← Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
What a Fool Believes, Part 2
00:41:41
Chris Molanphy's deep dive on Yacht Rock, continued.
Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:00]
Chris Melanfi
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One series. On our last episode, we explained the history and parameters of yacht rock, a term invented invented in the offs to define smooth California based music from the late 70s and early 80s. And as 1978 turned to 79, the Doobie Brothers, led by vocalist keyboardist Michael McDonald, were about to score their biggest hit ever with their bounciest, yachtiest song. What A Fool Believes was a song about romantic regret and the impossibility of rekindling a dormant romance. It established a lyrical theme the yacht rock coiners would later identify as core to the genre. It was about a romantic fool. But Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald buried their ruminative lyrics in a jaunty package after Loggins had his with it on his 1978 Night Watch album. McDonald cut it with the Doobies, and it became even jauntier. The Doobies, what A Fool Believes hit number one in April 1979. That same month, their Minute by Minute LP20 topped the Billboard album chart. But on top of its bespoke lyrics about romantic imprudence, fool also established a yacht rock archetype. The Doobie Bounce. This sprightly syncopated chord progression, typically played on piano or synthesizer, proved a remarkably sturdy pop song template. The Doobie Bounce recurred on a string of hit records. These included Steal away, a number six hit in July 1980 for Robbie Dupri, Or he's so Shy, a remarkably bouncy hit for the Poynter sisters in October 1980, a number 10 R&B hit that did even better on the Hot 100, reaching number three. Kenny Loggins himself would adopt those bubbly keyboards on more than one hit he co wrote with Michael McDonald, including his number 11 hit from 1980, this Is It, And his number 15 hit from 1983, Heart to Heart. The Doobie Bounce even found its way into the most yachty hit ever by Philly soul duo Daryl hall and John Oates, the 1981 number one smash Kiss on my list. A quick sidebar here. You may be asking, how did we get this far into a yacht rock episode without playing a song by hall and Oats? Well, are you sitting down? Hall and Oates are mostly not yacht rock. I know, I know. You may have been calling them that for the last decade and a half, ever since the Yacht Rock moniker was in invented. John Oates himself has, in at least one interview, credited the popularity of YAT Rock with helping to revive hall and Oates reputation and career. And of course, a version of hall and Oates appear in the original 2005 yacht Rock Channel 101 series. In a positively hilarious twist, John Oates, not Daryl hall, is the mastermind of the duo with a cartoonishly aggressive violent temper.
- [05:32]
Benjamin Frisch
Let's do this hauling Oats, hall and.
- [05:37]
Chris Melanfi
I will not stand idly by while you California vagina sailors stab the American airwaves in the balls with your shit.
- [05:46]
Rosemary Belson
Music.
- [05:47]
Chris Melanfi
For the record, J.D. riznar and his friends included hall and Oates in the Yacht Rock series as comic foils east coasters from the mean streets of Philadelphia. By the creator's yardstick, however, their music sits adjacent to yot rock but is not integral to it. Essentially, hall and Oates music is blue eyed soul and it ranges all over the map, from the 70s Philly Sound of their 1977 chart topper Rich Girl to the R and B new wave hybrid of their 1982 smash Maneater. Their music generally contains no west coast personnel, although Holland Oates did work with LA producers like David Foster occasionally on the Yacht Rock founders long running podcast Beyond Yacht Rock, wherein they rank songs fidelity to the genre on a yachtsky scale. More than a dozen hall and Oates songs were ranked and only 2 were tagged yacht Rock, a David Foster produced deep cut called Time's up and the Doobie Bouncing Kiss on their list. Look, YAT rock is an invented retroactive genre. I am covering it in this episode as if it were a defined thing that existed in the 70s and 80s, which it wasn't. But in the musical cosmology J.D. risnar and friends formulated, there are parameters and the music of Daryl hall and John Oates sensibly sits outside of them. I hope we've settled that. Anyway, as I mentioned at the top of the show, what A Fool Believes swept the top song prizes at the Grammys in 1980. But that same year Michael McDonald played a part in the album that would do any even better at the next Grammy Awards and set a new bar for pop smoothness. Ride like the Wind, featuring backing vocals by Michael McDonald, was the lead single from the self titled debut album by Christopher Cross. You might say Cross was born career wise into yacht rock. Unlike Michael McDonald or the members of Toto who helped build or adapt their way into the genre, Christopher Cross, a San Antonio, Texas guitarist and songwriter, had little history as a session player. Before signing with Warner Bros. Records in 1978, producer Michael Omardian, a California studio veteran who'd played with the likes of Steely Dan and Kenny Loggins, convinced Warner executives to let the easy listening crooner record his own material but use the cream of LA's session players. Cross's eponymous LP dropped in the closing weeks of 1970. With a tropical green background and a pink flamingo on the COVID the Christopher Cross LP might as well have been titled Yacht Rock Album. Literally dozens of west coast players were all over the tracks. The rising tide lifted Cross's boat, and he went on to command the charts in 1980 by spring. Ride like the Wind settled in at number two on the Hot 100 for four weeks. The follow up single did even better. Sailing is perhaps the most atypical but essential yacht rock song. It doesn't bounce or certainly groove, but it is to yot rock what the Bee Gees How Deep Is yous Love was to disco. The genre's prototypical ballad, Sailing is literally about a boat and about, as Cross sings, tranquility, all caught up in the reverie. It's a smooth song about smoothness.
- [10:59]
Benjamin Frisch
Sailing takes me way to where I.
- [11:09]
Chris Melanfi
Critics called Sailing somnolent and numbing, but the public loved it. Sailing topped the Hot 100 in August 1980, and it made Christopher Cross the king of 1981's Grammy Awards. When the night was done, thanks to Sailing and his self titled album, Cross had swept the night's top four prizes Record Song and Album of the Year and Best New Artist. He was the last artist to pull off this Grammy sweep until Billie Eilish in 2020.
- [11:48]
Benjamin Frisch
Sailing takes me away to where I'm always moody.
- [11:55]
Chris Melanfi
The complaint about this brand of soft rock after the 1980 and 81 Grammy Awards was that the music industry had taken a hard right toward white bread schlock. But apart from Sailing, most of the yacht rock that was now dominating the charts was a seamless blend of of R and B and pop. And at the time this blend was arguably more critical to black artists than white ones. As the 70s drew to a close and disco was enjoying its last moments of overt chart topping success, Black artists increasingly found themselves boxed out of top 40 playlists as radio programmers scurried away from anything resembling disco. What that often meant, bluntly, was any song that seemed too black. This made yacht rock or yacht soul a haven for African American acts. For example, Ray Parker Jr. Picked up the bouncy yacht style in 1979 for his band Radio's single you Can't Change that, a number nine pop number three R B hit. And jazz Saxophone Grover Washington Jr teamed with veteran soul singer Bill Withers on the 1981 yacht Soul Ballad Just the Two of Us, a number two pop number three R&B hit. This crossover was vital because the sorts of hard funk records that were topping the R and B chart at the time were largely ignored on Top 40 radio. Whether by the likes of Rick James. Or the gap band, These now highly regarded artists and songs were not pop hits. Whereas yacht soul helped launch the careers at both R B and pop radio of both jazzy soul singer Al Jarreau. And emerging RB vocal king Luther Vandross, Also benefiting from this sound was super producer Quincy Jones, whom I mentioned earlier as the producer of Michael Jackson's off the Wall. On the albums he produced, Jones employed many of the same musicians who played on records by Steely Dan or the doobie brothers. In 1980, guitarist and singer George Benson, whose aforementioned Breezen was an example of proto yacht soul, went full yacht on the Jones produced Give Me the Night. Quincy rebooted Benson's career around his army of session players, including guitarist Lee Rittenhauer, keyboardists Greg Fillinganes and George Duke, and percussionist Paulino da Costa. Even David Foster and Michael McDonald made contributions to Benson's album. Give Me the Night returned Benson to the top five on the album chart and its title track became his biggest hit ever, reaching number four on the Hot 101 on the R&B chart. One year later, Quincy's the Dude, a 1981 album under Jones own name, was practically a Whitman sampler of yacht rock and soul, featuring everyone from toto Steve Lukather to trumpeter and frequent Steely Dan contributor Chuck Findlay. Jones used the album to launch the career of vocalist James Ingram, who sang lead on the album's two biggest hits, the ballad Just Once and the mid tempo super smooth 100 ways. That same year, James Ingram reappeared on singer Patti Austin's Quincy Jones produced 1981 album Every Home should have One, Ingram and Austin duetted on the slow burning love song Baby Come To Me, which of course also featured Michael McDonald on backing vocals. After a long chart climb and a featured appearance on the TV soap opera General Hospital, Baby Come to Me topped the Hot 100 in early 1983.
- [17:40]
Benjamin Frisch
Baby come to me Let me put my arms around you this was meant to be and I'm also glad I.
- [17:51]
Chris Melanfi
Found you, need you this was the breadth of the yacht sound at its peak in the early 80s, it was infiltrating every corner of popular music, including TV themes and movies. There were middle of the road pop hits like Joey Scarberry's bouncy theme from TV's Greatest American Hero, a number two hit in 1981, believe it or Not.
- [18:18]
Benjamin Frisch
I'm Walking on Air, I Never Thought I Could Feel so free.
- [18:25]
Chris Melanfi
Or Christopher Cross's chart topping theme from the movie Arthur, winner of 1981's Best Original Song Oscar, a ditty about New York City that sounds very much like la. On the other hand, there were also hits in this period that leaned decidedly more R and b, like Michael McDonald's small gold ring 1982 torch song I Keep Forgetting. The track was McDonald's solo debut after the 1982 dissolution of the Doobie Brothers. I Keep Forgetting made the top 10 on both the Hot 100 and the R&B chart. Number four on the former, number seven on the latter. Unsurprisingly, on his solo debut, McDonald was backed up by a raft of professional players from the LA session axis, including Greg Fillinganes and two members of Toto, Steve Lukather and Jeff porcaro. But by 1982, Toto had something much bigger going on. After two underperforming albums, they had poured themselves into a make or break fourth album. Little did they know it was going to be Yacht rock's next chart and Grammy sweeping blockbuster. Rosanna, written by Toto's David Paich and named for Steve Porcaro's then girlfriend, actress Rosanna Arquette, was the lead single from Toto4, the LA group's biggest selling album. Instrumentally at least, Rosanna was a session rock masterclass built around an intricate halftime shuffle beat that Jeff Porcaro adapted from RB legend Bernard Purdy, trading off low vocals from Steve Lukather and falsettos from Bobby Kimball and closing with a full band jam. The song summed up everything smooth pop had produced in the last half decade. It was jazzy and rocking and bouncy and full of solos and lyrically regretful and sleek.
- [21:14]
Benjamin Frisch
Rosanna, Rosanna, I didn't know that girl.
- [21:19]
Chris Melanfi
Like you Rosanna spent a month at number two in the summer of 1982, stuck behind number ones by the human League and Survivor. It was a near miss, but this was already a bigger Hot 100 performance than Toto had ever experienced. The Toto 4 album was platinum by late 1982. Unfortunately, no other song on Toto's album seemed at the time like a proper follow up to Rosanna. The Band and their label tried issuing a similarly jazzy pop number named Make Believe, but it stalled at number 30 in the fall of 82. Of course, there was this other song, A dreamy fantasia primarily written by bandmate David Paich, about a man who hasn't traveled much but thinks he knows the character of an entire continent. A moody, oddball track that the band almost left off the album album thinking it didn't fit. So they buried it at the very end of side two, and nobody thought it should be a single. With no better options, the band finally released it as the third 45 from Toto. Four years later. Members of Toto said in interviews, if you told them in 1982 that this goofy song was the one they'd be most remembered for, they'd have said you were nuts.
- [23:14]
Benjamin Frisch
I felt the rains down in Africa.
- [23:21]
Chris Melanfi
What more more can be said about Africa? The most enduring yacht rock song of all, the 80s song most beloved by the millennial and Z generations, the song that would one day blanket the Internet. In one rather literal sense, the song is a metaphor for yacht rock itself. Black culture reinterpreted by white musicians. Drummer Jeff Porcaro, who arranged the song's conga based percussion, described it as a white boy trying to write a song on Africa, but since he's never been there, he can only tell what he's seen on tv.
- [24:04]
Benjamin Frisch
Frightened of this thing that I've become.
- [24:09]
Chris Melanfi
The song that everyone in Toto underestimated reached number one on the Hot 100 in early February 1983. Three weeks later, with Africa still in the top five, Toto took the podium at the Grammy Awards. Their earlier hit Rosanna won Record of the year and Toto 4 took album of the Year. In his acceptance speech, drummer Jeff Porcaro made plain why this band, composed entirely of session veterans, had won. The winner for Album of the Year this year is Toro. Toro Fet.
- [24:50]
Rosemary Belson
God, this is really hard for us. There's a lot of people to thank. Most of all, there's a lot of people we've worked with here. And we all love you. For everything we learned from you, we'd like to thank.
- [25:01]
Chris Melanfi
Porcaro had a point. If every industry figure who'd worked with Toto had voted for them, that alone might have been enough to give the band the win. It was the third time in four years, after the Doobie Brothers in 1980 and Christopher Cross in 1981, that a song by this Axis of LA session musicianship, the scene that was not yet known as yacht rock, took home one or more of the top Grammy Awards. By the way, among the albums that Toto Ford defeated for Album of the Year that night was the Night Fly, the solo debut album by Steely Dan singer Donald Fagan. Steely Dan would win Album of the year 18 years later in 2001 for their comeback album Two Against Nature, completing a sweep of the top Grammys by most of the major yacht rock acts. So what finally brought about an end to the chart dominance of YAT rock? Perhaps the answer lies in an album that was already released the night that Toto won their Grammys and an LP that came out in the closing weeks of 1982 and on which multiple members of the band had played. This album wouldn't be eligible for prizes until the 1984 Grammys, at which it would sweep and musically it was both fundamentally yacht rock and what can next.
- [26:52]
Benjamin Frisch
If they say, say why, why, why. Why?
- [27:02]
Chris Melanfi
Michael Jackson's Thriller, the top selling and most hit packed studio album of all time, was produced by Quincy Jones and packed with many of the same session musicians who had appeared on countless west coast studio albums since the mid-70s, from David Foster to Greg Fillinganes that also included several members of Toto. And in fact the song Human Nature was written by Steve Porcaro and intended for his own band before Quincy Jones heard it and asked if Michael Jackson could record it. It is in essence a Toto song, with Jackson singing movie. Human Nature, an eventual number seven hit on the Hot 100, was not even the extent of Toto's involvement on Thriller. They also played backup on the album's equally yachty lead single, the Paul McCartney duet the Girl is Mine, a number two smash, And believe it or not, Toto also backed the album's searing range single Beat It. Famously the chart topping beat, it's blistering solo on the bridge is played by guitar God Eddie Van Halen, but on the verses the main guitar riff is actually played by Toto's Steve Lukather. In the history of 80s pop music, you can divide the world into Before Thriller and after Thriller, Jackson's mega blockbuster effectively ended the post disco backlash and started a new age of crossover black pop. Contained within that 42 minute nine song album were tracks that nodded to the smooth music of the late 70s and early 80s and songs that blew that template up. Thriller was an album that employed yacht rockers and essentially also killed yacht rock, but not right away. For example, Lionel Richie, another crossover black star whose late 1983 album Can't Slow down, would also go on to win album of the Year recorded several songs involving the yacht rock axis of players. On Lionel's hit Running with the Night, Steve Lukather reprised his Beat it guitar performance, only this time Richie gave Lukather the showcase solo slot. Not long after Thriller, however, centrist pop that appealed to both white and black audiences began to take on different, more kinetic forms. Whether it was the new wave funk of British acts like Duran Duran who were working with cutting edge producers like Nile Rogers, Or hall and Oates, the yacht rock adjacent duo who moved deeper into clattery dance rock on 1984 hits like Adult Education and their number one smash out of Touch. Actual yacht rockers were also adapting their sound for this new centrist rock reality. Kenny Loggins scored his only number one hit with the title song from the movie Footloose, hiding his smoothness under a veneer of twangy guitar, And on their follow up to their Grammy winning juggernaut Toto attempted to transform themselves into new wave synth rockers with little success. The closest thing to pure yacht rock on the charts in 1984 came from Michael McDonald and James Ingram, who took one last smooth music victory lap with the Quincy Jones produced Yamo Be there, a number 5R and B number 19 pop hit. But the smoothest music on the charts in 1984 and 85 generally came from England, with no connection to the west coast US scene, this was the moment for UK sophisticopop like SA. And wham. This sax drenched music was its own breed of jazzy cocktail pop, certainly as smooth as peak yacht rock, but closer to the former New Roman romantic and New wave movements. By 1986, with Toto scoring their last top 20 pop hit, I'll Be over you. And Michael McDonald finally finally scoring a chart topper in a duet with Patti LaBelle on my own that only vaguely resembled Yat Sol. The movement that still didn't have a real life name, but which had quietly, smoothly commanded the charts for the better part of a decade, was over. So to return to the question we asked at the top of the why did yacht rock as a concept catch on? Was the appreciation of this music, especially by younger generations, ironic or sincere? For starters, as seemingly uncool as the music was, it never really went away. Only a decade after yot rock's decline in the summer of 1994, West coast rapper Warren G, a stepbrother of gangsta superstar Dr. Dre, took his hit with Nate Dogg regulate to number two on the Hot 100. That was two positions higher than the song Warren G very prominently sampled Michael McDonald's yacht Soul Classic I Keep Forgetting reached on the Hot 100 back in 1982. In the 2000s, as the yacht Rock video series swept the web, the rise of yacht rock as a musical movement was equal parts kitsch, nostalgia and eventually admiration. And what started out as a snarky meme invented by funny men who genuinely appreciated the music soon gave a real boost to the performers.
- [35:50]
Michael McDonald
I thought it was hilarious when I first saw it. It was, you know, it was almost uncanny. But it's fun. It's, it's. No one's more amazed than I think myself and my contemporaries are that we're still working, you know, and we're still out there playing music. It's what we love to do. And, you know, the fact that we get to do it at the level that sometimes we still get to do it is really remarkable to us.
- [36:19]
Chris Melanfi
That's Michael McDonald in a 2017 interview, marveling at his good fortune. Since the yacht rock concept caught on, MacDonald has been pretty busy. He toured with Boz Skaggs and Donald Fagan as the fake group the Dukes of September, recreating hits like Steely Dam's Head. And McDonald has enjoyed renewed hipster cred. In the last 10 years, he has recorded guest vocal appearances for Brooklyn indie rockers Grizzly Bear. And also from Brooklyn, the synth pop and neo disco duo Holy Ghost. Of course, neither of these indie pop tracks were trying to sound like yacht Rock. But in 2016, LA bassist and songwriter Steven Lee Bruner, aka Thundercat, went further, writing a new throwback to the yacht sound called show youw the Way. And he even invited both Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins to sing on it. And then, of course, there's the long afterlife of Toto's unkillable Africa. It has appeared on 21st century TV shows from Stranger Things to Family Guy to the Tonight show, plus probably a billion Internet memes. One of those memes, a Twitter request from a die hard 14 year old fan of the alt rock band Weezer, led Weezer to record a couple cover of Africa in the summer of 2018. That cover topped Billboard's alternative rock chart for three weeks, Weezer's biggest hit in a decade. As for Toto themselves, the surviving members, drummer Jeff Porcaro, died back in 1992, were off the road by the spring of 2020 when the COVID 19 pandemic hit. Then just last summer, at the request of their fans, Founding Toto members Steve Lukather and David Paich, along with longtime percussion. Lenny Castro produced a socially distanced version of their most famous hit, complete with video recorded from their homes. This new Africa was offered by Toto as a gesture of pure entertainment for folks under lockdown. This band of veteran musicians who had played in some of the world's fanciest studios were playing in their bedrooms and dens. Maybe this is the most apt legacy of yacht rock. Yes, the recordings were always high end and polished, suitable for playing on an expensive vessel on the high seas. But the love? That's for the song. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. 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 his research support on this episode. June Thomas is the Senior Managing Producer and Gabriel Roth the Editorial Director of Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching on the wine. Hello everyone, I'm Chris Milant.