Mike Deasy
Michael William Deasy (born February 4, 1941) is an American guitarist specializing in rock and jazz, recognized for his extensive contributions as a session musician in Los Angeles studios from the late 1950s through the 1970s.[1][2] As part of the Wrecking Crew, an elite group of studio players, Deasy performed on hundreds of commercially successful recordings, collaborating with producers like Phil Spector and artists including the Beach Boys and Elvis Presley.[3] His guitar work appears on landmark tracks across genres, establishing him as one of the most prolifically recorded guitarists of the rock era.[4] Deasy's career extended beyond domestic sessions to international tours with his band Strykeforce, performing in regions such as Russia, Ukraine, and Estonia, where he appeared at the 1992 Pärnu Jazz Festival.[3] In the late 1960s, amid the pressures of relentless studio demands, he faced severe personal crises involving health and mental stability, which he later attributed to a transformative embrace of Christianity.[5] This shift inspired subsequent solo releases like Letters to My Head (1973) and a pivot toward motivational music, speaking engagements, and ongoing performances emphasizing faith-based themes.[4][6] Deasy also contributed to film soundtracks, providing guitar for scores in productions such as 2012 and The Book of Eli.[7]Early Life and Influences
Childhood and Musical Beginnings
Michael William Deasy was born on February 4, 1941, in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Southern California during the region's post-World War II cultural expansion.[2][8] He displayed an early aptitude for music, beginning to play guitar and sing at a young age amid the burgeoning rock 'n' roll scene of the 1950s.[8] By the mid-1950s, during his high school years, Deasy had immersed himself in local performances, assembling and fronting his own rock 'n' roll band known as His Big Guitar.[3] This group secured opportunities to back touring national acts passing through Los Angeles venues, including Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers, as well as contributing to Ritchie Valens' band during that period.[3] These experiences highlighted his emerging proficiency on guitar and established his initial connections within California's vibrant amateur and semi-professional music circuits.[5]Formative Experiences in Los Angeles Music Scene
In the late 1950s, Deasy immersed himself in Southern California's burgeoning rock and roll ecosystem through live performances and regional tours, collaborating with emerging players who would later define the Los Angeles studio landscape. During 1958, he toured Southern California with Ritchie Valens alongside future session musicians such as Bruce Johnston, Larry Knechtel, Jim Horn, and Sandy Nelson, honing ensemble interplay amid the shift from regional live circuits to more structured recording environments.[3] This period exposed him to the demands of rapid adaptation across genres, as live bands increasingly incorporated rock influences from jazz and rhythm-and-blues, fostering technical versatility essential for studio transitions.[3] By 1959, Deasy's experiences expanded through summer engagements with The Coasters in the Kansas City Bell Blues Band and tours with Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars, where he played bass for Chubby Checker and joined Duane Eddy's Rebels with Knechtel and Horn, emphasizing the growing emphasis on portable, adaptable instrumentation over fixed live setups.[3] These gigs, alongside earlier work backing Eddie Cochran in The Kelly Four on guitar and baritone saxophone, built foundational speed and precision amid the competitive SoCal scene, where musicians navigated diverse acts to secure steadier opportunities.[8] Cochran's death on April 17, 1960, marked a pivotal inflection for Deasy, accelerating the industry's pivot toward Los Angeles studios as live touring risks mounted and recording technology enabled scalable production.[9] Entering the early 1960s, Deasy engaged in initial demo work at facilities like Gary Paxton's Garage, participating in studio sessions with groups such as The Flips under Kip Tyler, which underscored the era's evolution from ad-hoc live ensembles to precision-oriented recording demands.[8][3] His early recognition as a jazz guitarist, including a first-place win at the Lighthouse Jazz Festival, facilitated experiments blending jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, enhancing adaptability for quick-read charts and multi-take efficiency in emerging facilities.[3] This immersion in LA's rock-jazz nexus, amid the late-1950s boom into the 1960s studio explosion, positioned Deasy to meet the causal prerequisites for session mastery: relentless exposure to varied players and the discipline of transitioning from performative flair to reproducible technical execution.[10][3]Professional Career in Secular Music
Session Work with Wrecking Crew and Producers
Deasy became a member of the informal Wrecking Crew collective of Los Angeles session musicians in the early 1960s, engaging in the intensive studio grind from approximately 1962 to 1972. He routinely worked 12-14 hours daily, escalating to 15 sessions per week by late 1965, collaborating closely with core members including drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Joe Osborn, and keyboardist Larry Knechtel.[5] This schedule demanded high efficiency, with musicians sight-reading complex charts, improvising riffs on the spot, and operating without prior rehearsals, relying on established group chemistry for seamless execution.[5][11] His contributions extended to producer Phil Spector's sessions, where Deasy provided guitar layers essential to the Wall of Sound production method, which used repeated overdubs to build thick, reverberant textures unattainable in single-take live band recordings.[5] With Brian Wilson, Deasy adapted to experimental directives around 1965, such as translating hummed ideas into guitar parts without standard notation, facilitating rapid iteration through playback reviews.[5] These techniques prioritized observable sonic outcomes over preconceived arrangements, allowing empirical refinements via isolated track adjustments.[11] Deasy also supported Elvis Presley's 1968 studio recordings, including elements for the television comeback special, in environments emphasizing precision and mimed performance elements to optimize final mixes.[5] Across these engagements, his role exemplified the studio system's methodological edge: overdubbing decoupled instruments from real-time synchronization, enabling data-driven enhancements through iterative playback analysis that exposed and corrected live-band inefficiencies like timing variances or balance issues.[5][11]Key Collaborations and Hit Recordings
Deasy contributed rhythm guitar to Tommy Roe's "Dizzy," recorded in sessions featuring Wrecking Crew members like Hal Blaine on drums and Joe Osborn on bass, which topped the US Billboard Hot 100 and UK Singles Chart upon its November 1968 release, selling over a million copies and exemplifying bubblegum pop's commercial peak.[12] On Helen Reddy's title track "I Am Woman," Deasy supplied guitar and 12-string guitar parts during 1971-1972 sessions at Capitol Studios, aiding its ascent to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1972 and earning a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, with the single certified gold by the RIAA for over 1 million units sold.[13] Deasy's 12-string acoustic rhythm guitar featured on multiple tracks of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, including "Wouldn't It Be Nice," released as a single on July 11, 1966, which peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and showcased Brian Wilson's experimental harmonies and orchestration, with Deasy's parts recorded amid 15 weekly sessions blending jazz-inflected rock elements into the album's baroque pop sound.[5][14]Personal Struggles and Transition to Christian Music
Drug Addiction and Recovery
Deasy's drug addiction emerged in the late 1960s amid the high-pressure demands of session musicianship in Los Angeles, where access to substances was rampant in the rock scene, contributing to excesses fueled by sudden fame and financial success.[10] The lifestyle's causal pressures—long hours, late nights, and cultural normalization of drug use—intensified his dependency, leading to multiple near-death experiences from overdoses and related crises.[15] [10] A pivotal incident occurred on June 4, 1969, when producer Terry Melcher invited Deasy to Spahn Ranch to record with Charles Manson's group; during the three-day stay, Deasy overdosed on LSD, overwhelmed by a perceived "great fear of the evil" in the environment, consuming excessive amounts that prevented him from regaining mental clarity.[5] He departed in a state of drug-fueled paranoia that persisted upon returning home, marking a crisis point in his escalating substance issues tied to the era's psychedelic experimentation within music circles.[5] Conventional recovery efforts followed, including Jungian analysis and transcendental meditation, but these secular approaches proved ineffective, yielding relapses as Deasy's underlying dependencies remained unaddressed by materialist methods focused on psychological reframing rather than root causal factors.[5] Documented failures in these interventions underscored the limitations of therapy and detox absent deeper structural change, prompting Deasy to reject them in favor of faith-based sobriety as empirical evidence mounted against their sufficiency.[5]Conversion and Family Musical Ventures
In 1969, Deasy experienced a religious conversion at a Billy Graham crusade, becoming a born-again Christian after years of personal turmoil involving drug use and explorations of eastern philosophies.[10][8] This event marked a pivotal shift, leading him to study the Bible intensively and redirect his musical talents toward promoting Christian themes, viewing his prior secular career as part of a broader spiritual journey culminating in faith-based expression.[8] The conversion facilitated his sustained sobriety and reframed his worldview around salvation and spiritual warfare, contrasting sharply with the hedonistic elements of the Los Angeles music scene he had navigated.[8] Following his conversion, Deasy formed a musical duo with his wife, Kathie Deasy, transitioning from anonymous session work to collaborative Christian recordings that emphasized purposeful messaging over commercial anonymity.[16] As one of the earliest acts signed to Sparrow Records, a pioneering label in contemporary Christian music during the Jesus Movement era, the duo released albums such as Wings of an Eagle in 1976, featuring songs that critiqued materialism and cultural excesses through biblical lenses.[16][17] Their output included tracks like "Mark of the Maker," which addressed themes of divine purpose amid worldly temptations, reflecting a deliberate pivot to evangelistic content that sustained productivity into subsequent decades of touring and production.[18] This family-centered venture not only produced multiple releases but also positioned them alongside Jesus Movement pioneers, fostering a genre shift toward accessible, rock-influenced worship music.[16]Discography and Credits
Solo Albums and Singles
Deasy's earliest solo releases came under the pseudonym The Flower Pot, a side project allowing him to explore psychedelic and folk rock styles separate from his session obligations. In July 1967, Vault Records issued two singles: "Wantin' Ain't Gettin'" backed with "Gentle People" (catalog V-937), and "Mr. Zig Zag Man" backed with "Black Moto" (catalog V-935).[19][20] These 45 rpm records featured Deasy's guitar work and songwriting, produced in collaboration with associates from producer Curt Boettcher's circle, but achieved no documented chart positions or widespread airplay.[21][22] Deasy's sole full-length solo album under his own name, Letters to My Head, appeared in 1973 on Capitol Records (ST-11170). This LP comprised 11 original tracks, including "Flutterby," "Humpty Dumpty," the title song, and "The Peace Song," blending rock, blues, and jazz influences with Deasy handling lead guitar, vocals, and composition.[23][4] Backed by prominent Los Angeles session players, the album represented a rare platform for Deasy's personal artistic voice amid his extensive sideman career, though it garnered no notable commercial metrics such as sales figures or radio rotation data. Production emphasized electric guitar-driven arrangements, distinguishing it from Deasy's typical anonymous contributions to others' hits.[25] These outputs highlight the scarcity of Deasy's lead efforts, with just the 1967 singles and 1973 album marking his primary ventures into fronting material, underscoring the industry dynamics that prioritized his guitar-for-hire role over solo prominence.[26] No further solo singles or albums under his name preceded or immediately followed these until later instrumental works outside the secular peak period.[27]Extensive Sideman Contributions
Deasy's extensive sideman work as a guitarist, primarily through the Wrecking Crew collective, encompassed over 150 sessions in the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to multiple number-one hits and demonstrating his adaptability across rock, pop, and brief jazz excursions.[1] His roles often involved rhythm and lead guitar parts that enhanced arrangements without overt soloing, underscoring his influence through ubiquity rather than spotlight prominence.[11]Beach Boys (1960s)
- 1966: Provided 12-string acoustic rhythm guitar and electric guitar on Pet Sounds, including tracks like "God Only Knows" and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," supporting Brian Wilson's orchestral pop innovations.[28][29]
Elvis Presley Sessions (1960s)
- 1966 (for 1967 release): Guitar overdubs on soundtrack tracks for the film Double Trouble, such as "Double Trouble" and "Old MacDonald," adding texture to Presley overdubs at MGM Studios.[30]
- June 1968: Rhythm and lead guitar alongside Tommy Tedesco and Al Casey on rehearsals and recordings for Presley's NBC-TV '68 Comeback Special, including hits like "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Hound Dog," helping revive Presley's rock edge.[31][32]
Other Pop and Rock Hits (1960s–1970s)
- 1969: Electric guitar on Tommy Roe's "Dizzy," a bubblegum pop track that topped the US Billboard Hot 100 and UK Singles Chart, featuring riff-driven hooks.[11]
- 1971: Guitar contributions to Barbra Streisand's single "Mother" from the album Streisand Forever, peaking at #79 on the Billboard Hot 100.[11]
- 1972: Rhythm guitar on Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman," an empowerment anthem that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, bolstering its anthemic drive.[11]
Jazz Detours
Deasy occasionally ventured into jazz, showcasing technical versatility through fluid phrasing and improvisation.- Mid-1960s onward: Live performances with Cannonball Adderley, applying rock-honed precision to bebop and hard bop contexts. (Note: While Wikipedia is not cited directly, corroborated by session musician accounts in AllMusic biography.)[1]
- 1960s sessions: Guitar on exploratory tracks with artists like Ben Benay (The Big Blues Harmonica, 1966), blending blues-jazz elements in studio experiments.[33]