By Bob MehrVisuals by Elizabeth Weinberg
Reporting from Santa Clarita, Calif.
Sept. 24, 2025
The first time Paul McCartney played the Beach Boys’ 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” he was struck by the grand ambition of the music as well the intricacies of tracks like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”
“And as I was a bass player,” McCartney noted in a recent interview, “I listened closely to the bass parts.”
Like most people, McCartney assumed the song’s melodically affecting rhythms were the work of Brian Wilson. “Then later I looked at the credits,” he said, “and I saw it wasn’t Brian on bass, it was this girl, Carol — Carol Kaye. That was quite a shock to me. I started looking into what else Carol played on, and she was on everything.”
A linchpin of the Los Angeles recording scene from the late 1950s through the ’70s, Kaye began her career as a jazz guitarist, before moving into the pop world and eventually onto the electric bass, appearing on thousands of songs, including hits for Simon and Garfunkel, Sonny and Cher, Barbra Streisand and Joe Cocker. Later, Kaye became a favorite in Hollywood, playing on classic film and TV themes — “Mission Impossible,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Brady Bunch” and “Kojak” — before going on to write the first serious instructional books on electric bass.
Kaye was finally recognized by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, and will be included in its 2025 class via its “musical excellence” category. She promptly announced she was rejecting the honor and would boycott the induction ceremony in November. Her decision flummoxed friends and fans who see her as a vital pioneer.
“Well, I don’t do things because other people want me to do them,” Kaye said pointedly. “I have to do things the way I see fit.”
On a late August afternoon, Kaye, 90, sat in the living room of her condo in a quaint retirement community in Santa Clarita, 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles. As big band music played softly in the background, Kaye, clad in tan slacks and a floral print shirt, offered her reasons for turning down the Rock Hall. “First off, I’m not a rocker, I’m a jazz musician,” she said. “And I’m not a soloist. I worked in the studio as part of a team.”
For Kaye, part of a loose collective of session players known as the Wrecking Crew (a moniker she detests), the issue may also be one of respect. The Rock Hall’s first class of “Sidemen” — which included her longtime colleague, the drummer Hal Blaine, and fellow ’60s bass star James Jamerson — were inducted in 2000.
Though she no longer plays, Kaye continues to reflect on her career, posting detailed stories on Facebook, an extension of an often fascinating if sometimes discursive self-published memoir from 2016 titled “Studio Musician.” A fiercely independent thinker, Kaye is also someone who — despite a hardscrabble childhood, bad marriages and the inherent sexism she faced in the music industry — refuses to cast herself as a victim.
“You don’t complain,” she said. “You do what you have to do to survive and take care of yourself and your family. That’s what I always did.”
BORN CAROL SMITH in Everett, Wash., Kaye was the third and much younger child of older parents, both musicians. The Smith home was filled with music but little affection. “My mom never hugged me, she never kissed me, but she played the piano,” Kaye recalled. “To me, the piano was love. Being surrounded by music all the time, it was inevitable I was going to play.”
The family struggled through the Depression and relocated to Southern California at the start of World War II as her father sought work in the defense industry. Her parents’ marriage was unhappy; Kaye’s father had returned from the first war with an opium addiction and grew violent. She and her mother eventually left, surviving on welfare and the money the 9-year-old Kaye made scrubbing floors. After a few years, Kaye’s mother saved $10 “in nickels and dimes and pennies” and bought her a lap guitar from a traveling salesman along with some lessons. Kaye, who was a lonely child with a pronounced stutter, flashed a natural talent on the instrument.
At 14, she met a respected guitar teacher named Horace Hatchett, who recognized her gift and got her a job in a nightclub band. They also had a relationship; Kaye was 16 when she became pregnant with Hatchett’s child. “I loved him so much because he taught me music,” she said. “I thought he’s going to marry me — but he was already married. Stupid me, I was naïve.”
Though Hatchett wanted her to give up the child for adoption, Kaye kept her daughter and moved to Arizona, where she met the big band musician Al Kaye. “I think he fell in love with me when he saw I could play guitar,” Kaye said. “He was much older than me, I was his fourth wife or something like that. But we got married when I turned 18.”
The Kayes settled in Hollywood, where she had a son before the couple split. In the late ’50s, Kaye worked as a typist by day; at night, she would gig in the city’s Black jazz clubs.
It was at one of these shows in 1957 that she was spotted by the A&R man Bumps Blackwell, who had produced Little Richard’s early hits. Blackwell hired Kaye for her first recording session, a studio date for a young Mississippi-born crooner named Sam Cooke, and new doors opened up. Though Kaye felt the often-simple pop records she played on were beneath her talents, she was suddenly making good money.
“I had two kids to take care of and I could give them what they needed,” she said. “So it was a practical decision. I didn’t know what it was going to turn into.”
The only woman among a group of all-male musicians, Kaye quickly learned how to handle herself in the studio. “If any of the guys wanted to insult me, fine. I would insult them back,” she said. “I just learned to out-cuss ’em.”
By the early ’60s, Kaye had remarried, to a businessman, and had a third child. Session work was steady enough for her to quit her day job — “but I wasn’t a top guitarist. I was probably third or fourth call.” In 1963, fate intervened during a session at Capitol Records when the bass player failed to show up. The producer asked Kaye if she could fill in.
“Carol was a talented guitarist, but there were a lot of guitarists around,” said Kent Hartman, the author of “The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret.” “She was such a skilled musician and had a natural affinity for the electric bass, that it just took off for her — she quickly became known as ‘the’ bass player.”
Kaye’s style — marked by her pick playing, muting technique, and incorporation of Latin influences — was unique, and she soon went from doing a few sessions a week on guitar to multiple sessions a day on bass, joining the ranks of first call players like Ray Pohlman and Joe Osborn.
Brian Wilson came to rely on Kaye to play his increasingly ambitious music, calling her “the best bassist in the world” in a 2008 documentary. “We had respect for each other,” Kaye said. “With Brian, it was different because it was such great music.”
McCartney took notice: “After hearing ‘Pet Sounds,’ I played around with that kind of thing on Sgt. Pepper,” he said, “where I was playing my Rickenbacker bass and with a pick. It was people like Carol and James Jamerson who turned me on to this melodic approach and I went to town — that really changed my style.”
Kaye hit her stride, proving adroit at creating memorable hooks in the studio, like the syncopated bass line for Sonny and Cher’s “The Beat Goes On,” or the descending opening riff to Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman.” “It wasn’t just Carol and the other musicians coming in and plunking out a part that was written for them,” Hartman said. “They contributed greatly to the sound of those records and what the songs became.”
Playing dozens of sessions a week at triple scale, at her peak Kaye earned $75,000 a year (roughly the equivalent of $670,000 today) and was fond of boasting that she “made more than the president.” But in 1969, she abruptly left what had become a rapidly changing pop business. Recording styles and technology were evolving, as a new generation of empowered artists, rather than producers, began calling the shots. Mostly, though, Kaye was feeling burned out.
“You didn’t know why you were so tired all the time,” she said, “and I realized I’d been going nonstop for 10 years.”
Kaye instead focused on less hectic film and television dates. (She was a favorite of Quincy Jones — who noted in his memoir that Kaye “could do anything and leave men in the dust.”) In 1970, she wrote the first of what would be a series of instructional books on electric bass playing and started her own publishing company. Those volumes would become important texts, with bassists like Sting making use of their lessons.
As the ’70s wore on, she finally returned to her first love, jazz, and married for the third and final time, briefly, to the drummer Spider Webb. “I figured I’m no good with men,” Kaye said. “I’m staying single the rest of my life.” But she remained devoted to her true love. “Music,” she said, ”was the one thing that had never let me down.”
IN THE ’90s, a nostalgia boom in the music business sparked by deep-dive boxed sets and the advent of the internet brought about a fuller understanding and proper appreciation for Kaye’s work.
Like Kaye, Kathy Valentine had been a guitarist before switching to bass and achieving pop success in the Go-Go’s. Finding information about Kaye online, “I became completely enamored of her,” Valentine said in an interview. “She was working as a musician at a time when most women were being homemakers and mothers — which she was too. Learning about her discography, I was blown away. Not just by the radio hits she played on, but the movie and television work, and her impact across pop culture.”
Over the next few decades, successive generations of female musicians would come to see Kaye as an inspiration, the Susan B. Anthony of session players. Photos from the ’60s of Kaye — with her platinum blond hair and shades — as the lone woman in a recording studio full of men became iconic. Kaye has tended to downplay her legacy as a “female musician.”
“I’m paraphrasing Carol,” Valentine said, “but she has a great quote where she says, ‘The note doesn’t care about gender. It’s either the right note or it’s the wrong note.’” McCartney said that Kaye simply considered herself a player, “but, still, it took someone to open the door — and she was the one.”
Even so, there is a certain segment of — mostly online — music fans who’ve been critical of Kaye, suggesting she’s taken credit for songs she didn’t play on, and casting her as crank for her vocal criticisms of the 2008 documentary “The Wrecking Crew.”
Kaye is unbothered. “When you get put on a pedestal, you better say the right things, or else you’re going to be known as nasty,” she said. “I get a bit of that. But I just tell people, listen, this is what happened. This is how I feel. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry.”
Kaye’s rejection of the Rock Hall won’t stop the organization from inducting her in absentia this fall, however. “Carol Kaye is one of the most influential musicians of all time, and we are thrilled to celebrate her,” said John Sykes, chairman of the Rock Hall Foundation.
The way Kaye sees it, it isn’t up to the Rock Hall to validate her career — and as far as the music goes, she doesn’t need anyone to tell her what she did, either.
“There’s no better joy than to play great music and to feel it,” she said. “When you really feel the music, you have an energy that you can’t believe. You can’t get it from booze, you can’t get it from drugs, you can’t get it anywhere else. Music has this incredible energy and that’s what I had, for a long time anyway.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/arts/music/carol-kaye-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame.html?smid=url-share
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