The producers of HBO's new documentary movie "Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary," were able to interview many of the key players of the 1970s/1980s yacht rock music genre. But when they contacted Donald Fagen, the surviving member of the group Steely Dan, to request his involvement, the phone call, the audio of which is actually played in the documentary, went like this:
Garrett Price, the director of the documentary: "Yeah, so I've been talking to a lot of people that have played with you and Steely Dan over the years, and I was wondering if you'd sit down with me and talk about your music and this genre."
Fagen: "And what genre is that?"
Price: "Um, yacht rock."
Fagen: "Oh, yacht rock. Well, I tell you what. Why don't you go f*ck yourself?"
And then Fagen hung up.
Fagen may have colorfully refused to be interviewed for the movie, but he did allow six Steely Dan songs to be used in the film. This seems to mean either that his refusal was a winking way of maintaining his curmudgeonly persona, as Price interprets it, or he was genuinely angry and just wanted to get the licensing fees for his songs.
No doubt Fagen resents being lumped into a "genre" mockingly named in an absurd comedy series. The yacht rock term comes from a hilarious web video series from 2005, decades after the demise of yacht rock, that comedically depicts the associated artists, like Fagen, Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Toto, and Christopher Cross. Here is the first episode:
Yet, while the movie deals extensively with the jokes about yacht rock, most of it describes the actual music and phenomenon in positive, even reverential terms.
And an argument could be made that Steely Dan isn't even directly in the yacht rock genre — that they merely inspired it. "Hollywood" Steve Huey, who co-coined the term for the web series, says that Steely Dan was "the primordial ooze from which yacht rock sprang." Steely Dan brought innovative jazz chords into pop music, and created a community of Los Angeles session musicians who could play to their exacting standards.
Christopher Cross says that when he was recording his debut album, now considered a yacht rock cornerstone, he got several Steely Dan session players to contribute, and Michael Omartian, who had played keyboards for Steely Dan, to produce. Cross says:
"I drove him crazy with Steely Dan. Like, 'Everything, we have to do as good as Steely Dan. We gotta do this, Steely Dan, Steely Dan.' So, I came in the studio, the lights were dim. He was at the piano, he'd just played the piano solo. I came in, and he said, 'What do you think?' And I said, 'I think there's a note in the second bar that's a little late.' And he said, 'I was emoting.' You know, I said, 'Well, but I mean, I don't think Steely Dan…' But he said 'That's it! I'm done!' And he left. He got in his Porsche and left."
Even though most of the movie treats the yacht rock artists with serious critical analysis and praise, much of it also deals with the mocking the genre has received, both contemporaneously and in retrospect. But most of the comedy about yacht rock is actually a complex mix of ironic ridicule and actual fondness and respect for the genre.
Price was right to include a this SCTV sketch in which Rick Moranis, playing Michael McDonald, the singer/songwriter who appeared in background vocals in many yacht rock songs ("He is such an important sonic element to so many of these records"), rushes into the studio just in time to sing his brief phrases for Cross's "Ride Like the Wind."
The reaction of McDonald to the ironic comedy that surrounds the yacht rock phenomenon could not be more different from Fagen's. He says about the SCTV sketch: "Years later, Rick Moranis apologized to me. Because I guess he wondered if I was offended by it or something. I said, 'No, quite the opposite.'"
McDonald even appreciated the Yacht Rock web series, in which he is a main character, played for laughs:
"What's funny about it to me was my son couldn't wait to show me this thing he'd found on the internet. And it was hysterical. I couldn't deny that it was funny. I thought it was kind of uncanny at times how they made up these personalities that more or less had some basis of truth, whether they knew it or not. I always thought it was kind of flattering to made fun of because obviously it made an impression on somebody. Whether it's good or bad doesn't really matter at that point, you know."
Here is the trailer for the movie:
