If the wind is right, you can sail away and find serenity

Posted on by brucehhackett

In the late ’70s/early ’80s, there existed a commercially successful sub-genre of rock music that had been called “the West Coast sound,” or “adult-oriented rock” (AOR). Basically, it mixed pop, R&B, soul, funk, and jazz into impeccably produced radio-ready songs that emphasized melody and mellow vibes and downplayed rock’s harsher elements. “Soft rock,” some called it, although some of the songs were not ballads or even all that “soft.”

In 2005, J.D. Ryznar, a Southern California writer/director/producer who considers himself a fan of that music, became fascinated with how much of it seemed to be recorded by the same community of Los Angeles-based studio musicians. He developed a comedy video web series he dubbed “Yacht Rock,” which poked fun at what he guessed would be the music you’d hear if you frequented the marinas where the wealthy hung out sipping drinks on their yachts.

Although the songs of artists like Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto and others were never referred to as “yacht rock” at the time the music was created, the moniker is now widely used, both lovingly and pejoratively, to characterize the precise, polished, sublime sounds that commanded a great deal of airplay in the 1975-1985 period.

Indeed, for almost two decades now, an Atlanta-based ensemble known as Yacht Rock Revue has been touring for up to 100 shows per year, pumping out convincing cover versions of songs that fall into the loosely defined category. I attended one of these shows in Nashville last week and found it be fun and entertaining, even if it was pretty much just a bunch of unidentified musicians operating as a competent cover band. They’re not unlike the “tribute bands” that cover songs of one specific group (like Dark Star, the famous Grateful Dead tribute band), except Yacht Rock Revue offer renditions of songs by a couple dozen different artists.

To my ears, many of the tunes played are great songs, even favorites of mine — tracks like The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes,” Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind,” Toto’s “Hold the Line,” Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It,” Nicolette Larson’s “Lotta Love,” Boz Scaggs’s “Lowdown” and Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun.” Sure, they were (and still are) overplayed, but that’s really the fault of unimaginative radio programmers rather than the artists who recorded them.

Ryznar admits that the “yacht rock” phrase was meant to gently mock the non-threatening, smooth pop that served as the soundtrack for his short-lived comedy video series, but the name stuck, thanks in large part to jaded music critics who seized on it in their effort to disparage anything that didn’t rock out aggressively with shrieking vocals and shredded guitar solos.

I asked a few music-loving friends what the term “yacht rock” meant to them, and one said, “It’s music for preppy, upper-class, entitled kids (or wanna-be’s thereof) who took the easy-listening way out of having to understand what rock ‘n’ roll was all about.” Another friend added, “Think Tad and Muffy on the back deck in the harbor, dressed in casual (but expensive) Abercrombie attire, with a pitcher of margaritas.”

I beg to differ. Even Ryznar said he used the term affectionately, and those who like this style have embraced the “yacht rock” term. They sold out the Ryman Auditorium last week, as they have in most cities where Yacht Rock Revue have performed, many showing they were in on the joke by wearing captain’s hats and other nautical gear.

It’s music with strong R&B and smooth jazz influences, high production values, clean vocals and light, catchy melodies. In 2014, music writer Matt Colier identified what he feels are the key defining rules of the genre: 1) Keep it smooth, even when it grooves; 2) Keep the emotions light even when the sentiment turns sad; 3) Keep it catchy; 4) Offer the exhilaration of escape.

Bands like Toto and Steely Dan featured a very clean, precise sound that was painstakingly produced, and critics who prefer a rawer brand of rock find that pristine sound to be a negative, synonymous with “too commercial” and “lacking soul or spontaneity.” Rock and roll is meant to be rough around the edges, uncultured, with in-your-face energy and immediacy, they claim. Well, hey, I like loud, growling hard rock too, but there’s room in my music library for both.

On Sirius XM, there’s a station called Yacht Rock Radio that plays this stuff exclusively. “We celebrate the smooth-sailing soft rock from the late 70s and early 80s,” says its website. “It’s the kind of rock that doesn’t rock the boat!”

“Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary,” released in 2024, examines the phenomenon, interviewing a variety of musicians and music industry types who, either enthusiastically or grudgingly, concede that the music in question is sonically top-shelf and melodically satisfying. Thundercat, a Grammy-winning bassist from L.A., said, “I’ve never identified it as yacht rock. I’ve always looked at it from the inside, like, ‘Dang, that’s just amazing songwriting.'”

Comedian/actor/musician Fred Armisen had this to say in the documentary: “Yacht rock, to me, is a very relaxing feeling. The singers all seem to be saying, ‘Hey it’s gonna be OK.'”

In its review of the film, Rotten Tomatoes concluded, “Retroactively dubbed “Yacht Rock” in 2005 by a parody website series, the easy listening, relaxing sounds of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which were beloved by many, came to be gently mocked and even dismissed by rock lovers and critics, but have since reclaimed their legitimate place in music history and are celebrated in this groove-infused film.”

So which artists and songs qualify as yacht rock? The boundaries are actually rather fuzzy, but you might start with Steely Dan. On albums like “The Royal Scam,” “Aja” and “Gaucho,” Donald Fagen and Walter Becker used a broad range of LA-based studio musicians to create the stylish palette they were looking for, and they were perfectionists about it, sometimes trying a half-dozen different guitarists (or drummers or keyboardists) to get just the right take.

Sometimes they used the truly professional musicians who went on to become the members of Toto, who, along with singer Michael McDonald, also guested on the recorded work of Christopher Cross, or Boz Scaggs, or James Ingram, or Nicolette Larson. It was fairly incestuous the way the same names kept popping up on these albums, but that’s because they were the “first call” session musicians most in demand at the time.

Said highly regarded guitarist Jay Graydon, “Many of these songs offered jazz chord changes, but rock/pop grooves. We’re closet jazz guys making pop records — confident, even cocky, and perfect performances every time.”

There are artists who might have a few songs that fall into the yacht rock template but the bulk of their catalog does not. People like Ambrosia, Little River Band, Pablo Cruise, Lionel Richie, Alan Parsons Project, Stephen Bishop, Art Garfunkel, Seals & Crofts, Air Supply, Phil Collins, Grover Washington, Eric Carmen, Steve Winwood and Hall & Oates have heard some of their music played on Yacht Rock Radio. Some are cool with it, but Daryl Hall, for one, took umbrage.

“It’s just R&B, with maybe some jazz in there,” he said. “Mellow R&B, smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is. It was just a fucking joke by two jerkoffs in California, and suddenly it became a genre. I never understood it. People misjudged us because they couldn’t label us. The music press always came up with all these kinds of crap labels. Soft rock, yacht rock. It’s nonsense, really.”

Toto ran into this same problem. Founders David Paich and Jeff Porcaro were seasoned studio players who formed Toto in 1977, blending rock, pop, jazz, funk, even some progressive. Their music didn’t fit easily into a single category, so critics didn’t know how to evaluate them. Ironically, their huge commercial success with tracks like “Africa” and “Rosanna” worked against them, as certain critics looked down their noses and dismissed them as “mainstream” and “anti-rock.” They were called technicians rather than legitimate artists, which were prejudices that had little to do with their actual musical performances.

There are those who label Cross’s 1979 megahit “Sailing” as the ultimate yacht rock anthem largely because of its chill nautical theme. Others say, “Anything with Michael McDonald on it qualifies.” McDonald himself finds the yacht rock designation “hilarious. It’s a bit exaggerated, but these things always have a bit of truth to them. They hit on something, and it has struck a chord for a lot of people out there who find the music nostalgic.”

My friend Paul, who has a lot of experience sailing, noted, “Yacht rock has had a bad rap because it sounds snooty and upper class, while the music is not. I think ‘Summer Breeze’ by Seals and Crofts sums it up very well.”

I’ve collected 30 songs from a variety of “yacht rock” playlists (including 15 from Yacht Rock Revue’s setlist last week) and included my own preferences in the playlist below. If you’re a yacht-rock naysayer, I’d bet good money there are at least five or six songs on this list that you admire, even if only secretly as a “guilty pleasure.”

One of my friends summed up one of the appealing things about yacht rock: “This should be your playlist of choice if you’re trying to get laid.”

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I’m a high night flier and a rainbow rider

Posted on by brucehhackett

In 1970, Hoyt Axton, a folk guitarist/singer/songwriter and actor, had a new song he wanted to record but hadn’t yet written any words for it. His producer told him to “just sing any words to it, nonsense words if you want.”

The first line he thought of was “Jeremiah was a prophet,” but he decided he wanted to make it “a fun, silly song for kids and families to sing.” So the first line became, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine.”

Axton pitched the song to Three Dog Night, the Los Angeles-based pop group then riding high on seven consecutive Top Ten hits. Two of the band’s three singers — Cory Wells and Danny Hutton — rejected the song as wrong for them, but the third singer, Chuck Negron, thought it was just what the group needed and persuaded them to record it.

You know the rest. “Joy to the World” went on to become the top-selling single of 1971 and one of the most played songs on pop radio in the past 50 years. Me? I liked it fine for maybe the first five times I heard it but quickly soured on it because it seemed so slight, so silly, so repetitive and annoying, and frankly, it ended up tarnishing my enthusiasm for the band going forward. But Three Dog Night did quite well indeed without me among their loyal fan base.

Chuck Negron in 1971

Negron, who sang lead on the track and was perhaps the group’s most identifiable face on camera, died this week at age 83. Wells died in 2015, which leaves Hutton as the last surviving member of the trio of singers.

In 2009, Negron defended “Joy to the World,” which he was still singing in concert so many decades later. “I liked it immediately because I thought we could have some fun with it. That opening line had to be screamed. No one seemed to care what it was supposed to mean. It ended up outselling all other singles in 1971, which was a really great year for Top 40 radio.”

In the beginning, Three Dog Night was something different. They formed in 1968 as a three-man vocal group when Wells and Hutton joined forces with Negron, calling themselves Redwood, They first worked with Wells’s good friend Brian Wilson, who had grown disenchanted with his fellow Beach Boys and began producing and championing the new group instead, but that relationship didn’t last. The trio of singers decided to recruit their own backing band, comprised of keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon, bassist Joe Schermie, drummer Floyd Sneed and guitarist Mike Allsup. A strong showing by the group at Whiskey A Go Go and The Troubadour in Hollywood resulted in them winning a record deal, and they decided to change their name to Three Dog Night.

(I remember thinking, as a then-14-year-old, “Three Dog Night? What a stupid name.” Only much later did I learn the intriguing phrase comes from indigenous Australians in the outback, where it often gets chilly enough at night to snuggle with a dingo to stay warm. Sometimes it was cold enough to need two dogs in your bed, and on rare occasions, frosty conditions made it a “three-dog night.”)

With producer Gabriel Mekler (who had also worked with Steppenwolf) at the helm, they chose to focus mostly on songs written by highly regarded but little-known songwriters, some of whom would benefit from mainstream exposure, beginning with Harry Nilsson and his ode to loneliness, “One,” which featured the opening line, “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.” Negron sang lead vocals on that as well, and it vaulted to #5 and put them on the map in the summer of 1969.

That debut LP featured songs by Randy Newman, Neil Young, The Band’s Robbie Robertson and Traffic’s Steve Winwood, and even “It’s For You,” an obscure Lennon-McCartney song written for Cilla Black in 1964. The group’s second album, “Suitable for Framing,” continued that format, with songs by the as-yet undiscovered songwriting duo of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, as well as Laura Nyro, Dave Mason and the trio who wrote the music for the bold Broadway show “Hair.”

The seven members of Three Dog Night: Three singers and four musicians

By the summer of 1970, Three Dog Night boasted a remarkable run of quality hit songs — “One,” “Easy to Be Hard,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Celebrate,” “Mama Told Me Not to Come” and “Out in the Country” — all in less than 18 months. They’d also had a surprise success with their “Captured Live at the Forum” in-concert LP, which peaked at #6 in 1969, and included a high-voltage, show-closing interpretation of the Otis Redding classic, “Try a Little Tenderness.”

As The New York Times obituary on Negron stated the other day, “Flouting the standard practice of top acts in that singer-songwriter-dominated era, Three Dog Night did not compose the bulk of its material. The lack of original pieces brought critical barbs, even unwelcome comparisons to the Monkees, the 1960s group that had been manufactured for TV. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called Three Dog Night ‘as slick as Wesson Oil’ and ‘the kings of oversing.'”

Indeed, there were (and still are) two views on what Three Dog Night offered to the music scene. Robert Hilburn of The Los Angeles Times referred to the group as “a fairly pedestrian hit machine,” acknowledging their commercial clout but dismissing their artistry. A reviewer from The New York Times was much warmer, writing in 1975 that the band “has succeeded in recreating the days when rock and roll was fun music, before relevance and heaviness descended on it all.”

Three Dog Night’s triumvirate of vocal power: Danny Hutton, Chuck Negron and Cory Wells

Negron, Wells and Hutton took turns as lead vocalist on their growing repertoire of songs, and also offered passionate three-part harmonies bolstered by solid rock arrangements by the talented backup band. In my view, Negron’s voice was the best and most emotive of the three. His tenor had great range and impressive control, taking songs like “Easy to Be Hard” and “One” to heights not found when either Wells or Hutton were the featured voice.

Thanks to Mekler and his successor Richard Podolor, the songs shimmered with punchy production values, and not just the singles, like the fiery #7 hit “Liar” and the lovely Dave Loggins tune “Pieces of April,” but the deeper album tracks as well. Witness their convincing covers of Jesse Colin Young’s “Sunlight” and Free’s “I’ll Be Creeping” from the “Naturally” LP.

On the surface, Three Dog Night seemed to be firing on all cylinders. In December 1972, Three Dog Night was the featured act on the inaugural edition of Dick Clark’s “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.” Behind the scenes, though, there was tension, exacerbated by excessive drug use and egos. They continued to chart some big hits — “Never Been to Spain,” “An Old-Fashioned Love Song,” “Black and White,” “Shambala,” “The Show Must Go On” — but to my ears, these were inferior choices that didn’t have the same enduring likability of their earlier work. By 1974, they’d changed producers again, going for The Raspberries’ guy Jimmy Ienner, who pushed them in a more disco-ish direction. The hits stopped, the albums stiffed, and the band dissolved.

Three Dog Night mounted their first of several reunion tours in 1981, and I happened to catch one of those shows. I was delighted that they exceeded my expectations, churning out 90 minutes of almost exclusively familiar hits, and the crowd certainly ate it up. The drug issues that at first sidelined Hutton in the mid-’70s became a much bigger problem for Negron, whose inconsistency and unreliability ended up getting him drummed out of the group in 1985, and he remained estranged from his former bandmates for decades.

Negron, who had been a promising basketball player in high school and college before turning to rock singing, tried and failed multiple times to shake his heroin habit in the ’80s until he finally found the strength in 1992, eventually becoming a strong advocate for those with alcohol and substance abuse issues. In 1999, Negron, published “Three Dog Nightmare,” a harrowing autobiography that provided a frank, sometimes brutal look at the dual life he led for much of the time he sang in the group and afterwards. He told his tale of going from the pinnacle of the rock’n’roll universe to a Skid Row junkie — “lying, cheating, and stealing my way through life, leaving nothing but sorrow and devastation in my wake, hurting everyone who loved me just to get my next fix.” As he put it in a 2015 interview, “The point is not if you think drugs help you create. The point is, they’ll kill you.”

He toured with his own band in the mid-1990s in support of his solo LP “Am I Still in Your Heart,” and he also released the pretty decent live 2-CD package “Chuck Negron — Live in Concert” in 2001, which included most of the Three Dog Night hits.

Negron in 2001

My friend Chris has been a diehard fan of Three Dog Night since he was a young boy, and that devotion has earned him a fair amount of teasing from those of us who don’t share his level of enthusiasm. In the wake of Negron’s death, I asked him to point out some of the deeper tracks in their catalog that he particularly admired (“You,” “Midnight Runaway”) and to explain why he finds their music so appealing. Here’s what he said: “The more I think about it, I realize the true joy I got, and still do, from harmonizing along with them. They were singable in a vocal range I could reach…and the lyrics were so easy! Songs like ‘Celebrate’ and ‘Joy to the World’ are songs I can sing and be absolutely happy, and it never gets old. That’s certainly something I loved about this band.”

Fair enough, Chris. Hard to argue with music that makes you happy.

It was a life of exhilarating peaks and despairing valleys for you, Chuck. May you rest in peace knowing that the songs you sang brought joy to so many, and evidently still do.

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On the Spotify playlist below, I’ve tried to present a healthy cross-section of the hits (whether or not I personally liked them) and some hidden album tracks that are worthy of attention, plus a couple from Negron’s solo releases at the end.