Music

BEYOND YACHT ROCK:

The Lost Prince of Yacht Rock: In 1978 he was music’s next big thing. Then his album bombed, he began a long slide into obscurity, and a bizarre fraud sent him to prison. Will Dane Donohue finally get his encore? (Keith Barry, March 25, 2021, Narratively)

Donohue’s only album fits squarely into a genre that’s now commonly called “yacht rock,” a neologism for a sound you’re probably familiar with even if you weren’t alive in the 1970s. Think Michael McDonald’s husky “I Keep Forgettin’” or the shuffle beat of Toto’s “Rosanna.” The genre has cycled through popularity, ridicule, nostalgia and respect, all the way back to popularity again: There’s a “yacht rock” station on SiriusXM that plays ’70s soft rock hits, and hipsters in captain’s hats sing Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” at karaoke. There’s even been a yacht rock–themed Peloton workout.

Since its release in 1978, Dane Donohue has gained a cult following among yacht rock fans. That’s because it’s a seminal work in the development of the genre, says “Hollywood” Steve Huey, a former AllMusic critic. Huey would know: Along with JD Ryznar, David B. Lyons and Hunter Stair, he co-created the mockumentary that gave yacht rock its name. They also hosted the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast, and they are writing a book about the genre too.

“You can hear this older kind of David Geffen, Asylum kind of sound — it sounds like the whole Laurel Canyon kind of scene, the early ’70s stuff,” Huey says, referring to the Los Angeles neighborhood where folk-rockers like the Mamas & the Papas and Joni Mitchell lived in the ’60s and early ’70s, and where the Eagles honed their sound. You could mistake the first few songs on Donohue’s album for Jackson Browne. But then you hit songs like “Woman” or “Can’t Be Seen,” and it’s a total paradigm shift. “You can also hear where the music is going, where the Southern California sound is about to go over the next few years.” More horns, more rhythm, more jazzy chord progressions.

Dane Donohue was lucky enough to be in the studio at an important moment in the L.A. music scene, when studio musicians started merging the tight ensemble work of funk and Motown, the screaming guitar solos of rock, the creativity of jazz, the rhythms of Rio, the blues-tinged R&B of Stax, and the introspective singer-songwriter melodies of the Laurel Canyon era, while superstar producers started using the latest technology to make slick, flawless recordings. And Donohue’s voice — which blended the airy twanginess of a Nashville tearjerker with the drama and clarity of a Broadway first act finale — was an ideal vessel to cross over between the old and new worlds of Southern California soft rock.

Yacht rock lyrics tend to deal with divorce, male loneliness and suburban ennui — a far cry from the vitality of war protests and civil rights anthems of a decade earlier. But more important, yacht rock is a sound, and that sound was defined by the tight-knit group of studio musicians who inadvertently created the genre. The guys behind yacht rock — and with the exception of a handful of backup singers, it was always guys — were among the most talented in the business. They made names for themselves as “first call” musicians, who artists and producers would specifically request for their albums. And the best of the best played on Dane Donohue.

Critics dismissed what came out of the Southern California studios as radio-friendly soft rock, but it permeated popular music for nearly a decade, its influence seeping into every genre from disco to hair metal. Some of the musicians on Donohue’s album were already famous, while others would go on to write, record on or produce some of the best-known songs of the 20th century. Put together, they would win more than 30 Grammy awards during their varied careers.

TWIXT:

Punk, Poet, Prophet: In Praise of the Late, Great Shane MacGowan : Ed Simon on One of Music’s Great Lyricists (Ed Simon, March 17, 2025, Lit Hub)

“There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head / There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands / You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign lands,” MacGowan sings in “The Sick Bed of Cuchulain,” the album’s first track. Poetry between heaven and hell, with all the sublimity of Yeats and the profanity of Behan, where they “took you up to midnight Mass and left you in the lurch / So, you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church.” Wild music, but haunted. Shades of the dunes when on “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” a MacGowan describes “blood and death neath a screaming sky… And the arms and legs of other men / Were scattered all around, / Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed / Then prayed and bled some more.”

Back when I used to drink, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash was a favored album to shell out quarters for in the neon cacophony of the barroom jukebox; “Farewell to New York City boys, to Boston and PA!” belted out at Silky’s, Kelly’s, the Cage. “I’m a free born man of the USA!” goes the chorus in “Body of an American,” from the EP of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, a declaration of independence, but half-hearted, knowing that the inverse of freedom can always be another form of servitude.

I quit drinking, but I still listen to the Pogues.

TOP OF THE WORLD:

 REVIEW: of Doc Watson: A Life in Music by Eddie Huffman (James Ruchala, 1/27/25, Open Letters Review)

Despite becoming blind by his first birthday, growing up in one of the poorest areas of the nation, and relying on government support until middle age, Doc Watson became one of the most influential guitar players of the twentieth century. Watson could “bridge the gap” between the traditional Appalachian tunes he learned from family and neighbors and the music popular with modern urban audiences. As one early manager explained: “While some [folk] singers yowled like a rusty hinge or a deer tangled in a barbed-wire fence, Doc hummed like a well-tuned engine or a purring cat.” His recordings as both a guitar player and a singer are some of the warmest and most accessible to come out of the revival of interest in traditional American folk music forms that started in the early 1960s. 

THE BEAUTY MYTH:

Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without it – The Grateful Dead (Graeme Tait Can’t, 2/05/25, Americana uk)

“American Beauty”, the band’s fifth studio album, was released in November 1970, barely four months after the release of their previous offering “Workingman’s Dead”, and the two albums are seen very much as companions, some would say like brother and sister. The comparison is understandable, as prior to these recordings the band’s legacy had been forged on the stage rather than in the studio, mainly because they used their songs as starting points for improvisation that suited their psychedelic sound, of which they were the original true explorers, rather than ideals simply to be duplicated. However, the fading embers of the 60’s marked the beginning of the end of the ‘Hippie Dream‘, requiring the band to take stock and, in the studio at least, find a new approach. Crosby, Stills, & Nash had long been friends with the band, especially Garcia, who was particularly impressed with how the trio used their vocal harmonies, and was looking to embrace a similar approach, while the band’s lyricist Robert Hunter began incorporating more American folklore into the narratives including trains, guns, gambling and alcohol, using the country’s geography and religious symbolism to help create a visual soundscape full of American myth. The musical arrangement was also changed, now drawing heavily on the Bakersfield sound, a sub-genre of country music developed in the mid-to-late 1950’s in California defined by its use of electric instruments, and strong backbeat, being highly influenced by rock’n’roll, and born out of a reaction to the slickly produced sound emanating from Nashville.

“Workingman’s Dead” proved to be a resounding success, but in many ways it was a just template for what the band would create just four months later, having moved the recording process to Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco and choosing to co-produce the album with staff engineer Stephan Barncard, rather than previous producer Bob Matthews. They had also just discovered that manager, Lenny Hart (father of the drummer Micky Hart) had renewed their contract with Warner Brothers Records without their knowledge, before skipping town with a sizeable amount of the band’s wealth.

Like it’s predecessor, “American Beauty” was innovative for its fusion of bluegrass, rock’n’roll, folk and of course country music, though where “Workingman’s Dead” mixed the grittier Bakersfield sound with the band’s psychedelic roots, the new release was mostly acoustic in nature, with Garcia replacing his electric guitar for a pedal steel, while there was a greater focus on major-key melodies and folk harmonies. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann later explained, “The singers in our band really learned a lot about harmonising from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who had just released their seminal album “Deja Vu”, (recording their vocals around a 360 degree mic, before adding identical overdubs at 3/4 of the level). It was also on this album that Garcia first collaborated with legendary mandolinist David Grisman whose playing is heard to great effect on the tracks ‘Friend Of The Devil’ and ‘Ripple’.

Just as significantly was the increased writing input from the rest of the band which was in stark contrast to previous albums where almost all the songs had been composed by the songwriting partnership of Garcia and Hunter. This was immediately apparent from the opening number, the sublimely beautiful ‘Box Of Rain’, co-written by Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh, it was the first Grateful Dead song to feature Lesh on lead vocals. Harmonies were provided by Bob Weir as well as Garcia who also played piano, while David Nelson (of New Riders Of The Purple Sage) guested on lead guitar. As recently as last year ‘Rolling Stone Magazine’ ranked this song in the ‘Top 500 Songs Of All Time’. Second track ‘Friend Of The Devil’, a song written by Garcia and Hunter along with John Dawson, (also from New Riders Of The Purple Sage) opens with Garcia playing a delightful descending G major scale in the bass register, while Hunter’s lyrics skilfully succeed in connecting the fatalism of the physical frontier with the wonder of the psychedelic one. Third track ‘Sugar Magnolia’, with writing credits shared between Hunter and Weir, who also supplied the lead vocals, has long become one of the band’s best known songs and remained an integral part of their live set throughout the following decades while fourth number ‘Operator’, was written and sung by co-founder and original frontman for the band Ron McKennan (aka Pigpen). In truth, this was his only real contribution to the album as by this time his role within the band had become vastly diminished due to his deteriorating health. The first side of the original vinyl album comes to a close with ‘Candyman’, another classic Garcia/Hunter track with its beguiling structural simplicity and sweetest of melodies encouraging the listener to just drift away on a warm summer’s breeze.

CLASSICIST:

Requiem for a Punster: Leonard Slatkin Pays Tribute to P.D.Q. Bach (and Peter Schickele) (Chris King, November 22, 2024. Common Reader)

Leonard Slatkin: Peter Schickele was a composer, first and foremost. He played the bassoon and the piano as well. He had written, among other things, the music for a show back in the early sixties called O Calcutta that was a little bit like Hair, and these other sort of hippie-inspired things where it was very short, momentary flash of full nudity onstage, very shocking back in the early sixties. He wrote the music for a film called Silent Running with Bruce Dern, which was about the impact of pollution on the environment and outer space. He was part of a group called The Open Window, that combined classical music with pop genres of the time.

The success of that concert at Town Hall really put him on the map. He would appear on The Today Show; he would be on late-night chat shows. This invention of the last and least of J.S. Bach’s children was giving a kind of comedic bent to the stuffy world of classical music. Even if you didn’t know anything about classical music, you could come to these concerts and you would be rolling on the floor, because all of the references he would make to different music. At the same time he would invent instruments, all these things that were crazy. But it was very funny, and it really caught on—the public really embraced it.

When I came to St. Louis in 1968, we had this idea to do a concert at the Zoo, and we commissioned Peter to write a piece which was called A Zoo Called Earth, and at the end of the piece there was a march where many animals came out. The piece has become almost a staple of children’s concerts these days. It was also one of the first classical music pieces to deal with the environment because it had to do with an alien who comes to visit and thinks, well, if you’ll take better care of your planet, maybe we will come back and visit again.

I commissioned a symphony from Peter which we premiered in Washington. Then I would conduct for P.D.Q. Bach concerts that Peter would do around the country and many of them here. Peter would usually arrive late for the concerts, and he might come in swinging on a rope from the balcony, Tarzan-style, and then crawl his way to the stage. With this most disheveled-looking manner you could possibly imagine, he would then proceed just to totally entertain the audience.

He also had a fantastic radio show called The Schickele Mix, which, in a way, was an inspiration for me when I started doing The Slatkin Shuffle. It is based on the idea that you don’t need to categorize music. You just need to find ways to juxtapose it in both ways that work and ways that don’t. And Peter was really good at that as well.

So, this marvelous person, terrific composer, we decided, since he passed, to do a concert to honor him.

SURVIVOR:

How György Ligeti soundtracked 2001, inspired Radiohead and composed music like ‘a knife through Stalin’s heart’ (Gillian Moore,7/03/23, The Guardian)

With Ligeti, however, tragedy is never far away. In his Poème Symphonique (Symphonic Poem) from 1962, 100 mechanical metronomes are set out on the stage in the formation of a symphony orchestra, each one solemnly wound up and set in motion at different speeds by a performer wearing formal evening dress. Ligeti was inspired at the time by the Fluxus movement and it is often billed as a “fun” piece. When the metronomes are let loose, the aural effect of this weird, mechanical orchestra is like rain on a roof or swarms of loud insects. As they gradually wind down, intriguing patterns, rhythms and ticking melodies emerge. By the end, there are only three, then two and then just one solitary metronome – the survivor – ticking away on the stage until it too falls silent. I always find it devastating.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

What are you Haydn? The hoaxers who fooled the classical music world (Phil Hebblethwaite, 5 Nov 2024, The Guardian)

In his article, Beckerman wrote: “Knowing that a work is by Haydn or Mozart allows us to see ‘inevitable’ connections. Take away the certainty of authorship, and it’s devilishly difficult to read the musical images within.” He noted, too, that it was the inauthenticity of the manuscript that had exposed Michel and not the fidelity of the music. And so, Beckerman dared to ask: “If someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?”

MAN IS FALLEN:

Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson: What I Learned About Happiness From Country Music (Timothy O’Malley, July 26, 2024, Church Life Journal)

The hobby has made me recognize a couple of things about country music: it is the kind of music that proposes something about the human condition. It means something. It has revealed something, to me, about happiness (and how perilous that condition of contentment is).

The first thing such music has unfolded for me is, in fact, that something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with you. Something about this world is wrong. It is a bit of a cliché at this point: dogs die, trucks break down, and relationships end. But listen for a moment to Miranda Lambert’s “Tinman.” Or Carly Pierce’s recent “Fault Line.” Or Willy Nelson’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms.” Broken hearts rip you apart, such that you would be willing to trade it all to be made of heartless tinman. Love leads to suffering, the kind where once solid relationships become sources of violence. A red-headed stranger may be able to kill you at a moment’s notice, but what he longs for most is to spend the night in the arms of a woman: “Don’t know why, but the one I love left me / Left me lonely and cold and so weak / And I need someone’s arms to hold me / ’Til I’m strong enough to get back on my feet.”

The wrongness of the world is often tinted with the kind of violence more appropriate to a Flannery O’Connor short story than popular music. The murder ballad, “Knoxville Girl,” sung in the haunting blood harmony of the Louvin Brothers, narrates the senseless murder of a young woman. The tale is recounted by the murderer himself, who confesses the deed. There is never a reason described for the murder. He kills, and he pays the price, spending the rest of his life in jail.

Such violence is also addressed by singers who have a definite reason to kill. The erstwhile Dixie Chicks gleefully tell us why Earl must die. More recently, Ashley McBryde speaks to Martha Divine, her father’s mistress: “Honor thy father. Honor thy mother. But the Bible doesn’t say a damn thing about your daddy’s lover.” So, the singer kills Martha Divine—if she is caught, she willl say the devil made her do it. In his “Wait in the Truck,” Hardy describes a murder of an abused woman’s partner. The singer faces the consequences of his murder, spending the rest of his life in jail.

There is something like a gothic sensibility to country music. Violence is lauded not because it is a good, but because the reality is that in this broken world where dogs indeed die, where love does not last forever, there is also the violence of the human heart. There is a genuine tragedy defining the human condition. The only thing to do is to sing about it.

All of this seems to go against any sense of what constitutes naïve happiness (more appropriate to the bubble gum pop of the late nineties). That naïve sense is dreadful: the beginning of happiness is recognizing that you are broken. That you long for something more. Dolly Parton’s “The Grass Is Blue” reveals to anyone who listens to it the terrible irony of heartache. The world is so beautiful, so wonderful. But guess what, you are still going to cry. “The Tennessee Waltz” is beautiful and haunting at once: your sweetheart can be taken from you in a moment’s notice.

How can something so terrifying be sung in such a beautiful way? Rainbows and bunnies are not how country music thinks about reality. Even if the genre employs a stock series of archetypes (the adulterous spouse, the violent lover, the fragility of all relationships), it forces the listener to reckon with the truth that we all eventually figure out: something is wrong. And coming to terms with that wrongness is part of the beauty of human life.

WONDERED WHEN HE’D BRING US ANOTHER:

The Warriors review – Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis come out to play with firecracker musical: This concept album based on Walter Hill’s 1979 film features megastar rappers, Hamilton alumni and styles from metalcore to salsa – it is pulled off with breathtaking brio (Chris Wiegand, 17 Oct 2024, The Guardian)

In their adaptation, a concept album that raises the tantalising prospect of a future staging, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis achieve something similar. The blistering, kaleidoscopic opener is presided over by dancehall dynamo Shenseea as a DJ introducing MCs for each borough. Amid punchy fanfares, they are deftly delineated: Chris Rivers as a raspy Bronx, Nas cranking up intrigue as Queens, Cam’ron smoothly humorous as Manhattan (“when you say New York, we’re actually what you mean”), Busta Rhymes’ explosively gruff Brooklyn and Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah and RZA spinning ethereal suspense for Staten Island, repeating the detail of their arduous route to the Bronx, “taking a train to a boat to another train”. […]

Miranda and Davis deliver the same lurid pulp jolts as the movie, finding equivalents for Hill’s arsenal of whip pans, wipes and slo-mo violence, yet they also share the more sociological perspective of Sol Yurick’s original 1965 novel and in particular his interest in what gangs offer the alienated and alone. (Yurick drew on his experience working for the city’s welfare department.) A majestic-sounding Lauryn Hill’s solo as Cyrus, If You Can Count, uses several of the character’s rallying lines from the screenplay but builds them into something much more resonant. “Nobody’s wasting nobody” becomes a call not just for laying down arms but for recognising the collective potential of every member in this posited gang of gangs. […]

One of the album’s joys is its unexpected pairings, especially how musical theatre stars are matched with acts from other genres. Broadway’s Alex Boniello teams up with Australian metalcore artist Kim Dracula as the Rogues on a rat-a-tat-tat duet, Going Down, that manages to veer from monstrous destruction to soaring anthem and back again. Dracula channels the toddler rage of the film’s arch-villain Luther (original star David Patrick Kelly gets an album cameo as a cop), and as you’d expect his taunt “come out to play” becomes a thunderous hook.