Over Easy:Yachty By Nature
“Was your music ‘yacht rock’?”, an interviewer recently asked me. Youch! He was referring to my 1978 album “Spark of Desire”, but still, I blanched. Wouldn’t you?
Ok, to begin with, I’ll acknowledge that some very respectable artists, like Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, have been shoehorned into a category of pop music that also includes Bertie Higgins (“Key Largo”) and Looking Glass (“Brandy You’re a Fine Girl”). But let’s face it, the term is inherently disparaging – I picture musicians with too much money and too many chords sipping Pina Coladas on the deck of a pleasure craft as the wind does expensive things to their hair. And the music? Shiny on the surface and soft in the middle like under-cooked sponge cake. Who wants to be called that? It would be like being called a “hair band”! You know, those metal bands who say they really want to be your boyfriend, not just chase you around the pool at the Hyatt on Sunset.
As I ponder these sub-genres of pop it occurs to me that they may have some things in common. As for origin stories, yacht rock was surely begat by the soft rock of the 70s and 80s, and who better to take the heat for a world of suckiness than Bread, a group of mostly rich session guys who named their band after a euphemism for money. And who penned such nonsense as,
“Lately I’m a-praying
that you’ll always be
A-staying beside me”
From the unforgivable “Baby I’m-A Want you”.
Or, perhaps you prefer this nugget from “Make it With You”.
“Have you ever tried
Really reaching out for the other side
I may be climbing on rainbows
But baby, here I go”
I want what he’s smoking.
Is it possible that these two strains of music share something? Sure, hair metal is for people who want to raise the horns salute at a concert with no risk of being splashed by fake blood or witnessing a simulated beheading, but those same glam purveyors with the stuffed tights are selling you sentiments like this one From Cinderella’s “Nobody’s Fool”
“I count the falling tears
They fall before my eyes
Seems like a thousand years
Since we broke the ties”
And then there’s,
“I didn’t know you were looking for
More than I could ever be
Not quite a year since you went away”
But wait, that’s from “Rosanna” by Toto.
Now admittedly, no yacht rocker would sing,
“Swingin’ in the living room, swingin’ in the kitchen
Most folks don’t cause they’re too busy bitchin’
Swingin’ in there cause she wants me to feed her
So I mixed up the batter and she licked the beater”
Whew! Aside from the diabolically clever rhyme scheme , that’s a slice of serious lyricism. Of course, it’s actually a slice of “Cherry Pie” from Warrant. I recently watched the video to see if there were any hidden meanings that I’d missed when this sort of thing occupied a major chunk of MuchMusic’s programming day, back in the 80’s. You know, the kind of secret messages that Taylor Swift plants in her videos. I don’t think there are any.
But the line gets blurred between,
“Though it’s been a while now
I can still feel so much pain
Like a knife that cuts you the wound heals
But the scar, that scar remains”
From “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” from Poison, or Poisson as we used to refer to them in the Much programming committee. How does that stack up against this treacly offering from Paul Davis?
“I sometimes wonder why
All the flowers have to die
I dream about you
And now, summer’s come and gone
And the nights they seems so long
Let me clear, though I may be a bit yachty by nature, that’s not my style any more than hair metal. If you’ve read this far, I feel guilty that I have no convenient conclusion to offer you, except that I’m glad the flowers die, because the garden would get awfully crowded. And if you’re sailing with Christopher Cross and he plays Quiet Riot on his high end Bose system, get out your horns. And be careful when you’re climbing on those rainbows.
