he says. “He was sick, he was dying, and I waited too long. I once asked [documentarian] Albert Maysles, ‘If you had a choice of video or film, what would you shoot?’ He said, ‘I’ll give you 24 reasons not to shoot film.’ I knew what he meant. It’s about the message. I would have been better off interviewing my dad all the time with just a cassette player, just to get his voice. Technology—yeah, some of it’s gonna be better, some of it’s gonna be worse, but I admire these guys because Danny did use technology as it changed.”
Prior to that, of course, the Immediate Family—as Kortchmar and his partners are now known—were bringing their unerring chemistry and good taste to some of the biggest artists of the ‘70s. Drummer Kunkel confesses that his “main goal” in the early days of session work was “to not get fired,” but as David Crosby notes of bassist Sklar, and it could be said of all four them, there was simply nobody better, period.
Tedesco’s film becomes breathlessly entertaining when the hits start pouring in and the Family takes to the road, sharing stories of all-night poker sessions with Linda Ronstadt, crash-landing a Cessna into an open field with James Taylor, or doing 61 takes of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” before deciding they nailed it on the second.
Perhaps best of all, Tedesco has the four friends sitting together in a bull-session, bringing us closer to people who were stratospherically successful but largely anonymous for some 50 years.
Says Tedesco: “My strongest impression of Waddy Wachtel? The fact that he makes a strong impression! You know that if he walked into a room, he’d be letting you know that he walked into the room. The thing about Waddy is, it’s one thing to talk shit, but to be able to do it, to put it down—that’s great. He’s the funniest thing in the movie. He doesn’t know that he’s a funny guy, he’s not trying to be funny, and that’s the best part about it.”
Drummer Kunkel (who lives these days on Vancouver Island) emerges as grounded and savvy, while bassist Sklar, who’s looked like a Tolkien character since 1963, might inhabit a plane entirely his own. “He’s never done a drug in his life,” laughs Tedesco. “He’s so straight it’s ridiculous. His thing is doing the gardening, playing with his dogs.”
His other thing is playing with the Immediate Family. Tedesco’s camera takes us to a gig in New York, incidentally providing an argument for the rejuvenating powers of music. Even in their 70s, none of these men are ready to stop. “I remember asking the engineer-producer Bones Howe,‘What’s it like when you’re on the top of the world, and then you’re not?’ He said, ‘You got the ramp up, and you’re doing everything you can, and then you got the ramp down. It’s not about staying at the top, it’s making the ramp down as long as possible.’ I think that goes for every one of us. You just wanna keep going.”
Related Articles
