← Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
What a Fool Believes, Part 1
00:55:04
This is the story of Yacht Rock.
Loading summary
Transcript65 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Host (Slate Plus Promo)
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Hey there Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is Part one of this episode. Part two will arrive in your podcast.
- [00:13]
Chris Melanfi
Feed at the end of the month.
- [00:15]
Podcast Host (Slate Plus Promo)
Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus.
- [00:21]
Chris Melanfi
You can try it for a month.
- [00:23]
Podcast Host (Slate Plus Promo)
For just $1 and it supports not.
- [00:26]
Chris Melanfi
Only this show, but all of Slate's.
- [00:29]
Podcast Host (Slate Plus Promo)
Acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just to slate.com hitparadeplus you'll get to hear every Hit Parade episode in full.
- [00:39]
Chris Melanfi
The day it arrives.
- [00:40]
Podcast Host (Slate Plus Promo)
Plus Hit Parade the Bridge, our bonus episodes with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again to join, that's slate.com hitparadeplus thanks and now please enjoy part one of this hit Parade episode.
- [01:02]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
This podcast contains explicit language.
- [01:16]
Chris Melanfi
Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfi, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One? Series on today's show. Forty years ago at the 1980 Grammy Awards, the night's big winners, taking home four gramophones, were a band originally formed 10 years earlier in San Jose, California, that had transformed themselves into pop stars. They their name, Doobie Brothers, was taken from the slang word for marijuana. But by 1980 their music sounded more like a Chilled. That week in late February 1980 that the Doobies swept the Grammys, Billboard's Hot 100 was awash in similarly sleek, jazzy, ultra smooth music from Doobie's friend Kenny.
- [02:33]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Logging Are you gonna wait for Inside your Miracle?
- [02:49]
Chris Melanfi
To the equally smooth band of session players Toto, To the debut of a new easy listening singer, songwriter Christopher CR. All of this music by white performers on the charts owed something to the sound of contemporary black music. But even the R and B performers of the day, previously known for funk and disco hits, were also shifting into smoother, sultrier sounds suitable for a cocktail lounge.
- [03:43]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Oh it's too hot, too hot, too hot lady Gotta run for shelter, gotta run for shade.
- [03:53]
Chris Melanfi
What you didn't hear in any of these early 1980 hits were lyrics about beaches or pina coladas or nautical references. It's important to note this lack of seafaring imagery when when you consider the name that got attached to all of this music a full quarter century later.
- [04:15]
Narrator / Additional Commentary
From 1976 to 1984, the radio airwaves were dominated by really smooth music, also known as yacht rock.
- [04:23]
Chris Melanfi
These yacht rockers Docked a remarkable fleet. The name Yacht rock is a 21st century concoction coined by a foursome of LA based actors and writers. Writers at the dawn of the YouTube era. Conceived for a deliberately cheap looking online TV series, Yacht Rock caught on like wildfire, finally giving a name to a mini genre from the late 70s and early 80s that had generated a slew of west coast based studio bred smashes, yacht rock just seemed to fit. In the decade and a half since this name took off, it's become the retro pop genre that ate everything. It seems like all of 70s and 80s soft rock and jazzy R and B has been dubbed the Yacht Rock. Whether the term fits. Or doesn't, We will try to provide some clarity around what YAT rock actually is or was intended to be. Because many artists who weren't from the scene recorded music that evoked yacht rock. Or melded those smooth stylings with other genres, taking the sound to multiple radio formats.
- [06:23]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Turn your love around don't you turn me down.
- [06:30]
Chris Melanfi
The yacht trend even spawned improbable hits that now live on in the global pop imagination. Today on Hit Parade we will dissect the folk etymology of this retroactively invented genre. Yacht rock may be a slippery, overused term, but the music was dominant on the charts at the turn of the 80s, and sometimes the hits really did sound like they belonged on a boat.
- [07:14]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Sailing takes me way to where I was.
- [07:24]
Chris Melanfi
And that's where your hit parade marches today, the week ending August 30, 1980, when Sailing by Christopher Cross reached number one on Billboard's Hot 100, affirming that America had reached peak smooth. In that moment, just after disco and just before MTV studio bred performers like Christopher cross, Toto, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan and their army of sleek producers and sidemen were kings of the charts. So pour yourself a cocktail and join us in the Cantina Lounge for a friendly debate. What was yacht rock? So when you saw that this month's Hit Parade episode was going to be about yacht rock, even before you hit play, you probably thought we were going to be talking about songs like this.
- [08:39]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
If you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain.
- [08:45]
Chris Melanfi
Except this Rupert Holmes chart topper, a number one hit in 1979 is not yacht rock. Maybe you were picturing this. I love this Seals and Croft song, a number six hit in 1972. Except it's not yacht rock either. But surely this is. Ah, I love this Jerry Rafferty song. Let's leave Baker street on for a moment. But yeah, even this 1978 two hit by Scotsman Rafferty with that sultry sax. It's not yacht rock, Mind you. All of these songs do appear on yacht rock playlists on the radio and on Spotify, and they are played live by kitschy touring bands like the Yacht Rock Revue, who come on stage in captain's hats and Hawaiian shirts. These songs are all certainly soft rock, but strictly speaking, they are not what the inventors of YAT rock meant when they invented the term. Wait, someone invented YAT rock? How did that happen and why did it catch on? Before we talk about the music, we have to talk about how yacht rock was started by some moonlighting actors and writers in Los Angeles. Really, it was kind of a lark. In the early aughts, J.D. risnar, a writer and actor who'd relocated from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Los Angeles, would have friends over to his apartment to eat barbecue and listen to old records. Riznar had recently gone through a Steely Dan phase and he was becoming obsessed with late 70s and early 80s studio driven soft rock.
- [11:27]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
I like your pin shot. I keep it with your letter.
- [11:35]
Chris Melanfi
Quote. We listen to what I called yacht rock, riesnar later told Rolling Stone. You know, like Michael McDonald is singing background vocals and like there's guys on boats on the covers. It feels like you're on a yacht listening to it. And the guys were like, oh, we know this music. What Riznar and his buddies noticed was that these late 70s and early 80s hits had musicians in common, not just artists famous in their own right, like Michael McDonald singing backup for Steely Dan. There were session players like drummer Steve Gad or guitarist Jay Grady, Vocalists like Bill Champlin, Richard Page and Patty Austin, Producers like David Foster, Michael Omardian, or even the legendarily smooth Quincy Jones. And even whole groups essentially built out of la. Session musicians like Toto, whose members met while playing backup behind Boz Skaggs and Steely Daniel.
- [13:18]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
I think I'll do it alone.
- [13:25]
Chris Melanfi
Around this same time, in the early 2000s, while JD Riznar's gang was getting into this music, a monthly short film contest called Channel 101 had taken off in Los Angeles. Visitors to an LA bar would watch five minute videos. This was years before YouTube or Quibi concepts for TV shows with goofy titles like Laser Fart, and they would vote on whether to cancel the shows or renew them for more episodes. In 2005, Riznar and his buddies Hunter Stair and Lane Farnham hit upon the idea of turning JD's yacht rock concept into a channel 101 show Coco no, don't stop. It's so beautiful, so smooth. I heard the same song in my childhood dreams. Played by a man named Christopher Cross. You must take that name. The Yacht Rock video series was an instant channel 101 smash, firing up the LA crowd and renewed for a near record 10 episodes over the next year. The hilarious show was shot intentionally cheaply, and it told fanciful stories centered around a California marina run by one Coco Goldstein, a fictional record industry mogul in a captain's hat played by Dave Lyons. But the scripts satirized actual music history, as when, for example, Kenny Loggins, played by Hunter Stair, really did help Michael McDonald, played by J.D. riz, write a hit for the Doobie Brothers.
- [15:15]
Actor in Yacht Rock Series (Dave Lyons)
You're a sentimental fool, Kenny. You think you can come right back here from long ago and recreate your friendship just by mustering a smile and telling some nostalgic tales. That's what a fool believes, Kenny. That's what, that's what a fool believes.
- [15:35]
Chris Melanfi
The show was snarky but ultimately a fun affectionate toward the era of so called smooth music. Riznar told Reuters that Yat Rock was making fun of the songwriting process, but the music is generally treated pretty lovingly. The series also had the stamp of musical expertise thanks to the participation of actual AllMusic.com critic Steve Huey, nicknamed Hollywood Steve.
- [16:08]
Narrator / Additional Commentary
Oh hi, I'm Hollywood Steve. You caught me basting some lamb shanks. The back alley songwriting duel of 1978 went down as the day Yacht Rock lost its innocence.
- [16:20]
Chris Melanfi
What no one expected, neither Hollywood Steve nor co creators Riznar, Stair and lyons, was yacht rock's afterlife. The 2005 show happened to launch the same year as YouTube and their channel 101 videos went viral. The foursome were invited to other cities screening Yacht Rock episodes to rabid crowds in San Francisco, Chicago, Austin and New York. Over the next five years they even shot a couple of additional star studded Yacht Rock episodes with cameos from the likes of Jason Lee, Drew Carey and Wyatt Cenac. It's mellow but not smooth.
- [17:08]
Actor in Yacht Rock Series (Dave Lyons)
Kind of shitty Jimmy Buffett.
- [17:12]
Chris Melanfi
What Risnar, Stair, Lyons and Huey also didn't anticipate was that their musical brainchild would also have a long afterlife, longer even than the mini TV series. In essence, the show invented a genre that was hiding in plain sight but never previously had a name as they devised it. Yacht Rock was smooth music played largely by a network of LA bands and session musicians between the years 1976 and 1984, with instrumental complexity and sounds that evoked jazz and RB.
- [17:56]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Nothing you can do about it's too strong to be denied. Nothing you can do about it. Relax.
- [18:07]
Chris Melanfi
Of course, what made yacht rock go viral in the first place was the goofiness and memeability of the concept. The yacht was meant to be a metaphor about the high end quality of the music. But on the Internet, folks took the nautical idea literally. Even though Riznar had named the music for playing while on a boat, not about the boat per se. Even if we limit the concept to what the yacht rock framers intended, one thing is absolutely true. This music was commercially very successful. It was the right music at the right time. So to understand why yacht rock did as well as it did on the charts, we have to go back before 1976. The fact is there was west coast music played primarily by session musicians long before yacht rock.
- [19:23]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Goodbye, bridget. Goodbye.
- [19:30]
Chris Melanfi
That, of course, is the Beach Boys. And this is not the last time you will hear me say these words in this episode. This song is not yacht rock, but I'm playing The Beach Boys 1967 number one classic, Good Vibrations. To make a point, Brian Wilson's three and a half minute masterpiece was mostly not played by his fellow Beach Boys. Beyond the vocals by the Wilson brothers and Mike Love, the instruments on Good Vibrations were largely by session musicians, namely the legendary team of LA professionals known as the Wrecking Crew. From bassist Carol Kay to guitarist Al Casey to keyboardist Al Zolori to drummer Hal Blaine. This is a theme to keep in mind when we get to the genesis of what became yacht rock Ace musicians not beholden to any one frontline act spreading polished California vibes across a wave of pop hits. In the case of the Wrecking Crew, that included everything from I Got yout Babe to Up, up and Away to California Dreamin. Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine in particular was a journeyman who played on generations of pop hits. That includes this smash about eight years later, which connects the 60s era of Southern California pop to another wave of sunny hits.
- [21:13]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Love Will Keep Us Together Think of Me, Babe, Whenever.
- [21:21]
Chris Melanfi
That'S the Captain and Tenille with Love Will Keep Us Together, a number one smash in June and July of 1975, Billboard's top hit of that year and America's top song the Week My Sister Was Born. Happy belated birthday, Catherine. Anyway, though it predated yacht rock, this proto yacht smash had many hallmarks that would later mark the genre. Love Will Keep Us Together was written by transplanted East Coasters Brill Building songwriters Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield who had moved to la while Hal Blaine guests on the track, most of the instruments were played by Tony Tennille and Daryl Dragon, AKA the Captain, who performed on stage in a seafaring hat. What was I just saying about nautical themes? Dragon and Tennille made their bones in the early 70s as keyboardists for the Beach Boys, and their breakthrough smash featured a slap happy keyboard sound the yacht rock founders would later call the Doobie Bounce. This distinguished Love Will Keep Us together from other mid-70s soft rock, which was even mellower. Indeed, several UK acts were approximating the sound of yacht rock before the scene began to coalesce. Most prominently, soulful British band Ace took their R and B leaning how long to number three in America in 1975. As for for actual R and B combos, the arrangements on chart topping black albums were growing ever more sophisticated. By 75 and 76, Earth Wind and Fire closed their LP Gratitude, a number one album, in early 76 with the now classic Can't Hide Love, a plush soul ballad by LA songwriter Skip Scarborough. Six months after EWF's smash LP topped the chart, jazz and R and B guitarist George Benson was at number one with Breezen, an LP whose many Grammys included an award for its engineering and whose title track practically codified 70s lounge pop. All of these tracks, Benson's Breezen, EWF's Can't Hide Love, Aces How Long, serve as antecedents for the polished direction West coast derived pop was heading in the mid-70s. But in the dictionary of music, the word polished may as well be defined by one indefatigably smooth group, the root of the yacht rock family tree. Steely Steely Dan were officially a duo, keyboardist and vocalist Donald Fagan and bassist guitarist Walter Becker, but that belied the army of professional players who joined the duo on Steely Dan's immaculately produced LPs. Perhaps too immaculate. In the liner notes of one album, Becker and Fagan actually apologized for the sound quality of the LP's noise reduction system, which 70s rock fans found hilarious, since Steely Dan albums all sounded like they were recorded in a laboratory's clean room or the world's tidiest jazz club. Though nominally a rock group, Steely Dan leaned heavily on the jazz musicianship that Fagan and Becker, both New York area natives transplanted to the west coast, preferred to rock era pop music. In fact, Steely Dan's 1974 top five hit Ricky don't lose that number was built off of a piano hook Fagan borrowed from jazz legend Horace Silver. By the mid-70s, Steely Dan, named after a dildo in William S. Burroughs Beat Generation novel Naked Lunch, had stopped touring entirely to focus on studio LPs. Fagan and Becker's albums showcased a who's who of LA session musicians and performers from other groups, including future Toto members Jeff Porcaro and David Paich Poco singer and future Eagle Timothy B. Schmidt and guitarist Jeff Skunk Baxter, who would eventually leave Steely Dan to join the Doobie Brothers. Another future Doobie who broke through with the duo was the uniquely buried baritone Michael McDonald, who began singing prominently on the Dan's 1975 album Katy Live. SteELY Dan's impeccable recordings set a template for what yacht rock became yuppie music before yuppies had a name. Fagan and Becker worked alongside other California contemporaries, but set themselves apart from the folkier or country tinged music of groups like the Steve Miller Band, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band or the Eagles. In fact, on one song on 1976's the Royal Scam LP, Steely Dan sardonically poked fun at the Eagles.
- [28:19]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Turn up the Eagles.
- [28:25]
Chris Melanfi
By the way, the Eagles good naturedly turned that diss right back on Becker and Fagan just six months later on their Hotel California album. If you've ever wondered why on that Eagles album's deathless title track, Don Henley calls those knives in the song Steely, that was an in joke. The Eagles represented a different kind of California rock, far removed from the elements that formed yacht rock. The yacht aesthetic was much closer to jazzy blue eyed soul performance like Boz Skaggs, whose smash LP Silk Degrees featured many of the same session players from Steely Dan's albums. In 1976, Silk Degrees lead single the fluttery, danceable but not quite disco Lowdown was a number three hit co written by Skaggs and future Toto Movies member David Peach. Then there were the west coast acts who shifted sounds as the 70s progressed, moving away from folk or country rock influences toward smoother stylings. Perhaps the best before and after example is the aforementioned Doobie Brothers, who as I noted earlier, were formed in San Jose but for the first half of the 70s could have been mistaken for Southern rock. In their early years. The Doobies were fronted by guitarist vocalists Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons. Both were also songwriters and each man had a twang in his voice and his songs. Johnston wrote and sang the Doobie's first top 10 hit, the chugging boogie rock jam Long Train runnin', a number eight hit in 1973 and Simmons wrote and sang lead on the group's first Hot 100 chart topper, the spooky Southern gothic tale Black water. A number one in early 1975, These hits make the Doobie Brothers evolution in the second half of the decade all the more remarkable. You can divide their 70s discography into before and after periods, and the BCAD moment is demarcated by the arrival of a bearded Vocal Messiah.
- [31:34]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Michael McDonald's.
- [31:49]
Chris Melanfi
Fresh off his prominent backing vocals on Steely Dan's Katy Lide album, McDonald joined the Doobies in 1975. Not long after guitarist Jeff Skunk Baxter also joined the group. From Steely Dan, McDonald was brought in at first to cover vocals for the ailing Tom Johnston, who had health issues that prevented him from touring with the band. But by the 1976 LP Taking it to the Streets, MacDonald was rapidly emerging as the group's most successful songwriter. McDonald penned the album's only Top 40 hits, including the title track of Takin it to the streets, a number 13 hit in the summer of 76 and a foreshadowing of the sleek R B direction McDonald would soon take the band. Just as the Doobies went on a sonic journey across the 70s, so too did a future friend and collaborator of Michael McDonald's, a Washington born, California raised singer songwriter named Kenneth Clark Loggins. Kenny Loggins broke in the early 70s in a PO partnership with Jim Messina, a former member of the Buffalo Springfield and Poco who was originally only supposed to produce Kenny and wound up sitting in for his entire album as a duo, Loggins and Messina went on to score a string of gold and platinum albums between 1972 and 77, all sporting a country or four folk rock tinged AM gold sound, You can think of this chapter of Loggins career as the rough equivalent of the Doobie Brothers Tom Johnston years. Because in 1977 when Loggins finally broke away from Moosina Excuse Me Messina for a solo career, his sound became slicker and smoother. While I Believe in Love, the lead single from Kenny Loggin's solo debut Celebrate Me Home, was only a minor hit, peaking at number 66 on the Hot 100 in 1977, it gave notice that Kenny had gone full late 70s California with more overt jazzy R B overtones, Loggins made that even more explicit the following year on a duet with Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks that climbed all the way to number five on the Hot One 100 whenever I call you friend. But if by 77 both logins and the Doobies were signaling that west coast rock was top 40's future. A totemic album by the yacht rock progenitors, which came out later that year, all but announced that the scene had fully arrived. And it set the bar high. Extra clean, extra jazzy, Asia spelled aja. Steely Dan's sixth album was a landmark in perfectionist California studio pop. It was Steely Dan's most successful and fastest selling album ever, reaching its Billboard album chart peak of number three in just two weeks and eventually going double platinum from the opening bars of Black Cow.
- [36:32]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
So you should know how all the pros play the game.
- [36:40]
Chris Melanfi
The album was a sonic watershed, both technologically. Walter Becker and Donald Fagan had finally attained the reference quality audiophile sound they'd long been working toward. And musically, critics noted that it was impossible to categorize Asia as either entirely rock or entirely jazz. It was cool music made by a pair of agoraphobic misfits. On the album single Deacon blues, a number 19 hit, Fagan and Becker literally wrote a song for losers. Its autobiographical lyrics reflected their youthful suburban dreams of becoming jazz musicians. But the album's biggest hit and its most fussed over track was Peg, a sprightly pop record that peaked at number 11 and became essential to the sound of late 70s West West coast rock. In a 1999 episode of the British documentary series Classic Albums, Fagan, Becker and a roster of their Asia musicians revealed all of the labor that went into Peg. This included the array of guitarists who tried playing its seemingly laid back guitar solo before session veteran Jay Graden finally pulled it off.
- [38:38]
Studio Musician / Interviewee
This tune, I think, is infamous among studio players in that we hired a couple of guitar players, you know, to play the solo and. And it wasn't quite what we were looking for until we got through three or four, five players, six, six or seven, you know, eight players.
- [38:57]
Chris Melanfi
Or how Michael McDonald, Steely Dan's now established backup singer, drove himself crazy perfecting pegg's multi tracked chorus V. Back to.
- [39:12]
Michael McDonald (Interviewee)
You Peg doesn't sound like much of a part, but the harmonies were so close that that was a real learning experience for me to sing a chord, you know, part by part with myself.
- [39:24]
Chris Melanfi
And how the song, indeed the entire album would be replayed by different sets of session musicians each day until Becker and Fagan found the sound they liked.
- [39:37]
Michael McDonald (Interviewee)
It wasn't like they played musical chairs with the guys in the band. They played musical bands. Whole band would go and a whole incredible other band would come.
- [39:45]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
In.
- [39:50]
Chris Melanfi
The genre that would come to be known as yacht rock had begun to take shape years earlier. But Steely Dan's Asia, an album loved and loathed in equal measure by by generations of rock fans, must be regarded as the era's benchmark. It set a standard to which other late 70s and early 80s West Coast R& B and jazz inflected rock aspired. Perhaps it made sense then that some of the musicians who were playing with Steely Dan would form a band of their own.
- [40:31]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Hey Miss Son, what can I say? I tried to hold you.
- [40:48]
Chris Melanfi
The members of Toto, drummer Jeff Porcaro, keyboardists David Page and Steve Porcaro, Jeff's brother, guitarist Steve Lukather and bassist David Hungate were already LA session veterans by the time they began recording as a unit in 1977. Most of them had bonded during the making of Boz Skagg's album Silk Degrees, on which David Paiche co wrote all of the big hit songs. In fact, this song, Ms. Sun, one of Toto's first recordings, was a track they ultimately gave away to Skaggs. He wound up scoring a hit with it three years later. From the jump, Toto had the plush sound of yachty west coast rock down to science. But when they finally released a debut album in 1978, Toto fused this slick sound with the pomp of album oriented rock and scored a hit out of the box. Hold the Line codified a variation on the west coast template. It was smooth music that rocked. It reached number five on the Hot 100 in the early weeks of 1979 and Toto's self titled debut LP reached the top 10 on the album chart and went platinum a month later. It would eventually go double platinum. Never a critics band, Toto were often tagged with the derisive moniker corporate rock, alongside the likes of Styx, Boston Kansas and even Journey. But what Toto actually had more in common with was the emerging wave of polished LA bands that were issuing yacht style music in the wake of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers and taking over top 40 radio. Some of these bands, like the Doobies, had undergone a musical transformation. For example, back in 1975 the LA band Ambrosia, led by singer guitarist David Pack, scored a top 20 hit, the spacey Holdin on to Yesterday, that bordered on prog rock.
- [43:32]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
Days that we were once together Seems we'll never come alive so I keep up.
- [43:46]
Chris Melanfi
By 1978, however, Ambrosia had fully transformed themselves into pillowy purveyors of polished pop and scoring bigger hits in the process. Their super yachty How Much I Feel reached number three on the Hot 100 in November 1978. The same went for San Francisco band Pablo Cruz. They honed their mid-70s piano and guitar driven soft rock and into an even smoother late 70s sound with electric piano and sweet harmonies that finally scored them serious hits. 1978's Love Will Find a Way reached number six. Other acts that had fashioned themselves into de facto yacht rock were LA band player, who topped the Hot 100 in early 78 with Baby Come Back. Canadian singer singer Gino Vanelli, who relocated to a Hollywood studio to record his 78 album Brother to Brother and scored a number four hit with the velvety I Just Wanna Stop. And Australian group the Little River Band, whose members dated to the 60s British Invasion era and whose mid-70s work had resembled American country rock. But LRB scored its biggest US hit with the ultra smooth and e piano driven reminiscing, a number three hit in the fall of 78.
- [46:05]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
That's the way it began. We were hand in hand. Ben Miller's band was better than before.
- [46:15]
Chris Melanfi
As I often say on Hit Parade, when it comes to hit making, timing is everything. These singles were following a very specific strain of soft rock that captured the zeitgeist but was not beholden to other forms of pop. These songs weren't just smoothed out folk rock like for example the London trio America, who contrary to popular belief never recorded Yatra. They weren't trying to be disco like say, Leo Sayers chart topper you Make Me Feel Like Dancing.
- [47:13]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
I Feel Like.
- [47:14]
Chris Melanfi
Dancing and heaven forbid, none of the yacht rockers were straining for that laid back faux tropical vacation vibe. Like Jimmy Buffett. The king of the Parrotheads was strenuously, showily mellow, not effortlessly smooth. He was the anti yacht rock. Compare songs like Buffett's to a track like say, Bobby Caldwell's what yout Won't do for Love, a number nine pop number six R B hit in early 1970. 1999. Caldwell's Blue Eyed soul hit was solidly in the yacht pocket with a jazzy, soulful vibe perched on the the border between pop and R B. This was not, by the way, an isolated R B crossover by a white performer either. Consider Toto's hit Georgie Porgy. The song's verses were sung by guitarist Steve Lucy and at first Georgy Porgy resembles Toto's typically suave soft rock, albeit with some R and B syncopation. But then when it reaches the chorus, it goes even deeper into R B. That vocal, by the way, is by Cheryl Lynn, a former cast member of the musical the Wiz who became a recording artist in 1978. You might know Cheryl Lynn from her hit Got to Be Real. Just weeks after Lynn took that disco classic to number one on Billboard's Hot Soul Singles and number 12 on the Hot 100, she was back on both charts with Toda. Thanks not only to Cheryl Lynn's vocal but Toto's credible R& B chops, Georgie Porgy was a bigger hit at black radio than at pop radio. The single peaked on Billboard's soul chart at an impressive number, 1830 positions higher than it reached on the Hot 100. Moreover, there were plenty of black performers in the genre, and not only as session musicians. Consider Earth, Wind and Fire's smash mega ballad after the Love Has Gone Young.
- [50:37]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
And we knew in our eyes were relaxed Deep inside we knew our love was true for a while.
- [50:47]
Chris Melanfi
The song was co written by three white men, all affiliated with the California session scene, Canadian born LA based producer David Foster, Jay Graden, the guitarist on Steely Dan's Peg among many yachty hits, and Bill Champlin, who would later join the band Chicago. They had tried the song on two different albums and at one point were even considering it for an LP by Daryl hall and John Oates before Earth Wind and Fire's Maurice White got hold of it.
- [51:28]
Song Clips / Musical Inserts
My Name Is.
- [51:32]
Chris Melanfi
EWF turned After the Love has Gone into the quintessential yacht soul ballad. Tricked out with layers of falsetto from Maurice White and Philip Bailey, it reached number two in the fall of 1979. Or consider the song it's the Falling in Love, co written by David Foster with Journey Woman songwriter Carol Bayer Sager. After Sager herself tried recording it with background vocals by Bill Champlin and Michael McDonald, the song wound up in the hands of producer Quincy Jones who was working on the adult solo breakthrough album by former child star Michael Jackson. Recorded for Jackson's 1979 blockbuster off the Wall, it's the Falling in Love was a favorite album cut that became a black radio standard and Michael Jackson's introduction to to the sound of yacht soul. It would not be his last foray into the would be genre. This refining and repurposing of smooth songs arguably reached its apex with the hit that would define yacht rock as it entered the 80s and it wound up on the album that Michael McDonald was writing for the Doobie Brothers in late 1960 1978. Minute by minute, the Doobies eighth studio album would be their first chart topping LP and all time biggest seller and it affirmed McDonald's conversion of the the group into a smooth pop and be crossover act, but the LP's centerpiece was a song MacDonald had written with his friend Kenny Loggins, and which Loggins recorded first. Non Slate plus listeners will hear the.
- [54:06]
Podcast Host (Slate Plus Promo)
Rest of the of this episode in two weeks. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfy. That's me. My producer for this episode was Benjamin Frisch, and we also had help from Rosemary Belson. My extra special thanks to Hollywood Steve Huey for research support on this episode. June Thomas is the Senior Managing Producer and Gabriel Roth the Editorial Director of Slate Podcasts. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. We'll see you for part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanfy.