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It's a virtual certainty that you have heard the Wrecking Crew without having heard of them.

"The Wrecking Crew" was the informal name bestowed upon a group of session musicians on the Los Angeles studio scene who played anonymously on a slew of hit records.

Whose hit records, you ask?

Just for starters: the Beach Boys, the Byrds and the Monkees. The Crystals, the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. The Fifth Dimension, Johnny Rivers and the Association. Gary Lewis and the Playboys and the Mamas and the Papas. Jan and Dean, Simon and Garfunkel and Sonny and Cher.

Ray Charles. Elvis Presley. Frank Sinatra.

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

Alvin and the Chipmunks, for heaven's sake.

Are you getting the picture?

The Wrecking Crew were pros' pros, the A-list musicians everybody wanted to have playing on their records back in the day.

Even now, they remain as obscure as the records on which they played were popular.

A documentary titled "The Wrecking Crew" hopes to change all that by shedding light on who they are and what they did.

The film has been a 12-year labor of love for its director, Denny Tedesco. His dad, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, was one of the Wrecking Crew's most indispensable members.

Denny Tedesco, 48, has been working in the film industry since graduating from college. Doing a Wrecking Crew documentary had always been in the back of his mind, but the project assumed a now-or-never urgency when Tommy Tedesco was diagnosed with cancer in the mid-1990s.

The elder Tedesco never lived to see the final product (he died in November 1997 at age 67), but Denny Tedesco filmed him reminiscing about his remarkable life as an in-demand session musician at a roundtable discussion with fellow Wrecking Crew members Carol Kaye (bass), Plas Johnson (saxophone) and Hal Blaine (drums).

This scene is one of the highlights of "The Wrecking Crew," which will be shown Saturday in Winston-Salem at the Salem Fine Arts Center's Drama Workshop as part of the Revolve Film and Music Festival.

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The Wrecking Crew took its name from the grumblings of older studio veterans it displaced. The old guard thumbed its nose at rock 'n' roll and the new breed of session musicians who deigned to play on what it saw as faddish records for the fickle teen market. The veterans complained that these younger, hipper session musicians were "wrecking" the industry, and so they gleefully adopted the mantle of "the Wrecking Crew."

It was more of an extended family than a fixed group, though it did have its core members. In addition to Tedesco, Blaine, Kaye and Johnson, other Wrecking Crew alumni include guitarist Glen Campbell (yes, that Glen Campbell), bassist Ray Pohlman and drummer Earl Palmer.

They acquired their greatest identity and renown through their work with producer Phil Spector and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. After relocating from New York to Los Angeles, Spector developed his famous "Wall of Sound" with the Wrecking Crew. It involved filling a small studio with musicians and recording in such a way that they sounded like a supersonic rock 'n' roll orchestra. Spector's Wall of Sound is heard to maximum effect on "Da Doo Ron Ron" by the Crystals, "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' " by the Righteous Brothers.

In an interview I did with Blaine upon the publication of his memoir, "Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew," (Mix Books, 1990), he reminisced, "Every session was a party. It was hard work, but it was fun. We were always laughing."

Blaine is unofficially the most recorded musician in history, having drummed on 40 No. 1 hits, 350 gold records and 35,000 total sessions.

Brian Wilson also worked extensively with the Wrecking Crew, who played on the Beach Boys' recordings. The group itself tended only to sing on them. The same modus operandi held true for other vocal-oriented West Coast pop groups such as the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, Jan and Dean and the Association.

Yet while everyone knew the faces, voices and names in groups such as the Monkees, few were aware of the musicians who played on their records. It was similar to the anonymity of the unjustly overlooked house musicians at Motown in the 1960s. "The Wrecking Crew" accomplishes for the Los Angeles studio contingent what the documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" did for all the unsung heroes making history in Detroit.

The Wrecking Crew helped create and popularize the California pop sound on records such as "California Dreamin' " by the Mamas and the Papas, "California Girls" by the Beach Boys and "Surf City" by Jan and Dean." In a sense, those musicians were the pied pipers whose siren calls helped lure young people westward in the 1960s.

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"The Wrecking Crew" features illuminating reminiscences from a slew of famous faces, including Brian Wilson, Frank Zappa, Jimmy Webb and Nancy Sinatra. The casual banter among the members of the Wrecking Crew is priceless, as well, as they draw memories of those incredibly busy times from one another.

On a typical day, they skipped from studio to studio, doing sessions for commercials, TV theme songs, movie soundtracks and, of course, rock and pop acts across the spectrum. You got work by accepting as much as you could handle, and you turned down sessions at your own peril.

As producer Bones Howe put it in the movie, "Don't say no to anything until you can't say yes to anything."

Because his father's life was a night-and-day whirlwind of sessions, Denny Tedesco recalls that his dad kept all his stringed instruments -- including a mandolin and his trusty Fender Telecaster -- in the trunk of his car as he drove from session to session. They stayed there at all times, even during the night. Now, musicians have professional cartage companies to insure safe transport of prized instruments from studio to studio, but back in the 1960s, the musicians did what they needed to do to make their complicated schedules work.

Although they labored in obscurity, the Musician's Union saw to it that they were well-compensated for their work. Kaye recalls figuring out that she was earning more money than the president of the United States. Moreover, as busy as they were, they didn't have to go on tour and therefore had a somewhat more stable home life than the typical working musician.

Denny Tedesco fondly remembers his father as a gag-prone cutup who was close to his family and friends. And although Tedesco didn't pick up any guitar licks from his dad, he learned an even more valuable lesson.

"He taught me to take a common-sense approach to life," Tedesco says. "He was in all kinds of stressful situations involving highly creative people, and he figured out the best way to handle them was to stay calm, keep your cool and everything would work out in the end."

The younger Tedesco has put the same philosophy to work in his approach to "The Wrecking Crew." Although the film is being screened at select festivals across the country, he's working to finalize licensing rights to use snippets from some of the best-known songs ever recorded in hopes of having a theatrical release. In most cases, the labels and publishers are cooperating, but it has been a long, involved process that has required patience and persistence.

He's up to 12 years and counting on the project. The end product is - like the music of the Wrecking Crew itself - well worth the care and craft put into it.

Parke Puterbaugh is a freelance contributor who lives in Greensboro. Contact him at parkeputerbaugh@earthlink.net.