Really Smooth Music

I’m in the home stretch of an assignment, and I should be doing that, but last night I saw a documentary that wound up being so specifically related to my assignment that I can confidently claim this is a rehearsal.

I saw the new Yacht Rock documentary on HBO. It was wonderful, and I’m not saying that because I’m friends with like half the people involved. I was just happy to see them there. They picked the exact right talking heads. That’s no small thing; whenever I actually know about a documentary’s topic, I immediately and unconsciously start grading it according to whether they interviewed the right people, and I usually turn it off after half an hour. Didn’t happen this time. I was floored. Go see it.

No time to get in the weeds about explaining the yacht rock “deal,” which is all in the doc, but I saw the Yacht Rock sketch series when it came out. Me and my cousin watched it a thousand times. We have the dialogue memorized. It was a guaranteed pick-me-up during a time when our plan for adulthood was to become drifters and die of tuberculosis, and it’s a memory I’ll always treasure, the way you treasure anything you feel like you “discovered.” You have a sense of ownership. Whoever made this, these are my people.

Sometimes I wonder why. It was funny, yeah, but I think it was ultimately a high school rivalry thing. When yacht rock was getting popular, Merle Haggard was doing some of the best work of his career and The Clash was changing the world. There was a tougher world in the arts, of harder people, and this stuff just seemed like it was by and for rich brats who didn’t know pain. So maybe we just liked seeing them get punished by comedy.

It was also about guys we’d met and had bad interactions with, my cousin in the music business and me tirelessly at work inventing new ways to be unhappy in Malibu. These were all guys who could play anything but they only wanted to talk about jazz albums that bored me to death. And their stories were all, like, so I stole my dad’s key to the studio, drove to Sunset even though the traffic was terrible and then I accidentally walked in on a session and said “keyboards, huh?” and the song went to #1 and a couple weeks later I was buying a house. Quincy had the best coke, man. He really did.

I think the Bakersfield thing just gave us an outlook on music that prioritized “real” storytelling. You had to bleed, and it seemed like these guys didn’t bleed. Never mind what a diminished fifth is, are you bleeding? 

And these guys were cynical, which is cool, but we liked guys who were prison cynical, not Encino homeowner cynical. They could turn music into a series of solvable math and engineering problems, and that destroyed some of the magic. There’s a religious, ritual side to creating music that yacht rock neglected.

And there was this underdog thing of “shouldn’t you guys just go be electrical engineers and leave music to the poor bastards who can’t do anything else?” that still creeps into my head now and then even though I have no official business caring at all.

But I have to admit there’s something to yacht rock. It has this uncanniness, this unknowability, of being slightly before my time, slightly too far away by geography. And it was quietly ominous, made you feel like it was up to no good. Like going into a yuppie’s house that’s decorated like there are no guns in there, but there are definitely some guns in there. 

I have one memory of yacht rock before the webseries came around and put a name to it. When I was a kid at my grandparents’ house, I’d sit alone watching TV a lot, at antisocial hours, because I was a lazy bastard and hated secondhand smoke. There was an ad that played mercilessly for some sort of “Music You Remember From The Radio Before Your Divorce, You Love This Don’t You” compilation. It played little five second clips of soft rock staples, overlaid with images of couples on the beach and probably going to like Moonshadows. There was one clip that got stuck in my head forever. It made me want to actually bang my head against the wall, as in create noises and pain to distract from it, and I’d get a little sick every time I remembered it. Not just physically sick but morally sick, like everybody knows what I’ve done wrong and they’re onto me, there’s no way out. Like I was in the human zoo from 2001. Awful, disgusting sounds. After I watched this documentary, I looked up the lyrics to the clip I remembered, and this was like 30 years ago, and I didn’t know them but I knew them phonetically so I just started spelling out sounds on Google, and I actually found it. Finally. I can look my enemy in the eye. The song was “After All,” by Al Jarreau. Now it’s over. Thank God.

If you like this newsletter and you're a rich guy who should be ashamed of himself, consider a paid subscription or donation. Money. Powerful stuff. I want to try that stuff.