Jarvis Cocker recently asked readers of the Guardian to tell him about otherwise-innocuous songs that gave them the willies. Being more prone to nameless dread than most people, I am deathly afraid of an entire genre: mid-'70s soft rock.
Jarvis Cocker
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Unless we were lucky enough to have parents who listened to jazz or classical, we children of the seventies spent years huddled in the way-backs of station wagons listening to AM radio stations playing mellow hits from Loggins & Messina, the Eagles, and Bread. Even thinking about the Eagles nauseates me still, not just because they were awful, but because I spent so much of my early childhood carsick, sicking-up in a plastic Kresge's bag to the strains of "Tequila Sunrise."
Like most horrible musical trends, moustache music has venerable ancestors. Crosby, Stills & Nash are to America what J Church or Jawbreaker are to Blink-182 — great bands that paved the way to pure evil. The best songs from CSN (and sometimes Y) are filled with all the elements that hordes of mid-'70s singer-songwriters and studio bands would later use for their own nefarious purposes, but damn, it's good stuff. The three-part male vocal harmonies in "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" are so goofy, but so good, especially at the end. "Wooden Ships" is a gem — it has even more bluesy guitar and more vocal harmonies, and it was written on David Crosby's yacht, presumably under the influence of plenty of cocaine.
Steely Dan kicked it down a notch further. Their relentless mellow appealed to mid-'70s swingers who were trying to distance themselves from the more radical youth culture of the sixties. Steely Dan's frequent use of the mu major chord gave them a distinctive, creepy sound that, along with jazz-fusion hits from Chick Corea and Weather Report, provided the soundtrack for many of my childhood nightmares.
Dan Hill
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Soft rock lyrics were often terrifying, in a 1970s New Manhood kind of way. Dan Hill's "Sometimes When We Touch" could reduce me to real tears:
Sometimes when we touch
The honesty's too much
And I have to close my eyes and hide
I want to hold you till I die
Till we both break down and cry
I want to hold you till the fear in me subsides
Nothing was scarier to me, literal-minded four-year-old than I was, than the specter of a corduroy-clad man with a bushy moustache and Dry-Look feathered hair pinning me in a chokehold and holding me down as the tears (and life) slowly leaked out of him.
Soft rock had a huge, paradoxical influence on me, and perhaps I should thank the Doobie Brothers and Dan Fogelberg for that. If I didn't have mid-'70s adult contemporary to run away from, I doubt I would have been so starved for punk rock and noise when I finally found it. I craved dissonance as a child — it was the only thing that could cleanse my palate of Chris Cross's cloying sweetness.
The best way to approach one's fears is to laugh at them, so watching episodes of Yacht Rock has been therapeutic for me. Writer and director JD Ryznar has built up an alternate history of the mellow-gold years, filled with intrigue, terrible clothing and hairstyle choices, and inter-band rivalry.
I hope this particular wave of nostalgia begins and ends with Yacht Rock. Some pop history is just too scary to live through more than once.
Posted November 2006
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djlab commented, on December 8, 2006 at 12:48 a.m.:
Kim, Kim, Kim...a band I was doing a live sound showcase for some months back turned me onto those Yacht Rock episodes. Absolutely hilarious!
The entire series:
www.channel101.com/shows/cancelled.php