If you're headed to Long's Park tonight to check out Danny Kortchmar and his band, you'll probably hear songs from the likes of Jackson Browne, Don Henley, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and James Taylor.

But unless you're the kind of person who reads the liner notes of records — or the kind who actually remembers what records are — you might not know Kortchmar, the guy with the salt-and-pepper hair playing the Telecaster, wrote or co-wrote all of them.

"We do everything from 'Machine Gun Kelly' off of the third James Taylor record to songs I wrote just last year," Kortchmar said in a telephone interview from his New York City home.

A seasoned guitarist, songwriter and producer, Kortchmar helped to create the sound that made singer-songwriters of the 1970s like Taylor, Browne and Carole King into stars.

Kortchmar joined up with bassist Leland Sklar, drummer Russ Kunkel and, later, keyboardist Craig Doerge, informally dubbing themselves the Section. They went on to become one of the most prolific in-studio and onstage backing groups in pop music history.

Just last year, they reunited as part of an all-star band that backed Taylor and King on the hugely successful Troubadour Reunion Tour that celebrated more than 40 years of working together.

"That tour was the greatest six months I have ever spent playing music. That was the highlight of my life," Kortchmar said. "Every night James would introduce us and say the reason the shows had the authentic sound of the original recordings was because we were all there."

But this summer, "Kootch," as he is known to friends, is revisiting some of the songs he's written over the years in hopes of recording them himself for the first time later this year.

When his career first took off, sidemen were not generally well-known. "I haven't played nearly as many sessions as Tommy Tedesco did," he recalled.

Don't know who Tedesco was? Precisely the point.

For Kortchmar, it was different.

"We were playing a very specific kind of music that was very successful," he said of those early albums. "At right around the same time was when they began putting the names of session players on the album jackets. That meant I started getting more calls for other sessions."

Kortchmar played on every James Taylor album of the 1970s, as well as all of Carole King's records of the same decade, including her landmark "Tapestry," arguably the pre-eminent album of the singer-songwriter era.

But his connection to the two songwriters goes back even further than that. He had summered on Martha's Vineyard with Taylor as a teen.

"We spent our time listening to jazz, folk music, R&B. It was a really fertile time for music." He played in unsuccessful combos with both Taylor (The Flying Machine) and King (The City), but really developed his chops in recording sessions for King's songwriting demos. "She's an incredible arranger and taught me a lot."

By the turn of the decade, all three found themselves in Los Angeles just as singer-songwriters and country-rockers were pulling back from the psychedelic excesses of the 1960s, in effect asking "what now?"

The Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood, Calif., where future luminaries such as the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, J.D. Souther, Joni Mitchell, Elton John and Randy Newman got their first notices, was their home base.

Building on the sounds of soulful guitarists like Steve Cropper and Cornell Dupree, Kortchmar simply found himself in the right place, knowing talented people. "I was just following what was happening."

And by the time he got going, he couldn't get enough. "I just wanted to be in the studio all day, everyday, and make something really happen. I never wanted to just go in to a studio, play a chart and get out. It's like my friend [drummer] Steve Jordan says, 'I don't want a gig. I want an event!'"

In between sessions and tours with Taylor, Browne and King were dates for Linda Ronstadt, David Crosby and Graham Nash, Stevie Nicks, Karla Bonoff, Eric Carmen, Bob Seger, Bonnie Raitt and Warren Zevon. Throughout, his role was the same, no matter what kind of music. "My job as a sideman is to make that person comfortable."

Despite their popularity, the singer-songwriters soon found their work being criticized as being self-absorbed, even narcissistic. Kortchmar and the other players were their accomplices, tagged "the mellow mafia."

To this day, that barb riles Kortchmar.

"Listen to a song like 'Fire and Rain.' That's a song about drug addiction and suicide. There is nothing mellow about that. Jackson Browne sang about betrayal and loss. Again, nothing mellow about what he did. Songs like 'Rocky Mountain High' or 'Gentle on My Mind,' those are mellow."

In the 1980s, Kortchmar was instrumental in helping both Browne and Henley transition into the new decade. He co-wrote the hits "Somebody's Baby" and "Tender is the Night" for Browne, and wrote or co-wrote many of Henley's hits, including "Dirty Laundry," "All She Wants to Do is Dance," "Not Enough Love in the World," "New York Minute" and "Sunset Grill." By then he was co-producing for Henley as well.

Later he helmed the boards on records by Dada, Cowboy Mouth, Spin Doctors, Hanson and Billy Joel. He produced Neil Young's much-maligned "Landing on Water," but still stands behind it.

And all the while he was touring.

In recent years, Kortchmar has formed his own band called Slo Leak, which centers on blues and soul riffs but makes concessions to modern electronic beats. It's a bit ironic, considering how much Kootch dislikes the recent proliferation of home recording technology and programs like ProTools and Ableton. But given his history, he hates record labels almost as much.

"Anything that takes music out of the hands of corporations and major labels and back into the hands of people is in the end a good thing." But as a result, players like Kortchmar have seen a shift in the demand for their work.

"Lee [Sklar] tells me more and more of his dates consist of sitting in someone's bedroom overdubbing the bass part because some guy in an indie band can't play," he said. "There is a lot of fixing going on out there."

Kortchmar prefers it the old-school way.

"There is nothing like a bunch of cats in a studio with a talented engineer making music," Kortchmar said. "There is more pride in it. And because it's the real deal, nothing else sounds like it."

Danny Kortchmar will perform at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, July 24, at the Long's Park, on Harrisburg Pike, east of the Route 30 interchange. For more information, visit longspark.org.