Yacht Rock Radio
I spent a while searching for something to play on my Alexa at bedtime. (I used to listen to the all-news station for years – geek, I know – but I just can’t anymore.) I finally settled on the Yacht Rock Radio channel on XM. I figured the whiny moronic crap from the mid- to late-70s would put me to sleep the quickest, and for the most part I was right.
But instead of letting that pablum just wash over me like it has for almost 50 years, I actually started listening to it. Some thoughts follow. First the bad stuff:
- Everything Christopher Cross ever wrote and/or performed should be compressed into a very sharp dodecahedron and shoved up his fundamental aperture. And then Elon Musk can deliver him to someplace “between the moon and New York City” where he belongs. Preferably without a spacesuit.
- I feel bad dissing Kenny Loggins, because he did, early on, write “Danny’s Song,” which is sublime. But he seemed to start there, and then slowly descend into a dark, weird cave. “Whenever I Call You Friend,” “This is It,” “I’m Alright,” “Footloose” – absolute crap. They all sound as if he was making up the songs as he went along, like that schtick Kristen Wiig and Fred Armisen used to do on SNL. The earnestness with which he delivered these awful songs just made them worse. And he co-wrote the absolute worst song in all of Yacht Rock world. More later.
- There is some song (by Toto, I believe) that repeats the refrain “Georgie Porgie, pudding in pie/Kiss the girls and made them cry” 472 times. Even my wife, who actually likes ’70 music and disco, rolls over and begs me to turn the fucking thing off when it comes on.
- If I have to listen to “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” one more time, I will strangle a puppy. I seriously doubt that finding out my spouse is placing ads in order to cheat on me would have quite the happy ending that song does. And Rupert Holmes’ other hit, “Him,” is just as bad.
- I will probably get death threats for this, but “Africa’ by Toto is a terrible song. Not so much the music itself – it’s very pretty and evocative – but the lyrics are God-awful.
- “She’s coming in, 12:30 flight/The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation” Wait – she’s the one on the plane. Why are the stars guiding *you* towards salvation? Salvation from what? And how do “moonlit wings” reflect stars anyway?
- And who is “she”? Is it a girl? Africa itself? Some inner demon?
- “I stopped an old man along the way/Hoping to find some long-forgotten words or ancient melodies/He turned to me as if to say/’Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you’” – please demonstrate for me the look that says “Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you.” And accosting some poor old dude and asking him for long-forgotten words or ancient melodies seems pretty presumptuous.
- Who are you to “bless the rains down in Africa”? Do they need blessing? What does that even mean?
- I’ll bet a hundred men or more *could* take me away from you. It’s simple physics.
- “Solitary company”? Like “jumbo shrimp” or “military intelligence”?
- “As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti” – outside of the fact that this line is painfully shoehorned into the melody, Kilimanjaro is 470km from the Serengeti. Hardly looming over it.
- But the absolutely worst song in all of YR is “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers. Where to begin? Kenny Loggins cowrote it, and his version was released six months before the Doobie Brothers. If you dare, go listen to it. Without the swooning gloss that the Doobie Brothers swaddled it in, it is a terrible, jangling, disjointed piece of crap. Loggins can’t go more than eight bars without heading off in some different melody. The Beatles could get away with that shit, but it’s way over Kenny’s head. And the lyrics – Jesus. “He came from somewhere back in her long ago/The sentimental fool don’t see tryin’ hard to recreate/What had yet to be created.” And “No wise man has the power to reason away/What seems to be/Is always better than nothing/And nothing at all.” It sounds like this lyric was written in Korean and translated into English by someone who doesn’t know Korean. And I blame “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” but I now keep hearing the line as “Abe Weissman has the power,” which I’m sure Tony Shalhoub would appreciate. Once I fully absorbed the awfulness of this song, I looked it up in Wikipedia to see how this monstrosity came to be. And lo and behold – it won the Grammys for both Song of the Year and Record of the Year in 1980. What kind of hell is this?
But there were some good songs in that YR period.
- I never really paid that much attention to Seals and Croft, but “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl” and “We May Never Pass This Way Again” are gorgeous songs. They remind me of my father for some reason, and that’s never bad.
- ELO never wrote a bad song.
- “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty goes on about two minutes too long, but it’s pretty neat. I have a specific memory from the summer of 1978 attached to that song.
- “Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages” by Al Stewart are great songs – even though I can’t shake the belief that Al Stewart is actually Eric Idle goofing on us. Have you ever seen the two of them together? I haven’t.
- I’ve always liked Steely Dan – not enough to actually buy any of their records, but their biggest hits – “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Peg,” “Deacon Blues,” “Hey Nineteen” – are beautifully crafted and unique numbers. And you have to give props to a band that named themselves after a steam-powered dildo from “Naked Lunch.”
- At 2AM on a frigid February morning in 1978 in Madison, Wisconsin, I saw a naked girl dancing on the ice on Lake Mendota, just at the edge of the lights from shore. She had a cassette player slung across her shoulders, playing “Feels So Good” by Chuck Mangione. So of course, I like that song.
- In the summer of 1972, I was running a printing press for a congressman in the attic of the Longworth House Office Building, and my only companion was a radio tuned to WPGC. I remember three songs vividly from that summer: “Take It Easy” by the Eagles, “Alone Again Naturally” by Gilbert O’Sullivan, and one other song that I thought was so bad that I would turn the radio down when it came on. For years I hated it – the melody, the lyrics, the arrangement, the vocal, the idea, the whole damn thing. But now . . . I think “Brandy” by Looking Glass is the most fantastic pop song of the ‘70s. And this was before my daughter told me that I need to watch “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.”