Insofar as having nine separate bone fractures and a half-exploded spleen has kept me from doing anything interesting outside lately, I’ve had to occupy myself doing random and/or previously-procrastinated tasks. One of those has been to watch the Yacht Rock web series. Viewed critically, the show fails on every possible level; however, as with the music “Yacht Rock” simultaneously parodies and celebrates, the point is simply to enjoy the product.
What is “Yacht Rock”? It’s the “smooth music” that arose in the post-hippie era from a variety of performers who shared a faintly amazing amount of professional overlap. Michael McDonald is the archetypical Yacht Rocker, appearing everywhere from Steely Dan’s early records to the rather bizarre “Yah Mo B There” with James Ingram and the “Sweet Freedom” movie track for the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines 1986 film, Running Scared. But the web of Yacht Rock encompasses everyone from the studio musicians who would eventually form “Toto” to Journey’s Steve Perry (who tracked “Don’t Fight It” with Kenny Loggins and correspondingly received an avalanche of cash). Christopher Cross, Steely Dan, and even the Eagles fall under the big tent as well. I’d argue for the inclusion of Dan Fogelberg as well, not to mention England Dan and John Ford Coley.
What defines Yacht Rock? I’d argue that perhaps the most important characteristic of Yacht Rock, and the wall that separates it from simple pop, is the complexity of the product both compositionally and in the actual production. Here again, McDonald is the archetype. I’ve been working on a guitar-and-voice version of “Minute By Minute” and I remain surprised at just how complicated some of this stuff is. “What A Fool Believes” is probably the high or low water mark, insofar as it’s almost impossible to play without a fairly large band and some not-quite-human attention paid to the chord structure and vocal lines.
Supposedly, the first thing Bob Dylan said to Simon and Garfunkel when he met them was, “You got any new chords? I’m all out of chords.” Michael McDonald never runs out of chords — nor did Becker and Fagen, who spent over a year in the studio making Aja. Most of the Yacht Rock was plainly composed on a piano. Guitar-based songwriters don’t come up with
Dm7 C/E F F#dim7 C/G G#dim7 Am G/B Am/C C#dim7 Dm C/E F13sus F#dim7 C/G G#dim7 Am G/B Am/C C#dim7 Dm C/E F13sus F#dim7 C/G G#dim7 Am G/B Am/C C#dim7 Dm7
which, by the way, is the opener to “Minute By Minute”. The fuckin’ Lumineers will go their entire careers without even considering something one-fifth as complex, trust me. Nor did Dylan ever get there; his gift was the ability to write brilliant songs that happened to be simple. If you listen to “Love and Theft”, it’s plain that Mr. Zimmerman did, in fact, run out of chords a long time ago — and equally plain that he hasn’t suffered as a result.
Even “Ride Like The Wind” by Christopher Cross doesn’t have a single open guitar chord in it, unless you count Abmaj9 which you could play as Amaj7 on a guitar tuned down a half step. I used to play a seriously dumbed-down version of “Deacon Blues” during my sandwich-shop acoustic performer days, and even the dumbed-down version required that I snag five or six minor-seventh and major-ninth chords in quick succession. It still wasn’t “right”; I was depending on the audience to hear the song in their heads and adjust, the same way Jake Shimabukuro relies on your mind to fill out the rest of “Bohemian Rhapsody” when he plays his ukelele take on it.
You can argue that Yacht Rock represented a rather bourgeois phenomenon — not in its listeners or the generally positive/sappy nature of the lyrics, but in the relentless raising of barriers of entry which it threatened to enforce on the rest of the music world. Michael McDonald was doing to pop what people like Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai later threatened to do to rock, namely make it so blankety-blank difficult that fewer people would try it. Who among us would want to meet Aja or Gaucho on even terms, just to break into the business?
As fate would have it, the Yacht Rockers did make it too difficult to follow in their footsteps, so the music industry switched directions and started feeding their adult audiences black pop and R&B mixed with “diva music” like Celine Dion et al. Ironically, the last new Yacht Rocker was probably Anita Baker, who knocked out five extremely dense and compositionally interesting records in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The difference between an Anita Baker record and the contemporaneous stuff from Whitney/Mariah/anyone else is like the difference between Aja and Boston.
Today, there’s no such thing as “adult rock”, unless you count the occasional vestigial-tail release like Sunken Condos. White audiences are served a heavy dose of alt-country pap, Black audiences get the grown-and-sexy bump-and-grind junk. It’s probably because post-Boomer thirtysomething demographics aren’t promising enough to target anything specifically to them, but consider this: the Yacht Rock listener of 1978 has been supplanted by the 34-year-old mom listening to Lady Antebellum. I don’t care how you slice it, that’s sad.
Luckily for me, it’s still possible to get all the great recordings from the Seventies and Eighties — and thanks to the amount of studio perfectionism displayed in their creation, most of them continue to hold up when listened to on modern sound systems. Can we recommend a few albums and wind it up? Yes we can.
- If That’s What It Takes, Michael McDonald
- Christopher Cross, Christopher Cross
- Aja, Gaucho, and Katy Lied, Steely Dan
- Minute By Minute, The Doobie Brothers
- Toto IV, Toto
- The Innocent Age, Dan Fogelberg
- Pat Metheny Group, Pat Metheny Group (the ECM “white album”)
Okay, that last one was a sneak. But it belongs. Take a listen, Yacht Rockers, and see if I’m not right.
I hope that my request to include “Glamour Profession” in my latest TTAC article has something to do with this posting. You’re really speaking my language here.
I didn’t know it was called Yacht Rock, but I guess I really love Yacht Rock. I have no idea how I even came across it…I think it had something to do with an article I read in 1997 that talked about hip hop producers repeatedly sampling “Black Cow” by Steely Dan. I went out and bought Aja and it was hook, line, and sinker.
The complex orchestration, jazzy chord progressions, and poetic/melancholic/snarky lyrics are exactly why I fell so hard. It sounds like nothing else, and is very much of it’s time and place in 70’s and 80’s America. The Gaucho record especially, infused as it is with Becker’s obsession with the cocaine lifestyle just screams mid-80’s LA. I love it.
Also, the recordings are just so damned GLASSY. I don’t know how many versions of Aja on all formats I have at this point, but that record has absolutely faultless production values. To say they hold up is an understatement - you need serious gear to really hear those recordings. They sound so much better in terms of dynamics and mixing than anything made today.
Damn, now there was an old curmudgeon statement! Also, Lady Antebellum totally sucksl
I still like “What a Fool Believes” but I generally don’t like yacht rock, love the term btw. I also generally don’t like music that is insanely overproduced. For example, “Bombs Over Baghdad” is a great song but if you listen to it on expensive headphones it sounds very different than if you hear it on the radio in your car.
Three chords and the truth >> all the overdubs in the world
The Dan, if I remember correctly, did not like the original release of Katy Lied, claiming that there was something screwy with the studio noise-reduction system, or something like that. I do know that my single of “Black Friday” sounded terrible, but then it was pressed on reclaimed emery boards or something.
Once upon a time, I set out to write a short story informed by the hard-luck story of “What a Fool Believes.” I got turned around, if not 180 degrees, certainly 120, by the time I’d reached ten thousand words.
Paul, my self-taught, musical-prodegy, keyboard-playing bandmate in high school, basically taught himself how to play and learned keyboard theory almost exclusively by woodshedding Michael McDonald. In the basement of Paul’s parents’ house, he crammed in an old upright piano, his Fender Rhodes and a Moog synth (all analog with a confusing array of knobs, very high tech at the time.) We spent many hours learning all the Doobie Brothers tunes (when I wasn’t busy trying to figure out Geddy Lee riffs at home).
As Michael McDonald’s biggest fan, Paul cut class when the band came to town. He jumped in his old Jeep Waggoneer, drove to the nicest hotel in town, went to the front desk and asked which room Michael McDonald was staying in. Being a different era, and in a small western city with almost no crime, the hotel clerk gave him the room number and Paul, carrying every McDonald album he owned, along with a black marker, headed up the elevator.
After a couple knocks on the door, Michael opened it, rubbed his eyes, having had his nap interrupted, and asked, “You got a car, kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go. I’m hungry. I’ll buy.”
So Paul and Michael went downstairs, climbed into the rusty old Jeep, and drove to Burger King. At lunch, Paul peppered his piano playing hero with a hundred questions.
“What’s the fifth chord in the progression you play in the second chorus…”
“How are you voicing this chord on…”
Michael stopped him. “You got a piano we can play?”
Back in the Jeep to the cramped basement, where Paul and Michael spent the afternoon playing Doobie tunes and refining some of Paul’s original pieces. An impromptu master class.
“Hey, what time is it? I gotta get back and take a shower — I got a gig tonight.”
So Paul drove Michael back to the hotel, went back upstairs and retrieved his signed albums, and received a gift.
“Want some backstage passes? Here, bring your friends and meet us after the show.”
And so it was my phone rang after school, with a breathless Paul explaining how we were going to meet Michael McDonald that very night.
A very, very cool dude, Michael.
As for Anita Baker’s very complex and tasty early records, I got two words: Marcus. Miller.
ha, what an awesome story!! Hearse, that is too cool
ps I vote The Captain and Tennille to yacht rock status, as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6UrAroBHsM
c/o Neil Sedaka
You lost me at “fails on all possible levels” come on the Yacht Rock series is hilarious! Any series that coins the term “California vagina sailor” and spins fake tales about “Rosanna” is a winner in my book.
I still like the Yacht Rock my dad was a bit of a fan which was odd since he is such a “already heard that and tired of it” kinda musician. I guess many of those guys were pretty accomplished.
For sure it’s funny, I just meant that it’s soooooo half-assedly done. 🙂
Dear Jack,
Great piece.
HOWEVER, there is one obvious omission, and one regrettable but non-obvious omission.
The obvious omission is Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark,” which I think is on balance a more rewarding album overall than “Aja.”
“Aja” ‘s reputation IMHO (I am a professional music critic FWIW & YMMV), is based 90% upon the near-perfection of Side A; there is little in the Rock Era (apart from “Court and Spark”) that can compare with the detached omniscience of the title track “Aja.” But Side B is a letdown. Scattershot.
So, “Court and Spark” belongs on the list, not only for the intelligence and fearlessness of the songs, but, its instrumental sidemen can stand toe-to-toe with the entire “Aja” batallion.
The regrettable, non-remembered omission? Michael Franks’ “Sleeping Gypsy.”
Songs nearly as fearless and intelligent as Mitchell’s, with a measure of fey ironic wordplay foreign to her-which people can love, or not get.
But everyone should hear the song “In the Eye of the Storm,” which includes a deathless couplet fully worthy of Cole Porter:
“I hear from my ex-
On the back of my checks…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px7rD9Y3kic
And, there is a substantial overlap with the personnel from “Court and Spark.” And the recorded sound is perhaps even better than either “Aja”‘s or “Court and Spark” ‘s.
And Amen on Anita Baker.
ATB,
Johnny Puddles
My brother, a veteran of FM broadcast radio, favours the term Condo Rock for those too landlocked for yachting.
As previously mentioned in this forum I saw Michael McDonald / Donald Fagan / Boz Scaggs playing three hours of their favorite tunes in 2012. While mostly a half-generation removed from my timeline it was still an experience to take to the grave.
And I must agree on Yah Mo B There. It was like an ode to the Moonies or something.
But I admit to owning the genuine WB sheet music for Ride Like The Wind and anyone who can play it will be my hero for the day.
Although no mention of the man can be complete without a few youtube moments of Rick Moranis’ splendid tribute.
Hi Jack,
sorry to hijack, but I cannot comment on your older articles. Anyways, I note the melodyburner.com site is down. What gives?
And PS Keep up the writing, I do like your thoughts and musings indeed. Best of luck with your recovery.
Thanks for the heads-up! The domain expired while I was in the hospital.
Given that we have a MelodyBurner at the NAMM show (in the Dunlop booth) this was a bad time for that.
I owe you on in a big way!
Hey no worries, good to see the site back up. Will the melodybird get a pricelist anytime soon? I could be receptive to a good deal on one of those! Prettiest guitar ever.
Pricing and options are here:
http://www.melodyburner.com/?p=18
Drop me a line any time you want to talk. We have one prototype left if you want to save a buck or two, for sure.
You’ll consider this blasphemous, but I tried… I mean, really tried…. To listen to Aja. I found it boring as hell and completely soulless, and most yacht rock just about as bad. Yes, it’s remarkably slick and complex, but that, to me, is the problem. If I want that, I’ll listen to jazz. Give me humbuckers through a Marshall stack and a healthy helping of attitude with some fun over that stuff any day … 🙂
Oh, this was tough to read! But I forgive you. 🙂
Not that I am agreeing with you, but…
One of the most knowledgeable classical-music listeners I know, after watching a video in which Donald Fagan and Warren Bernhardt discuss the various genre influences and music-theory aspects (e.g., plagal cadences) of “Peg,” from Aja, observed:
“I’ve always thought of Aja as stiff and contrived, and now I know why.”
Please give a listen to the Michael Franks track I cite above; I expect you might find it more genuine.
ATB,
Johnny P.
One of the exercises I performed as a learning musician was to teach myself a piece until I could play it as perfectly as possible. Measure-by-measure repetition. Then woodshedding along with a professionally recorded song start-to-finish until I felt I had it down dead-nuts.
Next, I’d mic my instrument and tape myself separately from the song I was accompanying. Later, I’d play my part back, sans the rest of the song. There I was, naked and alone. All imperfections unveiled.
This is how I’d sound in the recording studio if I were the bassist on Takin’ it to the Streets.
Ugh. (Every misfret, any fumbled lick, even the slightest off-time attack is revealed.)
Of course, the studio can clean up a certain amount of messiness. Understand, however, that the incredible precision of the artists on Aja or any other Yacht Rock album is mindblowingly exact. Tight doesn’t begin to cover it.
One may lament the lack of Johnny Rotten-esque musical rage and pandemonium, but that’s to miss the point. Yacht Rock is simply the art form of pop-rock arranged, produced, and played at the highest possible human level.
I caught Michael McDonald and his band last year in a small venue. Even live, the dead-nuts accuracy and musical maturity and refinement was so good I had to remind myself to breathe. Every player had 1000-horsepower chops, held back and in control with parts that exactly served each song with taste and sensitivity. Egoless. Every player understanding that space is indeed a note (or as Miles Davis would rant to the many young musicians he’d recruit to be in his bands, “Shut the fuck up. Leave room for the song to get through.”)
For me Yacht Rock is soul without histrionics. It’s musical excellence without the cloak of stomp-box distortion.
Thanks to Jack, this is the first time I’d ever heard of this genre described as Yacht Rock. I kinda dig the term, though.