Boz Scaggs - Silk Degrees

The other day the bins at Redrum Records coughed up not one, but two Boz Scaggs albums: his 1976 multi-platinum Silk Degrees and its 1977 platinum follow-up Down Two Then Left. There are times I'll pair albums like this, but today I just don't have it in me. Although I wouldn't be surprised if I end up doing a two-fer anyway. At the moment I don't see it ... I just want to get through this one.

Silk Degrees celebrated its 50th birthday this past February and is considered in many circles an undeniable classic. Oh, if you're waiting for me to drop the term Yacht Rock you'll be waiting a while. Personally, I cannot stand the label, as frankly it's lazy and dismissive. "Oh look, someone used a complicated arrangement and a grownup guitar chord - this must be Yacht Rock." You can't see me, but I'm sitting at my keyboard giving that sentence The Johnny Cash Salute.

Over the years I have become well aware of the involvement of Jeff Porcaro, David Hungate and David Paich before they formed TOTO. What I wasn't aware of was that David Paich co-wrote the majority of the songs on the album.

Sadly, my record didn't have a credit or lyric insert, but I can look it up on Discogs. Among the guitarists were Les Dudek, who played slide on "Jump Street," and Fred Tackett and Louie Shelton, who seemed to play everything else. Another name that popped up was the king of the flugelhorn, Mister Chuck Findley.

If you're getting the sense that I'm dancing around the subject, you're not wrong.

Over the last 50 years I've struggled with the enigma that is Boz Scaggs. It's how he sings. Or more to the point, it's the vocal affectations he seems to love adopting that just ruin it for me. It's like sugar in the gas tank, a stick in the spokes, a poke in the eye, a smack upside the head, or a kick in the ear-nuts whenever I hear him sing.

It actually bugged me that it bugged me, so I looked it up and got this from Google: "Boz Scaggs' singing - often playfully compared to the voice of Kermit the Frog - is formally known as vocal fry combined with a pharyngeal voice placement." I don't buy the vocal fry part, and Kermit is a stretch, but a Muppet? Absolutely. There's a part of me that would love to hear Boz sneak in a "Waka waka" for shits and giggles.

What really gets me is that there are a lot of examples on Silk Degrees where Mister (trying to be respectful) Scaggs sings ... I mean, really sings. The guy can truly sing when he's not trying to be a cartoon voice-over actor. "Lido Shuffle" is awesome. "Lowdown" musically, is amazing, but then he sings and it nearly derails the song. It's the music that keeps pulling me back, but the singing ... oh my goodness.

Now I suspect I'm in the minority on this one. After all, this album was huge. Little countries like Australia and Canada each sold over 300,000 copies. In the US it went five-times platinum. So a lot, I mean a lot, of people loved this one.

I'm okay saying, "It's not you, it's me" on this one. I think I must have misophonia of the ear, because the sound of Boz in Muppet Mode makes me want to jump out of a moving car.

I've been playing it for about a week trying to figure it out and I'm still waffling on this one. Musically this is so good. Yes, it was 1976 and stylistically there are some giveaways: the strings, the disco influence (which I have to say is way, way better than I ever expected) and the tendency to fade out songs just as they get going.

Boz crafted his own style, and whether or not it floats your boat (fine, that is a yacht reference, I couldn't help myself), the guy was surrounded by the best of the best, and the more I listen the better it gets. It's sort of like the old adage, "How do you boil a frog?" I'm the frog. I came in cold and kept listening over and over, and eventually it just got hotter and hotter, and before I knew it I was cooked.

He kept turning up the heat by Silk Degrees ... ha ha ha.

I think I'm primed and ready for Down Two Then Left ... but not today.

I'll see myself out.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock, almost progressive at times who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , "Don...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

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