The Real Birth of Yacht Rock

That’s Three Dog Night performing for The Spirit of America Spectacular on July 5th, 1981. I say that’s the real birth of Yacht Rock.

Of course “Yacht Rock” was a web series, a kind of unmoored cable TV show starting in 2005. No one knows who first used the term, but that made it popular. The original musical term for mostly saccharine, overproduced, mellow music was soft rock, or the California Sound, or maybe adult-oriented rock (AOR). Music critics mostly use yacht rock as a pejorative, but that’s falling by the wayside more and more. It might be because people like it more than they like critics, so critics find ways to like it publicly and hate it in private.

This concert was part of The Spirit of America Spectacular, a nationally televised and radio broadcasted patriotic extravaganza. America used to have more than mostly peaceful arsonists roaming the land. Some people used to like it here. George Bush the elder was VP back then, and even sent in a telegram to express his approval. It’s a good format for messages from George. You could never tell what that guy was saying just by listening to him.

Anyway, that’s the permanently docked Queen Mary in Long Beach in the background, and about eleventy-zillion yachts. The lineup was The Beach Boys, Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise.

Now according to the intertunnel, the key nodule of Yacht Rock is something like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto, and Ambrosia. I’m at a loss to explain how anyone could think Christopher Cross and Steely Dan have anything in common.  When you get caught between the moon and New York City vs. I crawl like a viper through the suburban streets. If you think Don’t Take Me Alive is comparable to the theme from Arthur, there’s no hope for you. But I do get the drift.

Let’s run it down my idea of Yacht Rock’s adumbration. In 1981, the Beach Boys had long since morphed into the Beach Men. They were wandering aimlessly in the soft rock wilderness, until they ran aground with Kokomo, a song that makes Jimmy Buffet look like the Sex Pistols. I say they’re exhibit A in Yacht Rock pantheon.

I’ve got no beef with Three Dog Night. They can all sing and play their instruments. Shambala was a damn fine song. But they eventually hooked up with Paul Williams to write songs for them. He also wrote songs for the Carpenters, Streisand, Helen Reddy, and egad, The Sandpipers.  If your yacht was big enough to have an elevator in it, he was your man. They belong.

Next. Rick Springfield is rock music for girls, I guess. I could never tell him and Bryan Adams apart, so I’m not the guy to judge his total Sloop John B-ishness. We don’t need him, anyway, to prove our point. Because the last band on the docket, and the dock, was Pablo Cruise:

Case closed. July 5th, 1981. It’s the real birth of Yacht Rock. Fight me.

Footsteps Echo on the Stone

Grace Jones was so overwhelmingly strange and exotic that I think she ceased being characterized as human. She became kinda interstellar. She made Sade look like Annette Funicello by comparison. Way back in the ’80s, she was mildly obscure, but ubiquitous, if that’s possible. I guess her exposure reached a high water mark with Libertango (I’ve Seen This Face Before). I’ll bet it sound plenty familiar to you:

Like many songs, the vampiric movie industry used that ditty for atmospherics in several notable films. When Scorsese, who is unexcelled at picking pop music to adorn his films, needed a weird, otherworldly vibe for Griffin Dunne’s descent into the madness that is nighttime New York City in After Hours, he cued Grace up.

Speaking of vampires, I think the song is prominent in that weird David Bowie Lugosi movie, The Hunger, too. If you were into Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, or at least their stunt doubles, rolling around in their undies on a four poster, Tony Scott had you covered. The internet informs me that it was on the Miami Vice teevee show as well. I can’t say. I never planned on living to be four thousand years old, so I never had the time to watch that show.

But hey, I’ve actually seen the actual originator of that actual song, Astor Piazzolla, perform that actual song right in front of me. In Boston, actually. It’s a humdinger.

I’ve never understood how button accordions function. I’ve played things (badly) with keys and frets and soundholes and slides, and stuff that you beat with sticks. But that squeeze box thing is a dark and bloody mystery.

[Update: Many thanks to Gerry for his ongoing, generous support of this site through the Ko-Fi button. It’s greatly appreciated]

I Have a Nagging Suspicion It Was Tomorrow Yesterday

In my experience, artists, in the few times they’re right about stuff, always seem to be right for the wrong reasons. Their intellectual house is furnished in odd ways, which helps them to see things differently than other folks. Because the intellectual furniture is in weird places, they tend to stumble over things other people pass by without noticing.

So they figure out the what where others miss it, but the how and why totally escapes them. It’s probably because they use the same, weird logic they use to achieve their strangeness to instruct others how to be normal. The leader of World Party was right-handed, but turned a right-handed guitar upside down and played it lefthanded. Outre approaches like that lead to interesting results, but they’re not likely to be of much use at someplace mundane like the water department.

Then again, this is a downright sensible sentiment to deal with the Ship of Fools problem:

So the world might indeed end tomorrow. But Ship of Fools was recorded in 1986, and it hasn’t yet. Its composer Karl Edmond De Vere Wallinger died last March.

It reminds me of something an economist once said. “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

David Sanborn R.I.P.

Well, David Sanborn won’t be down for breakfast. He died of cancer a couple of days ago. He was an interesting, and very influential musician. Even if you don’t know his name, you’d recognize his saxophone playing on any number of pop, R&B, and jazz recordings. Like this one:

Sanborn was playing for money with Albert King when he was only fourteen years old. He did lots of session work, anonymous except for other musicians. For about twenty years after Young Americans, everybody making a record wanted someone who sounded like David Sanborn. In many cases, the quickest way to get someone who sounded like David Sanborn was to simply get David Sanborn. Here’s an in incomplete list of sessions from the Wikiup:

James Brown, Bryan Ferry, Michael Stanley, Eric Clapton, Bobby Charles, Cat Stevens, Roger Daltrey, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Jaco Pastorius, the Brecker Brothers, Michael Franks, Kenny Loggins, Casiopea, Players Association, David Bowie, Todd Rundgren, Bruce Springsteen, Little Feat, Tommy Bolin, Bob James, James Taylor, Al Jarreau, Pure Prairie League, Kenny G, Loudon Wainwright III, George Benson, Joe Beck, Donny Hathaway, Elton John, Gil Evans, Carly Simon, Guru, Linda Ronstadt, Billy Joel, Kenny Garrett, Roger Waters, Steely Dan, Ween, the Eagles, Grateful Dead, Nena, Hikaru Utada, The Rolling Stones, Ian Hunter, and Toto.

I remember him very kindly. I was a working musician in the late 1980s, and I was often awake at odd hours. Or more accurately, I was rarely asleep. Sanborn was the co-host and house band impresario of an after hours teevee show called Night Music that was about the only show I’d ever watch. The show was always jam-packed with interesting, often offbeat musicians, and sometimes assembled in unusual groupings. They had Conway Twitty, Miles Davis, and everybody in between.

Eclectic? How’s this for one night’s lineup: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Pharoah Sanders, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, The Platters on video tape from 1955, Van Dyke Parks, and Maria McKee. That’s out there, man.

Speaking of crosstown traffic and six degrees of separation, Stevie Ray Vaughn was friends with Albert King, who was friends with David Sanborn. Stevie also played on a David Bowie record. The music world is like that, sometimes. I remember Stevie doing that interstellar take on Albert King’s playing style when the show was first broadcast.

Sanborn got a rep as a smooth jazz dude, but he didn’t like it. He was good at it, but he was good at everything. He didn’t like the pigeonhole. He had plenty of heavy jazz dudes on the show, and he held his own with all of them, include guys like Wayne Shorter.

Sanborn had a serious bout of polio when he was a kid. One of his arms was kind of withered, and he had trouble breathing properly. A doctor suggested that he should take up a wind instrument, instead of playing the piano, to build up his lungs.

I ain’t no doctor, but I think it helped.

It’s a Groove Thang

Back in the ’80s, I used to play in blues and R&B bands, at least until I got tired of making no money. I surrendered to the zeitgeist, and started playing whitebread pop covers soon after. Happy Hour shite. I was instantly swimming in money and free beer and chicks, of course, but I still can’t hear three or four bars of a Beach Boys song without breaking out in hives. I specified three or four bars because that’s all I ever hear, before I plunge whatever’s making Beach Boys noises into the nearest tub full of water. This has led to problems when it’s a live band. Whatever. They all have it coming.

Da blues was really popular in the ’80s. Well, sorta. There was a lot of it, performed mostly in front of next to nobody. In the bar band world, the dividing line between straight blues and R&B was pretty much erased. I played electric bass, so I actually had something to occupy myself during R&B songs. The grooves were heavy on bass and drums.

We used to mine a weird little store that sold ’45 records used to load jukeboxes. It was cheaper to buy singles than whole albums when all you needed was an individual, audience-recognizable track. The original records were twenty or thirty years old already, and sometimes hard to lay your hands on back then. We were in cover bands, so we never played anything obscure, so the juke box guy always had what we were looking for.

This, I believe, is the granddaddy of all R&B groove thangs from that milieu. The Rosetta Stone of the genre. Junior Walker:

That’s James Jamerson playing the bass on the record. He’s in low earth orbit compared to the intergalactic stuff he played on later records. You could do worse than to learn Jamerson bass lines. He’s ranked Numero Uno on Bass Player Magazine’s 100 Greatest Bass Players list. Hmm. That’s news to me. Not that he’s number one. I’d rank him 1-10, and start the rest of the list on 11, but that’s just me. I’m only expressing surprise that a magazine thought bass players could read. And there are more than 100? I could barely play the thing, and I always worked. I thought there were only like forty of us.

Shotgun is about the first song I can remember learning on the drums, too. Big right foot, there. Of course the guitar part was also seminal. Learn that sharp 9, shangalang chord and you’re ready for bidness. It’s fun to watch Junior Walker sing and play, or at least mime Shotgun in that video. He was on Motown, and they were still in their Andy Williams sweater and business suit mode back in the early sixties. Everybody Frug!

It’s amusing to read that Junior was just supposed to play saxophone on the record, but the singer that Berry Gordy hired didn’t show up to the session. Junior offered to sing it to supply a reference track they could record over later. They liked it so much they released it that way. It was a big hit. Number One on the R&B singles chart, #4 on the Billboard chart.

People still recognize this song. They put it in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002. However, V-neck sweaters and skinny ties no longer need apply, I gather. Look what someone recently did with Shotgun using AI animation. Alice From the Hood Pulp Fiction Grand Theft Auto Wire in Wonderland:

Yikes. Hey, getting back to playing in front of nobody, the song made it all the way to RomCom movies in Norway. Let’s watch Public Enemies have a frosty go at it:

The song itself is truly a groove. There are essentially no chord changes. It’s all based on rhythms. James Brown would perfect this approach shortly after this. Lots of other musical people (who could afford the whole albums) mined the groove thang for their own sound back in the ’80s too:

So Shotgun was the Ur-Groove-Song for me, and I suspect plenty of other musicians. Not just Norwegians, either. That is, at least until Wilson Pickett showed up with this:

Lawd have mercy.