Boz Scaggs has always been a musical artist of complexity. He founded his connection to music through the blues, but his lasting legacy is one of glamorous and romantic pop songwriting.
He possessed a somewhat shy and sensitive demeanor never totally at home in the public eye, yet his claim to several chart-topping singles and albums, particularly the millions-selling and critically acclaimed Silk Degrees (1976), demanded constant exposure. The persona he expressed through his music was laid back, effortlessly cool, sophisticated, stylish, romantically charming, and suave. But the immense success he achieved in his career pointed in part to the driven and determined artist within.
Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs examines the uniqueness of these contradictions and Boz Scaggs’s sixty-plus-year career and his rich and diverse musical catalogue. Over the decades, Scaggs collaborated with an array of talented heavies, from the Steve Miller Band to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (which included a young Duane Allman) on Boz Scaggs (1969), from the session players on Silk Degrees (1976) who would form the hit band Toto to Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald on the Dukes of September’s 2010 Rhythm Revue tour.
This first-ever book on Boz, written by The Vinyl District writer Jude Warne (author of America, the Band: An Authorized Biography) is constructed around intensely thorough analysis of his complete discography, and new and exclusive in-depth interviews with a selection of Scaggs’s associated colleagues from his vast career.
CHAPTER 1 | WHEN IT ALL WENT RIGHT
AS USUAL, IT WAS JEFF PORCARO who brought them together. He had a gift for linking artists with each other, for knowing which musician could serve as an ideal catalyst for another’s creative project.
At the young age of twenty-one, the Los Angeles–based Porcaro was already a highly coveted session drummer with his industry popularity on the ever-intensifying rise. Jeff had toured with Sonny & Cher right out of high school and played on Steely Dan’s Katy Lied at the end of 1974 through early ’75, endorsed by the impossible-to-please cool geniuses Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Porcaro came from a musically successful family and was an incredible drummer—inventive, strong, adaptable, adept at mastering any style, genre, or groove, and impeccable at keeping time.
But it was more than all that too. Jeff Porcaro was special. The warm, intoxicating power of his persona, along with his inherent desire to work toward what was in each recording’s best interest rather than his own, highlighted his egalitarian approach to making art. And it pointed to his deeply ingrained musical ESP, as if he were sensing what a piece of music was aiming to become, what the universe wished it to be, and firmly but gently guiding the overall operation toward that beautiful end. Porcaro, while fully aware of his own immense talent and technical prowess, could place his individualist’s ego aside and operate on a higher plane, vibrating from more of a spiritual place rather than allowing himself to be weighed down by predictable me-first mortal wants. Jeff lived for the music.
And when Silk Degrees producer Joe Wissert introduced Porcaro to Boz Scaggs in 1975, Jeff surmised that Boz would click with his longtime best friend, up-and-coming songwriter and keyboardist David Paich.
Boz Scaggs had not yet reached a level of critical success that would have placed additional pressure on him or on his latest venture into the studio to record. Nor had he reached that certain height of commercial achievement that would have allowed him a do-whatever-you-like sort of go-ahead, either. Scaggs was precisely at the stage in his career in which he was urged to go forth and make as quality of a record as he could while understanding that he had already proved his own long-distance-runner quality in the music industry, that nothing in particular was riding on this impending album, that this record wouldn’t make or break any reputation behind him or any legend yet to be articulated in front of him. “I’ve been told every time I do an album that it’s the most important one of my career,” Scaggs expressed to Creem magazine in a 1976 interview. It was in this spirit, during the autumn of 1975, that Boz Scaggs went forth into Davlen Sound Studios and Hollywood Sound Recorders in Los Angeles to record the album that would prove to actually be “the most important one” of his career: Silk Degrees.
When Porcaro introduced Scaggs to Paich, Boz had been producing guitarist Les Dudek’s self-titled debut solo album. Fresh out of the Allman Brothers, Dudek cut seven original songs—a mix of funky tracks and Allman-esque guitar-heavy numbers, many of which ran five or so minutes long—and one cowrite with the Steve Miller Band’s ex-member James “Curley” Cooke. “What a Sacrifice” was a dreamy, meandering tune and the album’s writerly high point; the following year Steve Miller himself would cut a version of the song, featuring Dudek and Cooke on the recording, for the bestselling Fly Like an Eagle follow-up Book of Dreams. Dudek’s solo debut featured Jeff Porcaro on drums, David Paich on keys, and bassist David Hungate on two tracks. The rhythm section of Paich, Hungate, and Porcaro was quickly gaining popularity in the Hollywood recording session scene as the most incredible first-take rhythm section an artist could obtain. “David Paich was the main creative force,” Hungate reflected. “Jeff Porcaro was the editor—the ‘truth meter,’ the final judge of what was and wasn’t hip. I tried to live up to the standards they set. The main audience we cared about impressing was each other.” Amid the Dudek sessions, Scaggs witnessed the musical camaraderie of Paich and Porcaro jamming together. Porcaro, who had recently heard Paich’s latest composition “Miss Sun” for the first time, urged Scaggs to collaborate with Paich for his next record.
“Three am, it’s me again.” Some of the most intriguing first lyrics of any pop album belong to “What Can I Say,” side one, track one of Silk Degrees. String-section accents and a grooving baseline, in conjunction with melodically enticing piano chords, present a track one impossible for listeners to turn away from. The affluent glamour of heartbreak, of well-heeled loneliness in chrome cities, the meeting of the individual to modern life at large. The sheer romance of the lyrics, depicting Boz’s character-narrator as an immaculately dressed and irresistibly charming protagonist, presenting pure romance and seductive appeal in a manner at once enticing and modern. Elegance and opulence are frequent conspirators on certain seminal ’70s albums, but seldom are they given such articulation and appeal as on Boz Scaggs’s 1976 hit release Silk Degrees. The title itself suggests sleek seduction, a gradual immersion into or surrender unto a total blissful pleasure that marries physical sensation with cerebral understanding. In other words, the sought-after Shangri-La of mid-1970s California.
It was gradual immersion—by degrees—that would most define Boz Scaggs’s career as a musical artist coming up in the 1960s and ’70s. He participated in multiple projects and group lineups and crafted a number of albums as a solo performer before Silk Degrees soared to the chart tops in 1976. It was through degrees, through layers and steps, that Boz became the musician and performer on Silk Degrees, before he recognizably became a hitmaker, resonating with the zeitgeist of an era, at the ideal time and place in which his music spoke to listeners and contributed to the aesthetics of their lifestyles. A slow dance throughout the stages of his career and stints in others’ bands. Boz was a journeyman, always true to himself, his talents and strengths. And for a period in the mid-to-late ’70s, these aligned precisely with what the public sought and longed for, such that he was the ideal artist with an album perfect for the era.
One of a song’s most important elements is its wielding of space and time, and a composer who can honor this, possessing equal reverence for musical notes and for the space and time around them, is capable of conjuring up elegance in the song. When mastered, this mirrors the seduction of romance, a frequent pop-song plot, in which the waiting between moments spent with a love interest assumes just as much weight as the time spent together, as though both the anticipation and the impending satisfaction are working together in an eternal dance of bliss-seeking balance. The musical experience and the romantic experience both utilize the currency of time. David Paich had developed an increasing respect for this as he grew up studying music composition under his father’s guidance. Marty Paich was a prominent composer, arranger, and producer who worked with dozens of classic jazz artists like Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Pepper, Peggy Lee, Chet Baker, and others and served as studio orchestra leader on television variety programs for Sonny & Cher, Glen Campbell, and the Smothers Brothers. The best pop composers were as good at musical arrangement as they were at generating songs, and though only twenty-one years old in 1975, David Paich was becoming such a composer.
Scaggs had never cowritten an entire album before, and he was intent on trying it out with a songwriter who was also a keyboard player, who would hear harmonic and melodic possibilities in the way only a pianist could. Paich’s father owned a ranch in Santa Ynez, California, just north of Santa Barbara, where there was also a magnificent grand piano. David and Boz decided to go up there and try out some songs together to see if anything would stick.
One reason for the massive success of Silk Degrees was its careful consideration of both what would make a satisfying listening experience—how many fast and slow songs would be ideal, where to place them—and what the public of the day would want to hear. Producer Joe Wissert and manager Irving Azoff, two major figures in the music industry of the mid-’70s, both played roles in Boz’s position and the opportunities available to him during the making of Silk Degrees. As did the studio players who found their way onto the recording sessions. David Paich as arranger, cowriter, keyboard player, and multi-instrumentalist, Jeff Porcaro as drummer, and David Hungate as bassist would all find themselves in the wildly successful group Toto two years later. Fred Tackett, guitarist for Silk Degrees, would join the group Little Feat.
Paich had been working on a song about Charles Manson titled “Tale of a Man,” somewhat inspired by Steely Dan’s track “Don’t Take Me Alive” (The Royal Scam, 1976). David had demoed the song with the group that later became Toto. Scaggs had heard Paich playing it amid the Dudek sessions and taken a liking to its fadeout. “Toto was making demos at the time, in the early stages of the Silk Degrees record,” Paich remembered. “We had started a couple of demos. One was called ‘Tale of a Man.’ Kind of a rock, R&B thing. And the end, the fade, had this R&B kind of riff going, between two chords—and the chords are kind of like the chords that are on the intro to ‘Lowdown.’ Boz heard it, and he said he wanted to make a song out of that ending, the fadeout on ‘Tale of a Man.’ So we sat down, and I started with those two chords, and he started singing and went to the bridge. I sang a couple lines to him, he sang a couple lines to me, and the rest is history.”
Boz’s inner sophisticate, always a crucial undertone of his musical persona, rose to the forefront for the crafting of Silk Degrees, and the monied sheen of comfort and luxury—with an importance placed upon environment and aesthetics (but only in the coolest of ways)—covered the album from top to bottom. This penchant for smooth glamour had become a key tenet of the disco scene, a far cry from rock ’n’ roll grunge or anti-materialistic hippiedom. The clothes, tailored suits and polyester, marked a partial assimilation into the Straight world at large, a definite move away from anti-corporate all-you-need-is-love-ness.
Yet the love remained in the songs and perhaps even amplified itself, content to remain inherent in its overarching identity as a human experience, commonly lived via relationships with others, instead of an intense, world-defining philosophy. Becoming plebeian, tactile, of the earth and not just the heavens. And what was there to be said about earthly, mortal relationships, love? It would be described in more physical terms and more clothed, defined by lifestyle, cities, and social gatherings, the discotheque.
“Lowdown,” the first track on side two of Silk Degrees, was not the initial choice of single by Columbia Records. The up-tempo and upbeat “It’s Over” seemed the obvious selection to Columbia, but commercially the release refused to be a knockout, landing in the thirty-eighth slot of the Billboard Hot 100. A DJ in Cleveland, though, had a penchant for another tune off the album, a song with a slick groove and disco backdrop, a number dripping with sleek. “Lowdown,” it was called; it featured an addictively catchy flute part, and it was sonically at home in elegant nightclubs and dance-focused discos. Studio guitar great Louis Shelton, who had worked with Paich and Porcaro when he produced Seals and Crofts’s Diamond Girl album, on which they’d all played, was responsible for the immaculate guitar solo on “Lowdown.” Thematically the song was well suited to the album, celebrating ’70s nightlife and all that went along with it: the lush top layer and the occasionally seedy underbelly.
With “Lowdown” finally seeing airplay, the public began to latch on to the track—and Columbia did too, choosing to send the song out as a single to R&B-forward radio stations across the United States. “Lowdown” achieved chart status in the UK, became a hit in Canada, and reached number three in the States, on the Billboard Hot 100. The 1977 Grammy Awards saw “Lowdown” earn the award for best R&B song of 1976. “Boz was there at the ceremony,” co-nominee David Paich recalled. “I was late, so when I got to the table with him, he said, ‘We won.’ And that’s when I first knew. And I couldn’t believe it. You know, it was like, here’s the best R&B thing, and here’s Boz, who’s total blue-eyed soul. And it was just traumatizing, it was so good. We couldn’t believe it, you know?”
“Lido Shuffle” has a more immediate sense of action than “Lowdown” does and is less measured musically, less exacting. But it packs a weightier punch for the listener, its storyline operating in the foreground immediately following the first dramatic bass notes in the opening seconds. If “Lowdown” is the calm and collected glamour-puss of Silk Degrees, “Lido Shuffle”—whose title refers to a fictitious dance and never appears within the lyrics—is its wildly extroverted, action-seeking twin who has no time for pausing and reflecting, for building up at any number of paces, and instead only seeks immediate gratification and cheap thrill. And it’s fantastic. Paich recalled the composition of this particular track, saying that Scaggs was partly inspired by the energy of a song on Paul McCartney and Wings’s recent album Venus and Mars (1975) called “Magneto and Titanium Man.” “It was very organic. We just sat down at the piano side by side, and Boz said, ‘I’m hearing something like this.’ And he played this little bit, the beginning rhythm of ‘Lido Shuffle.’ And immediately I sat down at the piano and said, ‘Move over. How about something like this?’ And I kind of constructed the song chordally and everything like that. And then he took the song after we recorded it and came up with some fine melody parts and some lyrics.”
The album’s closer, “We’re All Alone,” would bring the musical drama fully home, leaving no room for doubt that Silk Degrees was a multifaceted, completely satisfying listening experience. David Paich’s father, Marty Paich, lent a hand when certain songs on the record called for orchestration. “As soon as Boz wrote ‘We’re All Alone,’” David remembered, “we knew we wanted to have orchestra on it and make an arrangement of that, like a power ballad kind of thing. So I think that was set in stone.” Marty Paich helped David construct the arrangement for “Lowdown.” David composed “the string arrangement and the horns. And all my dad did was come in with a big eraser and erase half the stuff that I did, so it had more space, because at the time I had been writing wall-to-wall music. My dad always was very good at leaving space in the stuff. So it was a fabulous collaboration. And I always had my dad there as my mentor to back me up writing wise, and he influenced me and taught me about arrangement.” The song’s signature wind instrument parts, which served to create the dance-friendly drama in the track, had been impeccably arranged. The song’s bass part too, lent so much to the creative capital of the track. Bassist David Hungate later recalled, “Dr. John had a hit at the time, ‘Right Place, Wrong Time.’ In the intro the bass player played a legato version of the pull-off that starts ‘Lowdown.’ We were jamming at the beginning of the session, and I played that lick the way it ended up on ‘Lowdown.’ After we cut the basic track Paich suggested I overdub it. I came up with the slides on the bridge. Boz was a delight to work with—no star trip, ego trip—more like just one of the guys.”
