You’re not going to get him to start singing about rump-shaking or rubbery sex. He’s one of the nicest guys in the history of San Francisco rock, but he ain’t no pushover. Say what you will about Silk Degrees’ many traits - Scaggs’ vowel-y croon, wisely selected or written material, a band (Toto, more or less) that’s obviously pro but nicely malleable - I think it made it because Scaggs made it commercial without lapsing into parody. But even they stumbled occasionally - the only old-timers I can instantly think of who made passable disco records were Johnnie Taylor (“Disco Lady”) and Joe Tex (“Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)”) which was an amusing novelty song at heart). He was always a straight-up blues and R&B guy anyway, so at the time moving into disco was conventional for blues and soul musicians. But it’s also because Scaggs didn’t piss the record away by divorcing his skepticism of disco. Why it worked for Scaggs and not for, say, Dynasty-era Kiss, Rod Stewart, Neil Diamond, or Ethel Merman might be because he more or less did it first. But Scaggs was the only representative of his milieu - we’ll make him a classic rocker, based on his association with Steve Miller - who embraced the slickness, the sleek luminescence of disco (could’ve been the lip gloss) without sounding like a chump. I could see Rerun working his charm to that one. I’ll give you five, if you’ve worked out some routine to “Lido Shuffle”.
Not all of 1976’s Silk Degrees was disco: Only four of its ten songs could conceivably translate to the dance floor. Boz at least produced a great record: Silk Degrees. Some folks found themselves kicked to the curb, with some half-forgotten phone numbers scribbled on soppy cocktail napkins, complexion in ruins and their liver in a specimen dish. But whatever happened in the halcyon days of Harry Casey and the macabre ritual known as the Hustle, few handled it as well as Boz Scaggs did.
They began to sport medallions and feather their hair, and if that was not applicable, they combed over. They purchased Angel Flights for wearing, only to have to forego them in the 1980s. The breadth of a paperclip.ĭisco changed people. Irrelevancy threatened to forfeit his chops and nail his palms to the drum machine, pelted to death by the beanie of Rerun from What’s Happening!! Oh, we were close.
We were only microseconds and some quick maneuvering away from losing Gregg Allman in the strobe lights. But lo, in 19, not only did disco look immortal, but it seemed poised to conquer the dinosaurs of hoary, hairy-headed classic rock musicians. It still does, of course, at wedding receptions for some people’s third marriages. At one time it seemed disco would live forever.
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