Nowadays, Leland Sklar is an undisputed session legend. Over the years, he's been the first-call bass player for the likes of Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Steve Lukather, Phil Collins, and Lyle Lovett – with a versatile playing style that's impossible to label under just one category.
So you might be surprised to learn that the bass wizard wasn't allowed to play on the record of one of his earlier bands.
“I was in a band called Group Therapy in 1967, and Mike Post [composer, best known for his television theme music work] was our producer, and we weren't allowed to play on our record,” Sklar tells The Sessions Panel.
“It was at United Studios in Hollywood, and the Wrecking Crew guys all played on our record. There was Carol Kaye and Bobby West on bass. It was [drummer] Hal Blaine. Jim Gordon was the percussionist. Mike Rubini, Mike Melvoin, and Larry Knechtel were the keyboard players. Mike Daisy, Dennis Budimir... all these guys.”
He continues, “And I'm looking through the window just kind of going, ‘Wow, these are the cats.’ And, three and a half years later, I was working with them every day.”
Because of his existing relationship with Post, who Sklar calls “the king of television,” the burgeoning bassist's luck soon turned, and he ended up “doing every one of his TV shows, from The Rockford Files on… We did Magnum, P.I. and Hill Street Blues and The A-Team, and all these different shows.”
As Sklar himself aptly puts it, “It's very strange how these things happen!”
In an interview with Bass Player, the bass icon once discussed how he managed to get into the session scene – and revealed that it was the gig with James Taylor that proved to be his ticket into the cut-throat world, back in the late ’60s.
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