Bill Pitman didn’t much like pop music, but created a string of hits

Bill Pitman was part of the loose alliance of musicians that has become known as the Wrecking Crew backing the biggest stars of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Wrecking Crew’s legendary guitarist Bill Pitman in the studio.

William Keith Pitman. Session musician.
Born Belleville, New Jersey, February 12, 1920; died Palm Springs, California, August 11, aged 102.

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Depending on whom you spoke to, guitarist Bill Pitman played on the best song of all time – and the worst. He is among the most recorded musicians of the 20th century, playing thousands of sessions, memorably as a member of the collective known as the Wrecking Crew that from the late 1950s changed the shape and sound of popular music.

Beach Boy mastermind Brian Wilson rates the Ronettes’ 1963 song Be My Baby as the greatest and it changed the course of his life and the manner in which he composed music. Pitman was brought in to play guitar on it as a member of the Wrecking Crew. But he already knew Phil Spector, who co-wrote the song and produced it; encouraged by Bertha Spector, Phil’s mother, he had tried to teach the youngster jazz guitar, but Spector was a poor student.

Driving across Los Angeles, Wilson heard Be My Baby come over the radio. He was dumbstruck. “Phil Spector was the biggest inspiration in my whole life,” he told a documentary maker decades later. “I pulled over to the side of the kerb and said: ‘My God, wait a minute. No way.’ I flipped out. I got my mind blown.” Many music fans were similarly struck. The song rose to No.2 on Billboard, kept at bay by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs’ Sugar Shack.

Spector’s emerging but messy and unfocused Wall of Sound buries Pitman in the mix. The other guitarist was Elvis’s favourite, Tommy Tedesco, but he is also mostly lost in the blur of sound. The B side of Be My Baby is an instrumental, a casual jam really, called Tedesco and Pitman.

Drummer Hal Blaine was on the sessions with Pitman and they would partner again, with a mate, Glen Campbell, to back Frank Sinatra on his 1966 No.1 hit, Strangers in the Night. Blaine says he copied the drum part from Be My Baby but slowed it down and applied it to Sinatra’s song in the studio.

Pitman and Blaine were regulars at the top of Billboard, but Strangers in the Night was one of the biggest hits of the era, quickly sold two million copies and gave Sinatra his first chart-topper for 11 years, dislodging the Beatles to do so. Sinatra hated it. While holding Bert Kaempfert’s sheet music for the first time he described it as “a piece of shit”, and later as “the worst song I have ever heard”.

Pitman was born in the suburbs of New Jersey, but the family soon moved to Manhattan. His father was a bass player in the NBC orchestra and from the age of six the young Pitman took lessons in piano, then trumpet, before turning to guitar, which he preferred.

While still at school he went to Manhattan jazz clubs and was entranced by the daring of the influential saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker. It was the birth of bebop, and Pitman was in. He was growing in confidence on his instrument and playing in various bands when he bumped into Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida who mentioned he was leaving Peggy Lee’s band. Pitman landed that job. He moved to Los Angeles, where he would be nominated for studio sessions for which other guitarists were double-booked.

Soon he was well known across the industry and the Wrecking Crew’s loose alliance fell together, finally including Pitman, Blaine, Tedesco, Campbell, Leon Russell, Barney Kessel, Steve Douglas, Larry Knechtel and Carol Kaye.

They played behind the hits of the Beach Boys, the Partridge Family, Simon and Garfunkel, John Denver, the Carpenters, the Righteous Brothers, Mel Torme, Tina Turner and hundreds of other artists.

Among the hits from Pitman’s more noted sessions came the Byrds’ pop interpretation of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man (you can hear the distinctive, sustained notes of Roger McGuinn’s 12-string guitar on that track, but no other Byrds played that day on the song credited with creating folk rock); Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head (Pitman plays the ukulele part on the Academy award-winner); M.A.S.H. theme Suicide is Painless (belatedly released a decade after it was recorded to top the UK charts for three weeks in 1980); and the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. He was bemused that some of these became such big hits. He couldn’t see the point of much rock and pop music.

Pitman also wrote some music for TV series, including a couple of early episodes of Star Trek. Perhaps his most distinctive and beautiful guitar parts were those understated (and uncredited) wah-wah shaded passages that punctuate Barbra Streisand’s 1973 Academy award-winner The Way We Were.