Kevin Purdy

[Link to original article at niagara-gazette.com]

By Kevin Purdy
Originally Published Nov. 4, 2007

When Tommy Tedesco was honored by his fellow musicians as Los Angeles Musician of the Year in the mid-1980s, film composer John Williams gave the keynote speech at the ceremony.

The man for whom Tedesco had played guitar on the scores for “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and other blockbusters offered up a pretty fair summation of the Niagara Falls native’s career.

“Millions of people have heard him play, and all over the world, they’ve enjoyed his music,” Williams said. “And they never had any idea who he was.”

“Millions,” in fact, was serious understatement from a man known for bombastic film scores. For anybody who’d ever listened to a radio, watched television or seen a movie, it would have been almost impossible to avoid hearing Tedesco’s signature solos or precise session work during the second half of the 20th century.

Saturday will mark the 10th anniversary of Tedesco’s death at the age of 67, about five years after a stroke left him paralyzed and tasked with retraining his nimble hands on the tool of his lifelong trade. Few would say he was bitter or unfulfilled during his semi-retired last years.

“Something he said to me during my interview with him, he had no regrets whatsoever in his career,” said Denny Tedesco, Tommy’s son. “He was one of the most successful studio guitar players in history. His career went much farther than he ever thought … he was happy just to make a living at playing his guitar.”

Before he played on the Beach Boys’ revolutionary “Good Vibrations,” before he played the iconic lead parts of the themes to “Bonanza” or “Green Acres,” Tedesco was plunking around in Niagara Falls clubs in 1950 with his buddy Al Giambattisa, newly married to wife Carmeline and working at Carborundum.

“He hated it, because it was, well, work,” said Carmeline Tedesco, Tommy’s widow. “He was playing guitar, but there was only so much guitar you could play in those years, it wasn’t a big club kind of place.”

Tommy Tedesco signed up with the Air National Guard mainly to get out of work one weekend a month, Carmeline said, but his unit was activated during the height of the Korean War. He was stationed in Niagara Falls, however, and after his release attended Niagara University, where he “majored in Gin Rummy,” Carmeline said.

At the NU prom, friends of Tommy’s found out from big band leader Ralph Marterie that his guitar player was leaving after the gig, and Tommy was pushed into a conversation with him. Three months later, he returned from the road, convinced his 22-year-old wife to move with him to California and took their 25-month-old baby with them.

Times were tough for a guitar player in the early 1950s, and Tedesco had to work a day job at Douglas Aircraft to be able to play clubs at night. Giambattisa said a story Tedesco often told was how he discovered the money to be made teaching accordion lessons — Tedesco took his own first lesson on a Friday night, Giambattisa said, and taught students the next Saturday morning.

Soon enough, guitars — and the rock music they propelled — found increasing popularity, and Tedesco found work and kept it. Nobody could describe him as diligent in his day jobs, but as a studio player who could make more in one day than he could in a week of factory work, he kept appointment books, showed up on time and strove to give the performers and session producers what they wanted.

“In 1983 or so, Tommy had landed a big, big job, working on the score for the movie ‘The River,’ but we had just found out our son (Denny) had cancer and would be going in for surgery the same day as the recording,” Carmeline said. “He went to the studio, played for three straight hours, took the music off the stand and just broke down crying.”

Tedesco eventually became a member of what was termed the “Wrecking Crew,” a group of session musicians including Glenn Campbell, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine and Dr. John who seemed to play on almost every major recording. Tedesco played the guitar parts to the original “Batman” television series, joined Elvis for his 1968 comeback special, helped out on the soundtrack to “The Godfather” and was even part of the original cast recording of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Thom Rotella, another Niagara Falls native who works as a session musician in Los Angeles, noted that Tedesco would often make light-hearted jabs about Rotella’s side work on his own music. As Tedesco aged, however, Rotella noticed that he started developing his own jazz-oriented songs — “His kids said that they’d never seen their dad pick up a guitar at home before, until then.”

The last session Tedesco played before his 1992 stroke was recording the score for “Schindler’s List,” Carmeline said. After his death, his picture was placed across from the Como Restaurant, his favorite spot for dinner and cards, and a small section of Pine Avenue nearby was named Via Tommy Tedesco.

Tedesco’s son, Denny Tedesco, an independent producer in Hollywood, has almost finished a documentary film about his father and the Wrecking Crew, which he has shown in private screenings around the country. He can’t release it in its intended form, however, until he either puts up significant cash or gets major entertainment studios to sign off on the rights to the songs his father helped craft in the studio.

“I started filming this just before he passed away because it felt urgent, it felt like if I didn’t record this, it would be gone with nobody to talk about it,” Denny Tedesco said. “My father never thought too much about how his music would be heard when he was doing it, he was just glad he could make a living doing what he loved.”