Yuku free message boards

BuckeyeTillEyeDie wrote:

---

Joyce Dewitt.

The correct answer would be David Hasselhoff.

Fighter59 wrote:

---

Did he even write his own music?

That's a great question. He of course has songwriting credits on a lot of his songs, and when he was a kid one of the big conflicts with MoTown is that they had their own songwriters - they didn't want their acts trying their own hands at it and wasting time. But about that song writing credit...

I made a trip on a Saturday a few months back and was in the car for most of the day. I happened to catch an interview program featuring Carol Kaye, a session bass player through the '50s and beyond. She did everything - jazz, blues, Motown, pop, and was in with so many great artists. She was one of the first session players to excel at the "Fender bass", so she got a ton of work. She also had the bass with her and played some bass runs while she discussed certain songs or artists.

There were two things that I found fascinating (but not surprising) about the interview. The first is that the music in her day was fairly loose, and she was extremely busy - sometimes recording in two or three different studios in a day. So you can imagine, she walked in, saw the music, played it straight for a take, played it loose with however the mood struck her, and was back in her car on to the next gig. She told a story about walking in to Mel Torme's session for "Games People Play", where she was given a very stoic bassline. They played the song several times and it sunk like a rock. When she got frustrated and no longer cared about fearing what the Producer might think of something else, she started messing around with the bass line and funked it up. The other studio musicians folled and they cut it like that. Mel's writing, but nothing like what he envisioned.

The second point was that many of the big names of the day -- The Beach Boys specifically - had session musicians for their albums and then used the band members for the tours. Many times, the main songwritere was the only member in the studio and they had to teach the other members the new songs for the tours. For Pet Sounds, Biran Wilson was the only guy around, other than studio musicians. They helped to shape everything on that album, although she said the ideas all came from Brian. But listening to the interview, then listening to Pet Sounds now makes me think more about what a blast it would have been to be a part of that creative group more than I think about Brian's musical genius as a result of what "he" (now "they") created.

The reason I say all of this is because when I see "writing credit", I know how the songs can evolve and each mucisan builds off one another in a real band. If you have a group of go-to session musicians that not only play with MJ, but also on dozens of records in between, is the sound more about Michael shaping the music, or the session musicians shaping his sound?