Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew

Hal Blaine was born Harold Simon Belsky in Holyoke, Massachusetts on February 5, 1929. After serving as an Army cartographer during the Korean War, he attended a drum school in Chicago run by Roy C. Knapp. Blaine began to play drums in strip clubs, and by the late 1950s he was working with a jazz quartet. Before becoming a session musician, he worked with the teenage idol Tommy Sands and the pop singer Patti Page and played briefly with Count Basie's big band at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Blaine was the session drummer for such hits as the Ronettes' Be My Baby, Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Night, Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling in Love, Simon & Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson, the 5th Dimension's Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, Barbra Streisand's The Way We Were, and the Crystals' Da Doo Ron Ron. Later in life, Blaine gave drum clinics and worked on commercial jingles. His autobiography, Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew written with David Goggin, was published in 1990. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 and received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2018. He died on March 11, 2019 at the age of 90.

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