Everybody reading these words has heard these four guys perform.
You simply didn’t know it at the time.
The quartet collectively known these days as The Immediate Family — guitarists Daniel “Danny Kootch” Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel — entered the music scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when pop hits crooned by camera-ready headliners (but written by others) gave way to folk/rock singer/songwriters who composed and performed their own material.
Kootch, Wachtel, Sklar and Kunkel quickly became in-demand session musicians: the backing “shading artists” who brought memorable highlights to chart-topping tunes by this new crop of talent.
But as filmmaker Denny Tedesco makes clear in this thoroughly absorbing documentary — and you can’t watch it without constantly smiling — these guys weren’t overnight sensations. They’d all been honing their musical chops since early childhood.
Their histories unfold via a series of individual on-camera interviews, vintage clips, brief bits of cute animation, and playful banter between all four of them, seated together and inspiring each others’ memories.
Kootch, a native New Yorker, met then-unknown James Taylor when both were teenagers spending summers at Martha’s Vineyard. They subsequently formed a band dubbed The Flying Machine, which survived long enough to produce one album’s worth of songs (finally released, rather hypocritically, only after Taylor hit big with the album Sweet Baby James, on which Kootch also played backing guitar).
Taylor’s hit song, “Fire and Rain,” references this band with the phrase “sweet dreams and flying machines, in pieces on the ground.”
Kootch eventually gravitated to Los Angeles, where he became part of a trio dubbed The City, alongside Carole King. Following Sweet Baby James, Kootch backed King on her 1971 breakthrough album, Tapestry.