There is a term in linguistics called constructed or con-languages. In the same way, many music fans love to come up with con-genres. Yacht Rock is one example.
JD Ryznar, along with David Lyons and Hunter Stair, are the creators of Yacht Rock as a genre. During her Desert Island Discs appearance, the DJ Zoe Ball has spoken of her love of the genre, particularly the music of Steely Dan and Toto. But what defines the genre, which is perfect for people who pop out to the sea and listen to some smooth music?
Following the creators of the genre, the parameters are broken down as follows:
· Era. The true Yacht Rock track was recorded between 1978 and 1982.
· Personnel. Usually the band set-up was a session band containing keyboard players like David Paich, guitarist like Jay Graydon, Lee Ritenour and Steve Lukather, and at least two of the Porcaro brothers: Jeff (drums), Steve (keys) and Mike (bass). David Foster and Greg Phillinganes may also be involved. Vocalists like Michael McDonald were imperative to the yacht rock sound.
· Sound: The Doobie Brothers pioneered what is known as the ‘Doobie Bounce’, a shuffle driven by a distinctive keyboard pattern and regular drumbeat.
· Lyrical themes: Love is the key theme of Yacht Rock, as we shall discover, whether in love or just out of it. The fool rears its head above many Yacht Rock classics, as our protagonist realises he has done wrong and lost something good.
Greg Prato’s book on Yacht Rock includes a playlist of acts and songs, which helped inspire this list. Beyond Yacht Rock, founded by the team behind the web series to create new con-genres, began to ‘throw a bone’ to the genre by discovering new tunes.
Eventually, listeners put forward selections ‘for the boat’, some of which were laughed off the vessel. Peaceful Easy Feeling by the Eagles, The Beach Boys’ Kokomo and Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett are all decidedly ‘nyacht’, or ‘not Yacht Rock’. Modern songs by Bruno Mars and Field Music were also nyacht rock. The complete list can be found on YachtOrNyacht.com.
Rather brilliantly, the guys restarted their show and have set up a Patreon page offering patrons listening parties where they offer a commentary on classic albums and news about their forthcoming book. There is also a Discord server for fans to communicate with one another and listen to thematic playlists. $1000 donations can be made by Kenny Loggins or Michael McDonald if they chose to do so; they would be a fool not to give!
A useful starting point for this list of 40 songs is that Channel 101 webseries from the 2005. Channel 101 was a monthly competition for filmmakers to roadtest ideas, and one team of competitors were three blokes who would go on to take their short films to the masses: The Lonely Island.
In conversation with Rolling Stone magazine to celebrate a decade since the series was first screened, JD Ryznar told the tale of meeting a crew of guys from Michigan, his home state: Dave Lyons, Hunter Stair and Steve Huey who, thanks to a blink-and-miss-him role as an extra in Pirates of the Caribbean, styled himself Hollywood Steve. The guys would meet every weekend and listen to old records where ‘there’s guys on boats on the covers’.
Dave came up with the term Marina Rock, and Steve got heavily into Steely Dan (‘This is my new identity. I’m gonna unwind…and leave parties early’). Hunter and Dave wanted to make a series about ‘a couple of jewel thieves who lived on a yacht’ or a detective duo called Loggins & Loggins.
The first episode was a standalone video which described the origins of What A Fool Believes, the ultimate Yacht Rock song. The episode was introduced by music critic Hollywood Steve: ‘If you look up a lot of nineties rap albums on All Music Guide [an early website that was a sort of musical Wikipedia], chances are Hollywood Steve wrote the review,’ says JD.
We see Kenny Loggins (played by Hunter Stair) approach Michael McDonald (JD Ryznar), while Hall and Oates prat around arrogantly saying that smooth music ‘sucks’. Michael is told to write a hit song and Loggins thinks he is the man to help him do it. But Michael knows what happened to Jim Messina (Lane Farnham), a broken man who cannot move on from his musical partnership with Loggins. ‘This is gonna be me, I know it,’ sighs Michael.
Loggins and music mogul Koko Goldstein visit him to reminisce about ‘the good times’. Loggins starts to mime a Loggins & Messina song but Messina throws up. At this point Michael McDonald calls Loggins ‘a sentimental fool’ for trying to rekindle his friendship ‘just by mustering a smile and telling some nostalgic tales. That’s what a fool believes!!’
Cut to the opening strains of What A Fool Believes and a happy montage where McDonald and Loggins play around with legal pads. Hall and Oates, especially John Oates, challenge the pair to a songwriting contest ‘but that’s another story’, says Hollywood Steve, daring the audience to vote them forward to enable them to film that story.
The idea for Koko Goldstein (Dave Lyons) came from the cover of a Doobie Brothers album; Hunter thought he looked cool and Dave brought the creation to life. According to JD Ryznar, Dave ‘put on a bunch of garbage Seventies clothes’ and a whistle around his neck.
Yacht Rock Episode One did win the night, so the guys could shoot that second episode. Koko is killed by a harpoon, becoming a martyr for Yacht Rock and telling his acolytes to ‘keep the fire’. Hunter thinks that episode is ‘the finest hour’ of the series and features my favourite line in the 12-episode series: ‘It’s so smooth!’
Christopher Cross, played by Justin Roiland of Rick & Morty fame, strums and mimes the song Sailing, a song Roiland had never heard before. ‘It’s an acquired taste,’ Roiland tells Rolling Stone. People went nuts for Cross and the team won again. ‘I think we might be rock stars,’ Hollywood Steve remembers thinking.
A few years after the webseries became popular, it was uploaded onto Youtube, which didn’t exist in early 2005. Word of Yacht Rock had spread: the guys were invited to Chicago to see all ten episodes back to back and, as JD says: ‘There was a line down the block…People were quoting lines.’
The 11th episode, which opened in Yacht Rock style with Hollywood Steve in a sticky situation (here ‘becoming estranged from my spouse’), told the tale of the theme song from Footloose aka ‘The Boy Who Dances Away Oppression’. Jimmy Buffett and Kevin Bacon open the episode then we cut to Michael McDonald, who is with James Ingram, played by a broke Wyatt Cenac, just before he landed his life-changing gig at The Daily Show. The pair are writing Yah Mo Be There and ring up Kenny Loggins, who pauses his karate workout and heads over to write with the pair of them.
But Jimmy Buffett blows a dart and captures Loggins, trapping him in a Buffett commune where only Jimmy Buffett music plays. Just like Kevin Bacon in Footloose, Loggins breaks free from this captive world with the help of…McDonald and Ingram who realise their friend has been seized by a man whose music is ‘mellow, but not smooth’. Cue a montage over the song Footloose as Buffett’s commune is turned into a bloodbath-cum-party with a thrust of Loggins’ groin.
Dave Lyons famously detests Jimmy Buffett: ‘I think it’s garbage music for people who have no interest in listening to anything good…[He’s] a rich dude getting richer off of the lack of taste of the poor and stupid.’ JD agrees, saying Buffett seeks to ‘paint a rosy picture of a reality that does not exist’. Never forget that you have to love music so much to hate music so much.
The final episode called Danger Zone is a glorious failure. It is ‘the space battle’, as JD calls it, where poor Hollywood Steve is killed off. Loggins tries to convince McDonald to soundtrack a Hollywood film, and we cut to Planet Synthos where Giorgio Moroder is told to find a ‘relevant pop star’.
Many of them are to be found recording We Are The World. Loggins is in, as are LaToya Jackson, Kim Carnes and of course Hall and Oates; McDonald, captioned the ‘Voice of the Seventies’, is not allowed in and spends a montage moping around, wailing and plucking hairs out of his beard.
His solution, in a throwback to the opening episode of the series, is to see poor Jim Messina who tells him to ‘charm that snake’. Here Christopher Cross pops out with a keytar and bellows: ‘Reinvent your image in a desperate attempt at relevance!!’ Cue a montage set to Christopher Cross’ awful Charm That Snake. The series is fun and educational, too.
Moroder appears ‘from the outer space’ looking for someone to record Danger Zone to stop his home planet from exploding. Then the plot dissolves into silliness, as Michael McDonald tries to prevent the death of Kenny Loggins with the help of Dan Aykroyd, who was at the recording of We Are The World because he stole McDonald’s invitation.
Loggins battles Hall and Oates with lasers and ‘really smooth music’ but McDonald, flying the Millennium Falcon (which he procured with Aykroyd’s help) offers sweet freedom from the lasers over McDonald’s killer soundtrack anthem Sweet Freedom. Then something happens at the end that ties up the series after 12 episodes (or does it??).
By 1985, the time of Danger Zone and Sweet Freedom, Yacht Rock as a genre was over. Nobody wanted smooth music any more: Toto were a shadow of their former selves, Steely Dan were no longer active, ditto the Doobies. Yet JD, the real JD Ryznar, was being invited to Hall and Oates and Steely Dan gigs.
Dave Lyons tells a story about how Michael McDonald and Steely Dan were playing a show in California and when they played Showbiz Kids they threw their captain’s hats down ‘and stomped on them. We just looked at each other and went: “They know who we are.”’
McDonald found the series ‘hilarious…It’s kind of like when you get a letter from a stalker who’s never met you.’ Likewise Toto’s Steve Porcaro, who collared Hunter Stair and asked if the Yacht Rock guys really did hate Toto. Hunter assured him that that was untrue; he argues that it was a smooth music version of the Blues Brothers: ‘We took the music that we really loved that we weren’t really part of and reintroduced it to our own generation.’
Such is the background to the con-genre Yacht Rock. The Only Yacht Rock Book You Need Vol 1will be launched later in 2022 via Constable Books and it’ll contain many, if not all, of the following 40 tunes.
The Hot 100 number one that is likely to be the most successful Yacht hit is What A Fool Believes. It came from the pair of Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins – my 40 songs includes versions of the former track by both men – but was a hit for the Doobie Brothers after they recruited the Bearded Wonder for the album Minute by Minute, whose title track follows What A Fool Believes on the album and is also perfectly ‘yachty’. McDonald wrote that one and I Keep Forgetting, which was later sampled on Regulate by Warren G (and parodied on the Yacht Rock webseries).
Loggins, meanwhile, had a series of hits under his own name after splitting from the duo Loggins & Massina. This Is It features in the webseries, with some great miming from Hunter Stair, while JD Ryznar takes backing vocals as McDonald. I also end the playlist with Keep The Fire, given that the motto of the webseries is exactly that. There’s a Loggins song called Heart to Heart but I’ve chosen a different copyright by Bobby King, a great production with a superb vocal.
A key contingent for the genre is the presence of the studio band Toto: three men called Porcaro, keyboardist/arranger David Paich and guitarist Steve Lukather were available around the clock to lay down the tracks. The Yacht Rock Wrecking Crew also played on Thriller: The Girl Is Mine was the album’s first single, a blockbuster duet between Michael Jackson and the man whose catalogue he would buy, Paul McCartney.
As Toto, their own garlanded work includes soft-rock evergreen Africa and Rosanna, which have both been faithfully covered faithfully by Weezer, and Hold The Line, a bouncy tune with a crunching riff and a Lukatherian solo (copyright JD Ryznar).
The other Yacht Rock studio wizards were Steely Dan, the project of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, two jazz-trained musicians who saw money in rock’n’roll. They came up with some of the most inventive pieces of the era, including Peg, which was later sampled by De La Soul on Eye Know. Tupac’s song Do For Love was based on the chorus of the equally smooth What You Won’t Do For Love by Bobby Caldwell.
Baby Come Back by Player (‘I was wrong and I just can’t live without you) and the shrug-in-song Nothin’ You Can Do About It by Airplay are both breezy pop songs with maximum smoothness; the former has a particularly brilliant middle eight which ends on a pause before the final chorus and wigout. Our old friend David Foster co-wrote the latter track along with Jay Graydon, who also produced and co-wrote Turn Your Love Around for George Benson along with Lukather and Bill Champlin, another regular cast member of the YRWC (see above).
The producer of Thriller, of course, was Q, Quincy Jones, of whom JD Ryznar does a mean impression. Q’s own album The Dude features keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, who became Michael Jackson’s MD on tour, while Q’s smooth mate Herbie Hancock also guests alongside Lukather. The album kicks off with Ai No Corrida, co-written by of all people Chaz Jankel from Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
There are songs written by Steve Wonder, Mann & Weil and Rod Temperton. Something Special is a Temperton tune with a smooth groove; vocals come from Patti Austin, who had her own album with James Ingram, who sings on three Dude tracks. Temperton also wrote Do You Love Me?, the opening track of the Every Home Should Have One LP with a so-called Doobie Bounce; things get slower later in the album on MOR tune Baby Come To Me, yet another Temperton composition. Give Me The Night by George Benson, which rivals Baby Come Back for best middle eight of the genre, was also written by Cleethorpes’ finest son. Research shows that he had five homes around the world. Surely he could have afforded a yacht too…
If so he would have gone Sailing (clunky segue). Christopher Cross had his career killed by MTV, but just before the less telegenic stars were overtaken by the likes of Madonna and Duran Duran, he swept the Grammy Awards thanks to the might of Sailing and Ride The Like Wind, which had backing vocals from the Bearded Wonder: ‘Such a long way to go’ never sounded so aching.
A song isn’t just Yacht Rock by its subject matter – Sail On Sailor by the Beach Boys is nyacht (not Yacht Rock) – but this song is. The arrangement comes from Michael Omartian, another YRWC member who had played on records by Loggins & Messina and also (fun fact) was the accordion player on Piano Man by Billy Joel. The duo Neilson/Pearson brought us If You Should Sail, which has both the Doobie Bounce, some synthesised horns and the word ‘stowaway’ in the lyric. Bear in mind Yacht Rock as a genre was not named until 30 years later and it is remarkably prescient. Likewise the concept of ‘the fool’, which pops up in the title of the Larsen/Feiten Band song Who’ll Be The Fool Tonight which is only bettered by the Bruce Roberts song Cool Fool, which plays a key role in the final official Beyond Yacht Rock podcast.
Funk and soul were brought together by two artists who were critically and commercially acclaimed. On Silk Degrees, Boz Scaggs crooned tunes like What Can I Say, Lido Shuffle and Lowdown, while Raydio frontman and future Ghostbuster theme tune writer Ray Parker Jr looked to the holiday season on Christmas Time Is Here. Jingle bells never sounded so smooth!!
As you can see, Yacht Rock is a mainly masculine genre (hey, so was the music industry in 1981) but the odd lady gets through. The Pointer Sisters jive along to He’s So Shy, which comes across as a pastiche of What A Fool Believes, while Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb have nothing to be Guilty of. Amusingly, that album has a song called What Kind of Fool!
There’s a fine line between MOR and Yacht rock, so tunes like Reminiscing by Little River Band, You Need a Hero by Pages and Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck could also have made it onto the MOR playlist.
There’s the pair of Still The One by Orleans and Biggest Part of Me by Ambrosia, two anonymous acts on big labels who both scored smooth harmony-soaked top 5 smashes. As night follows day, there was money to be made in copying the smash. Steal Away by Robbie Dupree is a homage, let’s say, to What A Fool Believes with sitar sound effects, while even Hall & Oates caught the bounce on Kiss On My List, a number one hit single with a chorus full of weird chords.
There is weirdness of a different kind in Escape, the Rupert Holmes tune based on a loop and a lyric about a personal ad which asks ‘if you like Piña Coladas and getting caught in the rain…come to me and escape’. The punchline is so strange that the song remains in conversation four decades later, with a Jimmy Fallon skit pointing out the absurdity and depth of the song, which even has lashings of waves throughout the song
A similar voice belongs to Stephen Bishop whose gorgeous song Save It For A Rainy Day, complete with vocalised wigout, is far better than his soppy ballad Separate Lives which made him an extraordinary amount of money. By the way, listen to the groove of Easy Lover by Phil Collins (who was the male voice on Separate Lives) to hear how that bouncy rhythm was still popular in 1985.
As shown by the recent success of Bruno Mars and Anderson.Paak’s Silk Sonic project, great production that recalls the golden studio era can stand out in any period. Daft Punk’s album Random Access Memories was a eulogy in sound to 70s production styles and they roped in Todd Edwards for the smooth Fragments of Time, which includes a fabulous instrumental section. I always remember reading how a record executive commented on how the production on Omar Hakim’s drumkit sounded expensive. There was money in the industry in the Yacht Rock era. Bass wizard Thundercat was so enamoured by the genre that he got Loggins and McDonald to guest on Show You The Way; indeed, had he been born 40 years earlier Thundercat might have played on some of those Toto or Doobie Brothers albums.
There is even a band called Yacht Rock Revue who are touring some original material across America in 2022 which will sit alongside covers of the genre’s classics including Escape, What a Fool Believes and the Loggins tune Heart to Heart. If you ask the Beyond Yacht Rock crew, or look at their setlist, you will see they are a soft rock covers band rather than exclusively ‘yacht rock’. Yet their homage to the genre, the 2020 album Hot Dads in Tight Jeans, includes the sex jam The Doobie Bounce and the promotional single Step, delivered in falsetto and full of production trickery and, naturally, some saxophone.
The band have been inspired by a podcast based on a webseries outlining a genre which was popular while the creators of the podcast and webseries were too young to vote. Such is culture in the age of everything.
I’ll use the guidelines above to write a Yacht Rock song of the sort that Yacht Rock Revue wrote. The Doobie Bounce would have been a great title! You can hear my effort, Foolin’ Around, here.
The full Yacht Rock playlist can be heard here.