(Please excuse the "Dead Air" after the intro music - technical difficulty for about half a minute!)

Back in 1976, we were not yet aware of the social ramifications that were starting to burble underneath the surface, so “Silk Degrees” was judged simply as an incredibly well-produced and arranged album with well-written songs that were performed with intricate attention to detail. In other words, it did a fabulous job of representing exactly what represented pop/rock and roll in 1976.

If you looked past the gloss and polish, though, it was obvious that things had changed drastically during the seventies. The change was subtle over time, but indisputable. A musical style that came to being as a way for middle-class teenaged kids to blow off some steam eventually grew more serious and purposeful, but often at the expense of dissipating the raw energy that originally made it so viable and timeless. Teenage rebellion (‘Waddya got?”) slowly turned to social rebellion, which introduced drugs to youth culture, and then political rebellion which added a hefty degree of seriousness to musical topicality, but as the subjects grew complex, so did the music’s style and production.

Recording studios that once looked like coffee shops now looked like NASA control bases. Record companies demanded high end producers who provided ‘quality’ recordings (yes, in italics), and the artists simply followed their leaders. And, by the way, most recording artists usually weren’t even bands anymore but session players who grew up in this sterile environment.

I picked Boz Scaggs for this rant because “Silk Degrees” is a perfect example of what is now called “yacht rock”, at its apex. It is the album directly related to the birth of the über-yacht-rock band Toto, as this is the album where those session musicians first united. It also marks a turning point for rock and roll – if you could even call it that anymore – or maybe it was ultimately just a dead end. Maybe the ride took us nowhere, but listening to “Silk Degrees” was an aural version of cruising to nowhere in a luxurious ship, and it stands out as an important transitional album in the course of rock/pop music history. In only a few months’ time, a rebellion would take place that would attempt to sink that ship.

Feature Tracks:

What Can I Say

Georgia

Jump Street

What Do You Want the Girl to Do

Harbor Lights

Lowdown

It's Over

Love Me Tomorrow

Lido Shuffle

We're All Alone

February 1976 - Billboard Charted #2