In Praise Of "Yacht Rock" and Yacht Rock
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.