One Week // One Band

Boz Scaggs - We’re All Alone

Final track from “Silk Degrees” (1976)

When I was younger I was certain there were only two kinds of closing tracks, sad ones and glad ones. You get older. Binaries fall away. Now there are three kinds: 1) a final, hopeful thought; 2) a restatement of terms (a process favored in hip-hop, intros and outros meant to codify the borders of a recorded world); or 3) a long vertiginous drop. Boz Scaggs’s “We’re All Alone,” taken from Silk Degrees, is preceded by “Lido Shuffle,” a single, which reached No. 11 on the US pop chart. “We’re All Alone” is also the b-side of the “Lido Shuffle” single, again, functionally, an ending. “Lido” was featured on the soundtrack for the movie FM, which contained the titular Steely Dan song, a song about people listening to the radio in an abandoned bunker somewhere, I assume, refining the mind-body connection. The soundtrack also included Linda Rondstadt’s rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” a more straightforward song in which people no longer have any sense of the future. At some point the concept of a future had ended, been replaced. There’s apocalyptic talk now—there’s always apocalyptic talk—but at least in the artifacts of the seventies there is a running current of dread, a feeling that something had imperceptibly slipped from the social contract, into a dead zone.

The second track on the FM soundtrack is “Fly Like an Eagle” by Steve Miller—Boz’s old band, Boz’s childhood friend from Dallas with whom he had played in countless rhythm and blues bands, transformed. When Boz performed with the Steve Miller Band in the late-’60s they played a psychedelic blues; Boz sang on a total four songs including “Dime-a-Dance Romance.” Theirs was a traditional rhythm and blues from an European perspective, which is naturally extraterrestrial. (Boz had lived in Europe just before joining the Steve Miller Band on their first two records, Children of the Future and Sailor.) Now, with “Fly Like an Eagle,” Miller had shifted invisibly into a gliding funk.

Boz too had changed. His 1969 record for Atlantic, Boz Scaggs, was stationed almost exclusively in a low blues, accompanied by a guitarist named Duane Allman. Duane was a kind of counterpoint to Boz—where Boz moaned Duane wailed, where Boz dwelled, low and alone-seeming, Duane hovered somewhere above, modifying the air. Since then Boz had expanded beyond Duane into a slick R&B realm, relentlessly composed, maybe best described as “honeyed.” On the album before Silk Degrees, 1974’s Slow Dancer, Boz collaborated with Johnny Bristol, who had co-produced “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1967, or was at least in the room and had absorbed some of the magic. The collaboration intensified the sweetness of Boz’s sound, it’s openness to the public.

Silk Degrees, released in 1976, was Boz’s most successful record, containing two tremendous singles (“Lido” and “Lowdown,” which was initially the b-side to “It’s Over,” but then—by a radio DJ’s small impulse, a fluke—fate took over). The record now recalls less a year than a whole decade, such is the way time modifies music and music modifies time. On Silk Degrees you can hear interactions between Motown soul and disco, a kind of identifiable sound of the ‘70s. While they seem organic these recombinations mostly occur in a white, anthropological way. It affords the music distance and perspective and its own fixed sense of loss. In less capable hands this loss articulates itself as an intense desire to be black and terrorized.

Boz experienced black music as Darryl Hall did—it was part of his development. A childhood with Steve Miller, studying the music, strangely, in London and then San Francisco. This is no less racially tortured but is also simply not as binary. It’s a more dense perspective from which he sings and which he is preternaturally able to navigate.

What’s strange about “We’re All Alone” is its unconscious association with other voices. The song was a hit for Rita Coolidge in 1977. In memory the instrumentation is pure mimicry of Boz’s recording, and when you listen to Boz’s recording you hear Coolidge in the background, in a shadow world. But listening now to the Coolidge recording I notice refined edges; it’s led by guitar instead of piano, for one, and so is more assured tonally, contained in tinselling. Coolidge sings as if she is aware of the ending, anticipating it, the part where her voice lifts and exchanges diction for high emotional notions of words. It’s weird that I notice this, because Coolidge’s is the version I most internalized, the staple of adult contemporary radio. It reminds me so intensely of youth that when I hear it I smell hairspray. I would sit in a chair at the salon my mom frequented. They would cut my hair and I would hear Coolidge pealing between “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me” because adult contemporary radio is evidently emotional hell.

Boz’s version is different in that he has none of the control of Coolidge. Boz’s voice migrates across faults. When you hear it, there are few references. Ronnie Spector singing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Scott Walker, who covered the song with The Walker Brothers. Frankie Valli, who covered the song too. But also some Van Morrison, from whom Boz maybe took the idea of singing from a shore inside the voice. There’s a deepness to all of these voices that does not express itself as traditional deepness. They are symbolically deep voices. They travel across registers with a kind of learned uncertainty. There’s a preserved pain therein, delivered along a purified frequency. It’s capable of snaking ease but also leaping terror.  High notes are achieved at a cost, because they overpower the surroundings and leave the singer frightfully alone and untethered.

“It seemed to be one of the touchstones of its time,” Boz said of Silk Degrees, but after the record came out, he had disconnected entirely. “I had all the trappings of a full-dress career going on,” he said. “But I wasn’t particularly interested or didn’t really have time to give to my music. I lost what it was I loved about music. I still loved music, but it wasn’t preoccupying me.” Something had slipped, and he told all of this to Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner produced that Atlantic album that featured Duane Allman. The author of the Rolling Stone article from which this quote is taken, Steve Hochmann, in 1994, described the end of Boz’s Silk Degrees success as a “wave crested.” Rolling Stone kept up with Scaggs that long because a working mythology of the magazine is pieced from the ‘70s. A remembered ‘70s. A ‘70s situated inexorably in Los Angeles, land of hot sidewalks and terrors and a supernatural belief in architecture as an indicator of spiritual wealth. Houses were set wide and apart, their own compounds, theologically sealed, the final sum of anarchic urban planning. Lawns served as borders and tributes to a totally conquered desert, at least psychically. There is always the threat of the old dead landscape lurking at the edge. Boz Scaggs entered Los Angeles in 1975 to record Silk Degrees with producer Joe Wissert, who had worked with Helen Reddy and Earth, Wind & Fire.

“I wanted a more intelligent approach and one with more foresight in terms of timing, logistics and production,” Boz told Rolling Stone in 1977. “You might say I had doubts about my career and where I was going, there in ‘74, ‘75.” Later: “I feel confident and comfortable in the L.A. studios. The best musicians are available to me, this vast selection to accomplish the music I want. I’m like a kid in a toy shop. Or maybe a bull in a china closet.” To read interviews with Boz Scaggs at the time is to read conversations with a man who desires and seems to approach total control, who is maybe close to exploding out of the other side. He talks of how he and Wissert had a plan during Silk Degrees, that if they needed an upbeat song in the tracklisting, they would just write it. Right there. As if atoning for something.

Steely Dan, Boz’s partners on the FM soundtrack, lived in L.A. for nine years before they could write about it totally. When they did, they wrote Gaucho. Their earlier records mainly wandered in and around New York or in imaginative distortions of L.A. and greater California, a kind of melted America city. Their earlier characters earned a kind of sympathy—in that kind of heightened space, in an environment where they could be pretty consistently overwhelmed by buildings and the functions of the body, the people in those Steely Dan songs could be interpreted as mere products of vertigo. The characters of Gaucho are more of a self-determined evil. They live in a place of weird emotional permission. They all contain an atomic history. The only outlier is in “Third World Man”—a contender for this piece—who, instead of producing his environment, reacts to it, in a twisted way, on the lawn.

Boz’s’ images on Silk Degrees fix themselves mainly in cities by the bay, things that have to maintain stability against a horrible muscle of ocean. The people that inhabit these cities are usually geographically displaced, no sense of home but inside pain and strangeness. In “Jump Street” Boz cuts a precious path through a poor, drug-addled section of town, people addicted forever to heroin and the promise of physical absence. In “Harbor Lights” he is wandering near the ocean and transcending himself and his place through images that come to him in brilliant flashes, out of red and blue shadows.

So it is in “We’re All Alone” that these standards to which the record has so far adhered suddenly warp terribly. “Lido Shuffle,” a song that, as far as I can tell, concerns a wacky gambler and his unnatural success at evading goons and skipping town, drops us here. A piano figure gently anchors us. There’s strings, undulating in the background, tuned to the bottom of the ocean. There’s Boz sounding as if he is carrying a burden in his stomach. There are drums. My roommate talked about these drums emphatically. “Those drums.” I completed her thought, or my thought. “Yes. Like dull thuds on a skull.”

Boz sings. He sings from a compromised spot. He sings, “Outside the rain begins, and it may never end.” In 1975 the rainfall in Los Angeles was 10.7 inches, neither at its lowest (4.08 inches in 1953) or highest relative ebb (34.04 inches in 1983). In 1969—the year of Boz’s Atlantic debut and Duane Allman and all 12 minutes of “Loan Me a Dime,” another contender for this article, as it too describes a heavy recess—extreme rains in Southern California, amounting to 50 inches over nine days at Mt. Baldy, east of Los Angeles, exacted a toll on the landscape. Mandeville Canyon Road, in Brentwood, turned into a river for a week, looked upon despairingly by actors and directors in their tall homes. Robert Altman couldn’t leave his house for a day. Pianos and furniture flowed down the new river completely stripped of function, helpless and absurd in the water. Imagine terrific objects, displays of man’s final sophistication, sliding back into the earth, full of mud. Boz is inheriting a doomed vision.

Later in the song Boz sings, “So cry no more, on the shore / a dream will take us out to sea / forevermore,” and the geography of Silk Degrees is shifted from ocean to sea, from harbor town to elsewhere, imaginatively. Which is fine, the lights in “Harbor Lights” are “of Venus.” Boz is easily cosmically shaken. The geography in “Harbor Lights” is unsure too—the “son of a Tokyo Rose” is called, by the effect of the light, back to “some Jamaica bay.” And Boz is an expert in transformative light. In “Jump Street,” he describes the dawn as “sneaking like a skinny snake.” In “Harbor Lights,” dawn is “like some junked out melody.” He considers dawn with a kind of annoyance. He is annoyed at how it seems to make him naked and make his delusions fall away gracelessly. The sun coming up is a thing you can’t control at all.

So there is no light in “We’re All Alone.” No color or transcendence. There is rain and there are rolling underwater caves full of time, delusions consuming indications of the natural world. Organic and manmade things enter a dreamy plasticity, a muddiness. Everything is melting and vaporizing. Boz too. Boz especially. He cries. He seems to cry. He sings that same Rita Coolidge section, where the words practically come apart. “Let it out, let it awwwwwww begennnn. How inndo the wiiiind, maiiiii laaaaa.” He is going away, into the wordless space. He is singing to us from there. The cover of Silk Degrees is a picture of Boz on a bench, a woman’s disembodied hand to the far right of him, its fingers crossed, gently touching the wood back of the bench. The bench is a sickly green. On the back cover, the hand is there, in the same position. Boz is gone. The only thing you can control is how you leave. The strings take over. He leaves you with a fact. “All’s forgotten now. We’re all alone, all alone.”

— Brad Nelson

(Brad previously wrote for OWOB about Ulver)