Steely Dan Is/Is Not/Is Yacht Rock
Yacht rock! OMG. LMAO. The time I wasted on Twitter arguing about "yacht rock." I don't really wish I had that time back, because it didn't take much to state my opinion and leaving the idjits battling over the chum I had tossed in the waters as bait.
My central argument was that no such thing existed: It was counterfeit currency, a royal scam. Especially when those who argued the legitimacy of yacht rock insisted that Steely Dan was yacht rock.
This is the central controversy in the naming of a genre 25 years after it occurred. Yacht rock was invented as a joke, really, explained in 90 entertaining minutes on the MAX (not Imax) movie, Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, where it debuted last November.
It started with a 2005 web series created by J.D. Ryznar, Hunter Stair and Lane Farnham, and featuring "Hollywood" Steve Huey as the "interviewer" of fictionalized versions of musicians in the "yacht rock" mold. These five-minute parodies each focused on the imaginary back stories of hits such as "What a Fool Believes," written by Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, which is considered the ne plus ultra of yacht rock songs:
Steely Dan could not be yacht rock, though they used many of the same musicians who played on many yacht rock records.
The smooth surfaces attained through a grotesque amount of studio time spent by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, perfection-obsessed, seeking the ultimate "sounds good to us" result was meant to subvert pop, not serve it. Their best-seller and rock-jazz apotheosis Aja (1977) seemed too filled with barnacles to be the model for any "genre," but their attention to detail led to greatness and their eventual estrangement for many years. They released one more album, Gaucho in 1980, where the attempt to top Aja led them to disentangle in distant corners of the world, Fagen in New York, Becker in Hawaii. They didn't record again as Steely Dan for 20 years.
For the record, some of my musician friends of long standing have no idea what "yacht rock" is, so let's leave Steely Dan out of the picture and lay down some names that are less contentiously identified with yacht rock: Michael McDonald, with both Steely Dan but especially the Doobie Brothers, who went from shaggy haired bikers club groovers of their early days ("Listen to the Music," "China Grove") to the suave purveyors of all that was slick and beautiful in 1979 with the No. 1 hit and Grammy-bait "What a Fool Believes," composed by the once unlikely team of Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald. Undoubtedly, "What a Fool Believes" is an outstanding composition, built to last, as it sure has, to this day in dentist offices, supermarkets, shopping malls, and of course the Sirius XM "Yacht Rock" playlist.
Other cushions on the Yacht Rock sofa include Toto, the "soft rock" group formed in 1978 in the San Fernando Valley (aka "the Valley") that Steely Dan warned about a few times in "Bad Sneakers" from their 1975 album, Katy Lied. "The ditch out in the valley that they're digging just for me," and "that fearsome excavation on Magnolia Boulevard," is a line members of my SD social media posse know better than their own mothers' birthdays. Magnolia Boulevard is a 10-mile stretch of the valley that connects Sherman Oaks and Burbank, names that themselves evoke terror in sensitive sophisticates even in L.A., the suburbia to which LAPD officer Harry Bosch is sometimes exiled and where his half-brother Mickey Haller often does his lawyer business in the novels of Michael Connelly.
Even as the audio wallpaper of Toto hits "Hold the Line" (1978), "Rosanna" (1982) and the inscrutable 1982 No. 1 hit, "Africa" became what I imagine to be the soundtrack to the 1980s made-in-the-Valley porn industry, Toto did have a symbiotic relationship with Steely Dan. Steve Lukather (guitar), David Paich (keyboards), and the Porcaro brothers, Steve, Jeff, and Mike (keyboard, drums, bass, I think), played thousands of sessions, some with Steely Dan. (To their credit, Toto said they didn't understand "Africa" or think it was hit quality.)
The reason that Steely Dan is considered "yacht rock" comes from the ample, yea, compulsive use of studio musicians, whom they hired and dismissed promiscuously in search of the perfect note. For "Peg," a seminal cut (they are all seminal, actually), on Aja, they went through six or seven or eight of the most renowned session guitar players (Robben Ford, Rick Derringer, Elliott Randall), before Jay Graydon managed to "pull the sword from the stone," as Alex Pappademas writes in his Quantum Criminals, the best book on Steely Dan, a story repeated in the "Yacht Rock" dockumentary. "The space in 'Peg' where a guitar solo goes is the question, and Jay Graydon's solo is the answer," Pappademas writes. "They liked articulation, an eloquence derived from speech – they wanted soloists who could create that sense of moment of abandon while still turning a phrase."
This kind of vision and effort is not found in yacht rock, where a smooth groove with a slight kick from studio musicians with some sense of jazz phrasing in a rock context is the goal. All are fine musicians, I would say: Bob James, Robben Ford, Tom Scott and members of the L.A. Express, a by-definition "jazz-fusion" group popular in the 1970s who backed Joni Mitchell often in the studio and in concert on her Miles of Aisles live album. But the thing with these musicians is that they were brilliant in the studio, one cut at a time, one project at a time. Bob James or Tom Scott albums of the 1970s, though, would hardly distract your attention from homework, washing dishes, vacuuming the the rug (deep pile shag carpets, at the time), or any ordinary household duty.
Another name firmly associated with yacht rock is Christopher Cross, whose self-titled 1980 debut album soft-rock debut album sold multiple millions and swept every major category of the Grammy awards, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Best New Artist. His name was Christopher Geppert, and Christopher Cross was the moniker for his band, which my friends in Texas say was mostly hard rock: not metal, but not soft, either. He once subbed for an unavailable Ritchie Blackmore in a concert. Chris Geppert was well-liked in the Texas music community, especially in his native San Antonio and Austin. Hip scenes.
"Sailing" and "Ride Like the Wind," his No. 1 and No. 2 hits from 1980, were not hip. In the Yacht Rock movie, Cross tells his back story that sounds like something out of the Yacht Rock web series. He was a successful marijuana dealer, and wrote "Ride Like the Wind" while on an acid trip. But no one would call it "acid rock." (BTW: Toto, Cross, and Men at Work will be touring together from July 18 – August 30, 2025, the peak of the "yacht rock season," I guess.
So where are the black musicians, during what was also the "Quiet Storm" era, the dominance of the R&B ballad and the disco era? Musician and philosopher Questlove of the Roots is on hand to describe the black view, and his stated enthusiasm for some of this music (Michael McDonald earning his lifetime invitation to the [black community] "barbecue") seems a little facetious. Prince Paul, the producer of De La Soul who heard the future in dozens of hip-hop samples in yacht rock, is incorrectly ID'd in the movie as "Prince," unless my eyes were elsewhere when "Paul" came up on the screen. He heard "perfection and groove" in Steely Dan's music, and borrowed a costly sample from "Peg" for De La Soul's "Eye Know."
Oh, and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" is considered yacht rock, because it was written by Steve Porcaro of Toto and John Bettis; the demo got to Quincy Jones, and their royalties from its placement on Thriller could earn them enough to buy a yacht, even if each didn't also write dozens of other hits. Ambrosia was yacht rock; Journey is not, because yacht rock is not power ballads. The distinctions are kinda nuts.
What has always troubled me about the term "yacht rock" is how inappropriate it is to listen to such bland music while on a yacht. If you can afford a yacht, you are going to outfit it with the most exquisite loud and clear sound system money can buy. So imagine sailing into the big boat slip at St. Tropez, where you will be living on the boat for the month of June, sending your helicopter over to David Geffen's yacht to bring him over for champagne and crudites dipped in caviar.
Would you be blasting Toto, or Boz Scaggs' lovely Silk Degrees? I don't think so. To announce one's entrance to the French Riviera, you might display one's master-of-the-universe wealth and dominance by blasting Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra, or some very big Beethoven symphony. Or Steely Dan's 1980 Gaucho. Or "Deacon Blues" and "Peg" from Aja. How grand they'd sound at night in the harbor in Juan-Les-Pins!
So, I've changed my mind about Steely Dan and yacht rock. Donald Fagen famously hung up the phone after the one of the "Dockumentary" filmmakers called him and asked to talk about yacht rock. "Why don't you go f*ck yourself," was Fagen's advice, recorded and played at the end of the movie.
But by my "what would you play on a yacht" example, Steely Dan is not only yacht rock, but it is the only "yacht rock." As Rabbi Akiva said, more or less, everything else is commentary.
This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins teaches at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and writes the Critical Conditions Substack:
https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
Header image: Steve Lukather of Toto, courtesy of HBO.
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