My Career in Five Songs
EVERY SO OFTEN — and, actually, more often than not — Larry Carlton will be out and about and he’ll hear… Larry Carlton. “I’ll be at the supermarket with my daughter, or maybe we’ll be at a shopping mall, and I’ll hear a song and go, ‘Oh, yeah. I played on that.’ It’s always a funny kind of feeling, but it’s nice, too, especially when the song sounds fresh.”
During the 1970s and into the ’80s, Carlton distinguished himself as one of the undisputed kings of the West Coast studio session scene. “I was the newcomer in town just as a lot of the Wrecking Crew players were moving on to other things,” he recalls. “I worked with a lot of them at the start of my career, but I never became part of the fold.”
In his time as a studio guitarist, Carlton logged 15 and sometimes 20 sessions a week, appearing on records by the likes of Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Herb Alpert, Andy Williams, the Fifth Dimension, Linda Ronstadt — even the Partridge Family.
