Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Immediate Family’ on Hulu, A Music Doc That Celebrates The Session Musicians Who Brought A Generation Of Jams To Life 

Released in 2022 and now streaming on Hulu in addition to numerous platforms, Immediate Family tells the story of how four session musicians who became indispensable to the rock and pop singer-songwriter sound of the 1970s before branching out as individual players, record producers, and eventually as a band themselves, a combo for which the doc is named. Immediate Family was directed by Denny Tedesco, whose film The Wrecking Crew profiled the session musician titans of the 1960s, and features testimonials from a ton of famous faces, including James Taylor, Carole King, Keith Richards, Stevie Nicks, Don Henley, Steve Jordan, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and David Crosby.

IMMEDIATE FAMILY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “In a way,” Lyle Lovett says in Immediate Family, “these new independent players that were brought in by new artists like Carole King, in those days, the baton was handed to them.” Guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar and Robert “Waddy” Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel all came from different backgrounds and different introductions to their chosen instruments. But as young players influenced equally by The Beatles, by the time they’d all hit the Los Angeles music scene of the late 1960s and early 70s, it was a sea change moment. Like The Fab Four, who’d shown how a band could write and perform its own material – as opposed to the traditional record industry dividing line of artist and repertoire – artists like James Taylor, Carole King, and Jackson Browne were at the forefront of the singer-songwriter emergence. Those lead artists needed session musicians to help them cut albums, and soon the Kortchmar, Wachtel, Sklar, and Kunkel were in high demand.

In the present, they’re known as Immediate Family, this crew of musicians who’ve played on hundreds of hit songs, and their interviews together spur the direction the doc takes, filling in each guy’s formative years, how they all met – an iconic 1970 gig with a Sweet Baby James-era Taylor at the Troubadour figures heavily into the narrative – and supporting their recollections visually with renderings in sketch and watercolor. There is some live footage in the mix here, too, both in the studio and out on the road. But Family also periodically peels off to feature someone playing his part over the recording of a classic song. So you get Waddy Wachtel with his Les Paul, recreating his foundational, monumental chattering guitar line for Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen,” or Kunkel laying down the drums for King’s “It’s Too Late,” all buttressed with talking head tributes to the skills that made Kunkel, Waddy, Kootch, and Sklar invaluable to so many artists working at the time.

One producer interviewed describes the Immediate Family guys as the world’s best cover band, because all of their covers are hit songs they produced or co-wrote. But while they’ve played on all of these jams, and helped shape them creatively, none of them have ever longed for an individual spotlight. “I like the responsibility of playing the bass,” Sklar says. “You can be the guy in the back.” And for Wachtel, if was never about being the frontman. “You come up playing in bands, you figure you want your band to be the one that makes it.” What’s interesting about Immediate Family is seeing how they made their status as session players key to the success of whoever’s name was splashed across the cover art.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2020 Linda Ronstadt doc Sound of My Voice is a great compendium of the singer and songwriter’s legendary career, which intersected in numerous ways with the session guys profiled in Immediate Family. But additionally, this doc’s sizzling live footage might suggest the promise of movies that have yet to be made. If we were in charge, Johnny Flynn of Ripley fame would play Warren Zevon in a biopic. But Selena Gomez actually is playing Ronstadt in an upcoming film, and one look at the singer on stage in 1974, ripping through “You’re No Good” with a frizzed-out Wachtel on lead guitar, and all you want to know is who they’ll cast as Waddy to support Gomez’s Ronstadt.

Performance Worth Watching: “He’s not putting a saxophone there. Play the fucking tape – I know what should go there.” Robert “Waddy” Wachtel is the standout personality in Immediate Family, whether he’s talking about playing the eighth notes and, ultimately, the guitar solo on Steve Perry’s 1984 hit “Oh, Sherrie” or chopping it up in roundtable interviews with the other dudes in Immediate Family. 

Memorable Dialogue: “The thing about those guys is that they knew what to play, the right thing to play,” Linda Ronstadt says in a contemporary interview. It was an everybody wins moment, from her perspective as the singer and frontperson. “They knew how to play with each other, and they knew how to play with us.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing here, really. Immediate Family takes us back to eras like LA’s Laurel Canyon scene of the late 1960s, and rock acts rolling around the country on tour buses in the 1970s. So you know there was sex, skin, and everything else going on. But the closest this doc gets to acknowledging any of that is a brief quote from drummer Russ Kunkel over stock footage of someone rolling a joint. “There’s a period of time back in those days that – it’s a little foggy…” 

Our Take: Immediate Family is kind of a throwback to music documentaries of yore in that it relies heavily on cutaway testimonials to the power and professionalism of the people it profiles. Here’s Keith Richards saying how Waddy Wachtel was the only guy to call when it came time to record Richards’ 1988 solo album Talk is Cheap. Here’s Don Henley, crediting Danny Kortchmar with the guitar tones and synth-addled production that marked his post-Eagles solo work. And here’s Phil Collins with one of the ultimate tributes any musician can hear, that he would buy records just because Kortchmar, Wachtel, Sklar, or Kunkel were on it. And that’s a point solidified by one of Immediate Family’s most interesting music industry tidbits – even during the preceding Wrecking Crew era, there was no guarantee that session players’ names would even be listed in album’s credits. “I think the fact that they put our names on the album jackets had a profound effect on our careers,” Sklar says. A pro like Phil Collins seeking them out is one thing. But their album credits proved to regular everyday people, casual music listeners, that the same bunch of musicians were playing on albums across an aesthetic spectrum. The credit is nice, they all agree. But getting asked into a session, any session, that never gets old. Just consider the look that comes over Sklar’s face as he plays his bassline for Collins’ classic No Jacket Required single “Don’t Lose My Number.” It could be described as “serenely grooving.” Even now, he’s not doing it just for a paycheck.

Our Call: STREAM IT. For the old heads, Immediate Family can be a kind of memory lane experience, given all of the terrific music on which Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, Leland Sklar, and Russ Kunkel played. But the doc is also a kind of sonic rolodex, linking some of their greatest material to their long standing professional legacy.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.