Best That You Can Do

Why you shouldn't skip the new Yacht Rock documentary

Hello, true blue readers. A warm welcome to those of you who are just dropping by.

Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting here in 2024. I appreciate you more than you’ll ever know. Of all my writing over the past year, I’m probably proudest of my Hard Truths for Poor Artists series. A gazillion thanks for your support of it and all the writing here!

I’ve been ruminating about how much confidence matters in this Substack game. Too often, instead of simply sharing my research and interests, I feel a need to attempt profound insight in these posts. My Christmas gift to myself and you, dear reader, is to ease up. Stop seeking the philosopher’s stone in every post. Write more often and more casually here. Share more video interviews with fascinating people. Slowly crafted essays will still happen. But I do try to live in a state of inspiration with my reading, viewing, and listening; I couldn’t stop thinking and talking about the meaning of things if I tried. That alone is worth sharing with you—and if I keep saying it, maybe I’ll believe it.

I’ll start right now.

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It’s the time of best-of-year lists. I’m always happy to learn about books, movies, and music I’ve missed. Best-of lists, though, are usually more than a simple accounting of what we like. They also reflect who we want to be and/or how we want to be seen. Lists are aspirational signs of our desired coolness, sophistication, virtue, rebellion, or depth.

Yacht Rock is none of that.

Yacht Rock is who we were conquered in a car seat or the dentist’s chair. In line at the supermarket. Yacht Rock is the soft sound of idle moments, moments we were given rather than made. Anyone who was alive in the late 70s/early 80s remembers Yacht Rock’s smoothness ruling the airwaves. Pop music, yes, but before Walkmans and the personal curation era, when popular meant public, ubiquitous, and inescapable. Unlike punk or the jazz loft scene, nobody chose Yacht Rock. Yacht Rock claimed us.

Long before the term Yacht Rock was in conversance, my sisters and I referred to this genre as “Lake Afton Songs.” These songs conjure the late ‘70s/early ‘80s when we were preschoolers/grade schoolers spending summer days at the lake with my Mom, Aunt, and cousins. In our sibling vocabulary, Lake Afton Songs mean learning to swim, vinyl chaise lounge chairs, baby oil tans, and coolers stocked with canned Tab and jarred Kool-Aid mixed fresh that morning. More than anything, Lake Afton Songs reference music from a time when the radio seemed as fundamental to our lives as air and water. Music to take for granted, not music to take seriously.

Yacht Rock’s reputation for banality is exactly what makes the excellence of Music Box: Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary such a delightful surprise. The Garret Price doc, which has been streaming since late November, is substantive and incisive enough to possibly even revise understandings of its subject. The film traces yacht rock’s development, offers stories behind the songs, and explores why all yacht rock is soft rock, but not all soft rock is yacht rock. Not Yacht Rock: Hall & Oates (too Philly), Fleetwood Mac (no jazz), and the Eagles (too country).

Neither Yacht Rock nor this new documentary has any aspirations or claims to be the best of anything, which gives the film freedom and possibility.

Here are five elements of its success. According to me.

Comedians establish its tone and perspective

The film starts with Yacht Rock’s naming. In the mid-aughts, a group of Los Angeles comedians, including Steve Huey and J.D. Ryznar, noticed some serious inbreeding on the album credits for late 70s/early 80s pop albums, which were then plentiful in Amoeba Records’ dollar bins. The Toto musicians played everywhere, as did Michael McDonald and others. It looked like a scene. Comedians know from scenes because comedy runs on them. These comedians parodied the newfound music scene in a 2005 online video series they called Yacht Rock. The term stuck.

But Yacht Rock was no venerated scene like, say, folk in Greenwich Village or bebop on 52nd Street. We tend to regard our taste for those musical scenes so seriously that documentaries about them can’t help reflecting reverence, developing a worshipful tone. Yacht Rock musicians would be the first to tell you they were not Charlie Parker searching for the lost chord. For all of Yacht Rock’s top-notch musicianship, its players were out to craft and score hits, to make a buck. Commercialism set their course. This is the rare music doc that doesn’t feel compelled to glorify its subject. Instead, Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary keeps its perspective informative and its tone light, fun—the irony is that the doc’s easygoing attitude elevates its subject.

Steely Dan is credited but not blamed for Yacht Rock

Besides the polarizing term itself, another common objection to Yacht Rock is Steely Dan’s inclusion in the category. For the comedians who coined the term, Steely Dan is the genre’s ground zero, or “the primordial ooze from whence yacht rock sprang”—but critically, not Yacht Rock itself.

After the success of Aja, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s extensive use of session players, incorporation of R&B and jazz into pop/rock, and polished production techniques became a kind of blueprint, giving other closet jazzers license to use extended chords within pop grooves and aim for studio perfection without necessarily sacrificing soul. Steely Dan’s big sales also prepped the mainstream public for smoother, more complex pop music. But in this film, Steely Dan is depicted as the progenitor of Yacht Rock, not a club member. No one suggests any of the music that followed had The Dan’s excellence. Nuanced distinctions are made.

Donald Fagen fans will also relish his brief, true-to-character appearance at the end of the film. (I was scheduled to interview Donald Fagen and Walter Becker together for my Wayne Shorter book. Then Donald pulled out. “It’s just me,” Walter apologized. I was flooded with relief.)

Yacht Rockers are depicted as virtuosic working stiffs in the studio

The documentary did manage to get interviews with most of Yacht Rock’s major players: Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, the Toto musicians, etc. The film then affords them the respect and humility of working musicians.

By the mid-70s, this group of LA studio musicians could read and play music in several styles. As Toto’s Steve Lukather points out, some of them also had “arranger ears.” They could hear and create parts on the spot. Valuable advanced musicianship in the studio, where time is money. But working on hundreds or thousands of sessions left most of these musicians with enduring humility. They were paid to serve the track at hand. Who had time for ego and its pretensions when you were a journeyman with a couple more studio sessions to make that day?

The film’s musician commentators, now of advanced age, are both self-effacing and clear-eyed enough to tell Yacht Rock stories well. More than anything, they remember the work of music. Its making.

Even Kenny Loggins, whose origins were more in songwriting than the studio’s salt mines, is careful to credit Stevie Nicks’ popularity for propelling their 1976 duet “Whenever I Call You Friend” to number five on the charts. Nicks made his solo career, he acknowledges in the film. Why would Loggins pretend otherwise? Yacht Rock is not some singer-songwriter’s holy land of self-mythologies. We’re just talking about making some pop records here, these musicians shrug.

“Whenever I Call You Friend” was playing at Lake Afton the day my cousin Bob and I wandered over to a van whose back doors were open to tangled, naked bodies on a mattress inside.

We had no idea what we were seeing. We ran back to our Moms. “People are kissing inside that van!” we announced.

They looked toward the van. “Stay away from there,” my Aunt said. I seem to remember pot smoke billowing from the van, though my memory may be embellishing the scene.

We wandered on, free to see what else we could see. In the days when soft rock was a public soundtrack, kids went hard, making their own adventure.

The doc departs from dominant cultural appropriation narratives but offers a powerful celebration of Black culture

The film is careful to acknowledge Black music’s influence on Yacht Rock’s biggest stars, but doesn’t frame this relationship as malicious cultural appropriation. Questlove, one of the film’s Black commentators, instead invokes the mysteries of cultural transmission when he confesses he assumed much of the radio’s Yacht Rock was by Black musicians until he saw its white players on album covers.

Commentator Jason King criticizes Toto for its gawd-awful “Africa” lyrics. Fully deserved. Yet the film doesn’t lecture viewers on how to think or feel about musical influences. Instead, it celebrates Black ingenuity and taste. Repeatedly. Black culture is even remembered for carrying the Yacht Rock flame in the music’s years of ignominy: De La Soul’s sample of Steely Dan’s “Peg” on the 1989 “Eye Now;” Warren G’s sample of Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’” on the 1994 “Regulate.”

****The film fails to discuss song royalties or ticket sales, which is where appropriation’s costs matter most. I wish it had. ****

I remember an early aughts night in a Brooklyn bar when someone dissed the Doobie Brothers. My DC-raised Black friend, the gift-of-gab endowed Tom Terrell, gave a discursive lecture on the band’s merits, tracing how the good-time boogie band evolved to play jazzy, R&B-seasoned pop with tricky time signatures and describing how much the band meant to him. Other Black bar patrons murmured their assent. Tom had a whole Hard Truths on Soft Rock series in him.

“Yacht rock is associated with white groups and white songwriters and producers, but I know more Black yacht rock than I do traditional yacht rock,” Questlove says onscreen, echoing another bullet point in Tom’s extemporaneous lecture that night. Artists such as Al Jarreau in general, The Pointer Sisters with “Slow Hand,” and George Benson with “Turn Your Love Around.”

Here’s Questlove’s broad-minded Yacht Rock playlist dedicated to his friend Anthony Bourdain:

Michael McDonald or the “really funky Muppet”

“One way to know if you are listening to yacht rock is if you hear the sound of Michael McDonald’s voice,” the doc asserts. Commentator Jason King remarks that this Yacht Rock king could testify like an R&B or gospel singer while sounding like no one but himself. When Questlove was a kid, he heard McDonald as a “really funky Muppet.” Other documentaries might leave this comment on the cutting room floor, but Questlove delivered his accurate, memorable description with love. It stayed in. McDonald’s ubiquity in the period’s music is also remembered as the stuff of comedy. Here’s Rick Moranis playing him in an SCTV parody:

McDonald was, of course, a major songwriter as well as yacht rock’s omnipresent voice. He and Kenny Loggins wrote “What a Fool Believes,” yacht rock’s often-copied high-water mark—“Steal Away,” for example, took its piano riff from the tune. McDonald and Loggins feared a sophomore songwriting slump but managed to follow “What A Food Believes” with another record of the year: “This Is It.”

In the film, David Pack tells a story about asking McDonald for songwriting advice. McDonald revealed to Pack that he studied Handel practice books for chord progression secrets. McDonald doesn’t offer this Handel story himself because he’s smart enough to know such a claim would invite musical analysis to which his songs might not stand up. McDonald is Yacht Rock’s modest center. Its self-deprecating core. Seeing the essential McDonald present himself as a minor player is itself a reason to watch the film.

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This Is It

When it comes to musical meaning, there’s what music means for music, what music means for the wider culture(s), and what music means for us personally. The best music writing or coverage helps us connect all these meanings.

I’d known that Lake Afton Songs-cum-Yacht Rock’s role in my childhood meant it would always conjure a warm imaginary place where life’s possibilities are wide open. I’d also known that Yacht Rock’s openness of spirit for me was partly a product of its elite musicianship and killer chord progressions.

The documentary combined those meanings with fascinating perspectives from Questlove, Thundercat, and others, delivering a new understanding that, in a sense, Michael McDonald and co. probably got me ready to embrace Carla Bley and Ambrose Akinmusire as a teen and adult. Nothing else in my rural Kansas upbringing did.

When I turned seven, I started begging my Mom for permission to swim across a section of Lake Afton. She finally agreed, swimming with me and dragging a tube. “Steal Away” was playing on the radio when we left shore.

“You might get out in the middle and want to hold onto this tube when you see how far from shore you are,” she said.

I didn’t. The farther from shore I swam, the calmer and stronger I felt. After that, every time I headed out to swim, my Mom said, “Good for you!” with genuine enthusiasm and turned back to one of my younger siblings. Open-water swimming became one of my things.

I used to think my swimming was brave. But I only first dared to swim so far out into that brown lake because my loving family formed an invisible tether back to shore.

I used to think my taste in music indicated some predisposition for originality. But maybe I only listened so deeply into adventurous improv later because Yacht Rock primed me for it.

We take so much for granted. We leave so much behind. Sometimes, the best that you can do is fall in love with what you were free to disregard or abandon.

Happy New Year to you and yours.