If you love Sixties US pop music, you’re a fan of drummer Hal Blaine – whether you’ve heard of him or not

No, honestly - Hal Blaine was so brilliant, so versatile and so ubiquitous, I guarantee that you know and love dozens of the records he played on. Elvis, the Beach Boys, Mamas and Papas, The Byrds, Frank Sinatra, Simon & Garfunkel, Sam Cooke, anything produced by Phil Spector, Johnny Rivers, Roy Orbison, Johnny Rivers, some Love tracks, Richard Harris (okay – that’s stretching it!)… well, you get the idea. He was everywhere!

Blaine played on 50 Number One hits, over 150 Top ten records, and on around 35,000 pieces of recorded music. You’d expect anyone that thinly spread to have a formula, but proof of this hard-working man’s genius is that on so many of his records the drum part is individual, highly memorable and utterly key to the song’s success – but it’s only when you’re told Blaine’s playing on all of them that you become aware of the magnitude of his contribution: that, surely, is the definition of a perfect session-player. For instance, here’s one of the most iconic drum openings ever recorded:

Those four repeated opening notes drove Brian Wilson beyond the point of madness, to the extent that he co-opted Blane to perform on most of the Beach Boys’ classic tracks. Drum-wise, this is probably my favourite (as with his Spector recordings, the drums sound IMMENSE :

I’ve been vaguely aware of Hal Blaine as a top-flight drummer for many years, but it was only when I recorded a version of Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man” and did a bit of reading that I realised just how many of favourite songs the man played on. Here’s a fairly random selection:

I mean – wow!

There aren’t many session men who can claim to have had a song written about them. In fact, Hal Blaine’s the only one I’m aware of – here he let’s rip on his famous tom-toms on Nancy Sinatra’s “Drummer Man”:

If you want to learn more about Hal Blaine, there's a two-part video tribute to him available here and here.