Bolt from the blues: Boz Scaggs rips it up, Rainbow Theatre, London, July 29, 1977.
Ian Dickson/Shutterstock, Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo
POP HAVING ALWAYS been driven by new sounds, beats and words for new generations, it’s the radical disruptors and innovators who get the biggest props. But even the Berrys, Beatles and Hendrixes cut their snazzy new cloth from fabric homespun over time by the weavers who preserve, evolve and deepen the music. So to William ‘Boz’ Scaggs, a footnote to the canonical history chaptered by the revolutionary big beasts but also the creator of some of the warmest, most gorgeous music you’ll ever hear. Having cut his teeth in various US blues crews he wound up in London, soaking up future inspiration in the soul-jazz Soho of Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames, then cut loose to busk around the globe, in 1965 making an obscure debut LP in Sweden. Reunited in 1967 with Texas high school pal Steve Miller in his new San Francisco-based band and cutting two psych classics,Children Of The FutureandSailor, Scaggs then split to do his own rootsier, blues-rock thing.
Spreading his wings stylistically in the early ’70s and, like Van Morrison, leading a Ray Charles/Bobby Bland/ B.B. King-style R&B big band, he commanded cult status among roots rock connoisseurs before rebooting to slick, blue-eyed R&B, a class act “A footnote to the canonical history, but creator of some of the most gorgeous music you’ll ever hear.”
rewarded in 1976 with the hit-packed Silk Degrees, a peak LA AOR classic.
That multi-platinum platter’s sessioneer roll-call birthed Toto, and it’s a measure of bandleader Scaggs that he’s always attracted and gelled top-drawer talent, groove-steeped musical aces on the same page as a fellow craftsman who first and foremost cares for the music as he cares for his voice – he’s that rare bird who sang better at 56 than 26 – and only lastly cares for career, fortune and fame.
CAST YOUR VOTES…
This month you chose your Top 10 Boz Scaggs LPs. Next month we want your Led Zeppelin Top 10. Send selections via X, Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram or e-mail to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy Led Zeppelin’ and we’ll print the best comments.
CAST YOUR VOTES…
This month you chose your Top 10 Boz Scaggs LPs. Next month we want your Led Zeppelin Top 10. Send selections via X, Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram or e-mail to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy Led Zeppelin’ and we’ll print the best comments.
In the ’80s, the hits and songwriting well no longer overflowing, Scaggs “spent a lot of time doing flat nothing” only to return the following decade alongside the likes of Donald Fagen on-stage and the cream of sessioneers on record, his releases increasingly weighted towards covers and his burgeoning interpretive talent but always deeply pleasurable.
If Scaggs started out as did so many others in the ’60s as a guitar-skewed white-boy bluesician, in recent decades he’s grown into rock’n’roll’s Ol’ Blue Eyes – 2003’s But Beautiful and 2008’s
Speak Low rival Rod Stewart’s takes on the Great American Songbook – a beautifully grained and seasoned voice endowing losers with the bittersweet glamour of winners. Losers, he said in 2001, “are more interesting to explore than winners, the way that we experience things with their ups and downs.”