Cover versions

I guess I’m just frightened out of my mind

Posted on by brucehhackett

Favorite holiday?

Many say Christmas, and with good reason. Others pick Thanksgiving, also a fine choice. Even the Fourth of July gets a nod from a few, and that makes sense as well.

But me? I’ve always loved Halloween. As the leaves turn, the temperatures dip and the sun keeps setting earlier in the day, I get a sense of foreboding that gives me goosebumps. I relish a good scare, whether it’s from negotiating my way through a haunted house or sitting through a marathon of really hair-raising horror movies.

Like other holidays, Halloween comes with its own soundtrack, but I don’t mean the tired, overplayed stuff like “The Monster Mash” or “Werewolves of London.” I’m talking about music that imparts a sense of unease and makes you want to glance repeatedly over your shoulder to be sure there’s no one about to do you harm.

I’ve gathered 15 haunting pieces of music from the classic rock era that should make your trick-or-treat season just a little bit more creepy. They’re all on a Spotify playlist at the end of this post, along with a handful of honorable mentions.

May the ghosts, goblins and monsters from your psyche come visit you this weekend!

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“‘Halloween‘ Theme,” John Carpenter, 1978

Every October, I dial up this horror classic starring a young Jamie Lee Curtis, and it never fails to give me the willies. I was astonished to learn very recently that the frightening soundtrack theme music was written by the movie’s director, John Carpenter. We used to use it every year for the haunted house we staged in our Atlanta neighborhood. It’s such a hypnotic piece, using a 5/4 beat, minor chords, piano and synthesizer to build a relentless heartbeat to what turned out to be the first in a long series of scary movies about the unkillable killer Michael Myers.

“‘Psycho‘ Prelude,” Bernard Herrmann, 1960

I still rank this Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece among my favorite films of all time (not just scary ones), and part of the reason it retains its effectiveness is Herrmann’s incredible score. He uses staccato violins almost exclusively to build tension as he torments the audience while star Janet Leigh struggles with moral issues, and then co-star Tony Perkins as Norman Bates wrestles his inner demons. It might be the most terrifying soundtrack ever created. This piece and two others from “Psycho” were also a regular part of our haunted house music accompaniment.

“Season of the Witch,” Donovan, 1966

It’s hard to decide which version of this classic song grabs me more: Donovan’s five-minute original or the 10-minute track by Al Kooper, Stephen Stills and Co. on the legendary 1968 “Super Session” LP. Donovan, the British mystical folkie responsible for “Sunshine Superman” and other flower-garden reflections of the mid-to-late ’60s, wrote it as a somewhat creepy ode to October. Two years later, Kooper & Stills recorded a remarkable jam on Donovan’s chords that became something else entirely, also haunting and intriguing in its own way. “When I look out my window, so many sights to see, and when I look in my window, so many different people to be, and it’s strange, so strange…”

“Black Magic Woman,” Santana, 1970

Written by the great blues guitarist Peter Green and released as a single with his band Fleetwood Mac back in 1968, this song became a huge #4 hit for Carlos Santana and his band in 1970, from “Abraxas.”   It was combined in a medley with the 1966 track “Gypsy Queen,” and utilised congas, timbales and Latin polyrhythms to give the whole thing a distinct voodoo feel: “Got your spell on me baby, yes, you got your spell on me baby, you’re turning my heart into stone, I need you so bad, magic woman, I can’t leave you alone…”

“In the Air Tonight,” Phil Collins, 1981

The relentless touring schedule of Genesis in the late ’70s as they were becoming more commercially successful caused tension and estrangement between Phil Collins and his first wife, culminating in divorce in 1980. The grief this caused for Collins came pouring out in many of the songs on “Face Value,” his debut solo LP in 1981, most notably on the powerful, influential is Nile “In the Air Tonight.” In a 2016 interview, Collins said of the song’s lyrics: “I wrote the lyrics spontaneously. I’m not quite sure what the song is about, but there’s a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration.” The arranger nt has an undeniable spookiness to it, and the words reflect that vibe: “Well, the hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows, t’s no stranger to you and me, /And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord…”

“Cemetery Gates,” The Smiths, 1986

Johnny Marr, guitarist for The Smiths, said he thought the riff he came up with that’s the basis for “Cemetery Gates” wasn’t substantial enough to create a track, but after Morrissey added lyrics about two friends who spend the day in a graveyard, he changed his mind. The song ended up on their 1986 LP “The Queen is Dead” and as the B-side of the single “Ask” the same year: “A dreaded sunny day, so I meet you at the cemetery gates… /So we go inside and we gravely read the stones, all those people, all those lives, where are they now? /With loves and hates and passions just like mine, they were born, and then they lived, and then they died…”

“Thriller,” Michael Jackson, 1982

Jackson’s trailblazing 13-minute music video of his title track “Thriller” broke new ground as a short story, fully choreographed with gory zombie makeup, and the first to be preserved in the National Film Registry…and for the finale, horror movie legend Vincent Price recites the spoken section that ends with his maniacal laugh. It has become a Halloween classic, and rightly so:  “It’s close to midnight, and something evil’s lurking in the dark, under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart, you try to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it, you start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes, you’re paralyzed…”

“Black Sabbath,” Black Sabbath, 1970

Death metal, Goth, Satanic rock — the bands who revel in these genres have plenty of disturbing, macabre lyrics that could certainly be deserving of space on a Halloween setlist, but frankly, I don’t claim to know much about them.  I do, however, recall the spooky chill that made me shudder the first time I heard the song “Black Sabbath,” the leadoff track from Black Sabbath’s debut LP (and check out that creepy album cover).  An ominous tolling bell, a rainstorm with distant thunder, then huge power chords in a minor key, and Ozzy Osbourne demanding to know, “What is this that stands before me?”  Brrrrr. If this isn’t appropriate Halloween music, I don’t know what is.

“Too Much Blood,” The Rolling Stones, 1983

Mick Jagger gets the lion’s share of songwriting credit for this strangely compelling dance track from The Stones’ 1983 LP “Undercover” that protests gratuitous violence in 1980s films even while it’s knee-deep in graphic images about that same violence.  Sparked by a lurid murder in Paris that year involving dismemberment and cannibalism, the song’s lyrics devolved into rap in the middle third, specifically mentioning the 1974 film “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and bemoaning, “I can feel it everywhere, feel it up above, feel the tension in the air, there’s too much blood, yeah, too much blood…”

“Don’t Fear the Reaper,” Blue Oyster Cult, 1976

Out of Long Island, New York, in 1971 came Blue Oyster Cult, one of the stalwart hard rock bands of its era.  BOC guitarist Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser wrote this 1976 hit single in his early 20s, imagining an early death for himself.  “I wasn’t suicidal,” he said, “just thinking cosmically about eternal love and premature death.”  Seems spooky enough to me to be perfect for a Halloween mix… “Then the door was opened and the wind appeared, the candles blew and then disappeared, the curtains flew and then he appeared, saying, ‘don’t be afraid, come on baby, don’t fear the reaper’…”

“D.O.A.,” Bloodrock, 1971

The two-note drone of a European emergency siren is the basic hook on which this gruesome song hangs, and embodies that feeling of dread you might feel in a dark alley or as you approach a haunted house.  The lyrics, which caused the song to be censored in some markets, graphically describe the thoughts of a plane crash survivor as he is brought into a hospital:  “I try to move my arm and there’s no feeling, and when I look, I see there’s nothing there…Life is flowing out my body, pain is flowing out with my blood, the sheets are red and moist where I’m lying, God in heaven, teach me how to die…”

“Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps),” David Bowie, 1980

Bowie had written an early version of this song called “Running Scared” in 1975, and recorded a demo, but ultimately put it aside until compiling tracks for his 1980 LP that he intended to be more commercial than the so-called “Berlin Trilogy” albums that preceded it. “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” is a punky, heavily distorted track featuring Robert Fripp’s harsh guitar, and Bowie so loved the way it turned out that he chose to make it the album’s title track. The eerie lyrics convey the dysfunction behind a strange relationship: “When I looked in her eyes, they were blue, but nobody home, /Well, she could’ve been a killer if she didn’t walk the way she do, /She opened strange doors that we’d never close again…”

“Devil Woman,” Cliff Richard, 1976

British rock ‘n’ roll legend Richard ruled the UK airwaves in the pre-Beatles years (1957-1962) and is one of the most successful recording artists of all time, but he rarely made a dent in the US charts. In 1976, after he had gone through a softening phase, dabbling in gospel and Christian music, he found himself with a big hit in “Devil Woman,” which reached #6 in the US and sparked four more Top 20 hits here in the late ’70s. The lyrics tell the tale of a man jinxed from an encounter with a stray cat with evil eyes, and his discovery that the psychic whose help he sought to break the spell turned out to be the one responsible for the curse in the first place.

“I Put a Spell on You,” Nina Simone, 1965

Written and originally recorded by “Screamin'” Jay Hawkins in 1956, “I Put a Spell on You” has been covered by more than a hundred different artists, from Creedence and Jeff Beck to Annie Lennox and Bryan Ferry. In 1965, blues/jazz singer Nina Simone recorded an amazing rendition that reached #23 on the R&B charts here and also charted well in England. Hawkins, a blues singer, had established himself in the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon by turning the song into a ghoulish stage centerpiece, rising from a coffin amidst smoke and dry ice to deliver a frightful screaming vocal that gave him his nickname.

“‘The X-Files‘ Theme,” Mark Snow, 1993

Martin Fulterman, known professionally as Mark Snow, has written theme music and incidental score parts for several hundred film and TV series since his first project, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” in 1976. Other series include “Hart to Hart,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “Vega$” and “Cagney and Lacey.” At first, Snow was hesitant to work on “The X-Files” because he thought creator Chris Carter and his staff were “kind of weird.” That weirdness is reflected in the theme he ended up composing, which utilized electronic whistling and spooky piano scales that complemented the often macabre story lines.

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Honorable mention:

“Welcome to my Nightmare,” Alice Cooper, 1975; “Yes, I’m a Witch,” Yoko Ono, 1974/2007; “Evil Woman,” Electric Light Orchestra, 1975; “Spooky,” Classics IV, 1968; “Witchy Woman,” The Eagles, 1972; “Halloween,” The Misfits, 1981; “Hells Bells,” AC/DC, 1980.

If the wind is right, you can sail away and find serenity

Posted on by brucehhackett

In the late ’70s/early ’80s, there existed a commercially successful sub-genre of rock music that had been called “the West Coast sound,” or “adult-oriented rock” (AOR). Basically, it mixed pop, R&B, soul, funk, and jazz into impeccably produced radio-ready songs that emphasized melody and mellow vibes and downplayed rock’s harsher elements. “Soft rock,” some called it, although some of the songs were not ballads or even all that “soft.”

In 2005, J.D. Ryznar, a Southern California writer/director/producer who considers himself a fan of that music, became fascinated with how much of it seemed to be recorded by the same community of Los Angeles-based studio musicians. He developed a comedy video web series he dubbed “Yacht Rock,” which poked fun at what he guessed would be the music you’d hear if you frequented the marinas where the wealthy hung out sipping drinks on their yachts.

Although the songs of artists like Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto and others were never referred to as “yacht rock” at the time the music was created, the moniker is now widely used, both lovingly and pejoratively, to characterize the precise, polished, sublime sounds that commanded a great deal of airplay in the 1975-1985 period.

Indeed, for almost two decades now, an Atlanta-based ensemble known as Yacht Rock Revue has been touring for up to 100 shows per year, pumping out convincing cover versions of songs that fall into the loosely defined category. I attended one of these shows in Nashville last week and found it be fun and entertaining, even if it was pretty much just a bunch of unidentified musicians operating as a competent cover band. They’re not unlike the “tribute bands” that cover songs of one specific group (like Dark Star, the famous Grateful Dead tribute band), except Yacht Rock Revue offer renditions of songs by a couple dozen different artists.

To my ears, many of the tunes played are great songs, even favorites of mine — tracks like The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes,” Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind,” Toto’s “Hold the Line,” Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It,” Nicolette Larson’s “Lotta Love,” Boz Scaggs’s “Lowdown” and Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun.” Sure, they were (and still are) overplayed, but that’s really the fault of unimaginative radio programmers rather than the artists who recorded them.

Ryznar admits that the “yacht rock” phrase was meant to gently mock the non-threatening, smooth pop that served as the soundtrack for his short-lived comedy video series, but the name stuck, thanks in large part to jaded music critics who seized on it in their effort to disparage anything that didn’t rock out aggressively with shrieking vocals and shredded guitar solos.

I asked a few music-loving friends what the term “yacht rock” meant to them, and one said, “It’s music for preppy, upper-class, entitled kids (or wanna-be’s thereof) who took the easy-listening way out of having to understand what rock ‘n’ roll was all about.” Another friend added, “Think Tad and Muffy on the back deck in the harbor, dressed in casual (but expensive) Abercrombie attire, with a pitcher of margaritas.”

I beg to differ. Even Ryznar said he used the term affectionately, and those who like this style have embraced the “yacht rock” term. They sold out the Ryman Auditorium last week, as they have in most cities where Yacht Rock Revue have performed, many showing they were in on the joke by wearing captain’s hats and other nautical gear.

It’s music with strong R&B and smooth jazz influences, high production values, clean vocals and light, catchy melodies. In 2014, music writer Matt Colier identified what he feels are the key defining rules of the genre: 1) Keep it smooth, even when it grooves; 2) Keep the emotions light even when the sentiment turns sad; 3) Keep it catchy; 4) Offer the exhilaration of escape.

Bands like Toto and Steely Dan featured a very clean, precise sound that was painstakingly produced, and critics who prefer a rawer brand of rock find that pristine sound to be a negative, synonymous with “too commercial” and “lacking soul or spontaneity.” Rock and roll is meant to be rough around the edges, uncultured, with in-your-face energy and immediacy, they claim. Well, hey, I like loud, growling hard rock too, but there’s room in my music library for both.

On Sirius XM, there’s a station called Yacht Rock Radio that plays this stuff exclusively. “We celebrate the smooth-sailing soft rock from the late 70s and early 80s,” says its website. “It’s the kind of rock that doesn’t rock the boat!”

“Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary,” released in 2024, examines the phenomenon, interviewing a variety of musicians and music industry types who, either enthusiastically or grudgingly, concede that the music in question is sonically top-shelf and melodically satisfying. Thundercat, a Grammy-winning bassist from L.A., said, “I’ve never identified it as yacht rock. I’ve always looked at it from the inside, like, ‘Dang, that’s just amazing songwriting.'”

Comedian/actor/musician Fred Armisen had this to say in the documentary: “Yacht rock, to me, is a very relaxing feeling. The singers all seem to be saying, ‘Hey it’s gonna be OK.'”

In its review of the film, Rotten Tomatoes concluded, “Retroactively dubbed “Yacht Rock” in 2005 by a parody website series, the easy listening, relaxing sounds of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which were beloved by many, came to be gently mocked and even dismissed by rock lovers and critics, but have since reclaimed their legitimate place in music history and are celebrated in this groove-infused film.”

So which artists and songs qualify as yacht rock? The boundaries are actually rather fuzzy, but you might start with Steely Dan. On albums like “The Royal Scam,” “Aja” and “Gaucho,” Donald Fagen and Walter Becker used a broad range of LA-based studio musicians to create the stylish palette they were looking for, and they were perfectionists about it, sometimes trying a half-dozen different guitarists (or drummers or keyboardists) to get just the right take.

Sometimes they used the truly professional musicians who went on to become the members of Toto, who, along with singer Michael McDonald, also guested on the recorded work of Christopher Cross, or Boz Scaggs, or James Ingram, or Nicolette Larson. It was fairly incestuous the way the same names kept popping up on these albums, but that’s because they were the “first call” session musicians most in demand at the time.

Said highly regarded guitarist Jay Graydon, “Many of these songs offered jazz chord changes, but rock/pop grooves. We’re closet jazz guys making pop records — confident, even cocky, and perfect performances every time.”

There are artists who might have a few songs that fall into the yacht rock template but the bulk of their catalog does not. People like Ambrosia, Little River Band, Pablo Cruise, Lionel Richie, Alan Parsons Project, Stephen Bishop, Art Garfunkel, Seals & Crofts, Air Supply, Phil Collins, Grover Washington, Eric Carmen, Steve Winwood and Hall & Oates have heard some of their music played on Yacht Rock Radio. Some are cool with it, but Daryl Hall, for one, took umbrage.

“It’s just R&B, with maybe some jazz in there,” he said. “Mellow R&B, smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is. It was just a fucking joke by two jerkoffs in California, and suddenly it became a genre. I never understood it. People misjudged us because they couldn’t label us. The music press always came up with all these kinds of crap labels. Soft rock, yacht rock. It’s nonsense, really.”

Toto ran into this same problem. Founders David Paich and Jeff Porcaro were seasoned studio players who formed Toto in 1977, blending rock, pop, jazz, funk, even some progressive. Their music didn’t fit easily into a single category, so critics didn’t know how to evaluate them. Ironically, their huge commercial success with tracks like “Africa” and “Rosanna” worked against them, as certain critics looked down their noses and dismissed them as “mainstream” and “anti-rock.” They were called technicians rather than legitimate artists, which were prejudices that had little to do with their actual musical performances.

There are those who label Cross’s 1979 megahit “Sailing” as the ultimate yacht rock anthem largely because of its chill nautical theme. Others say, “Anything with Michael McDonald on it qualifies.” McDonald himself finds the yacht rock designation “hilarious. It’s a bit exaggerated, but these things always have a bit of truth to them. They hit on something, and it has struck a chord for a lot of people out there who find the music nostalgic.”

My friend Paul, who has a lot of experience sailing, noted, “Yacht rock has had a bad rap because it sounds snooty and upper class, while the music is not. I think ‘Summer Breeze’ by Seals and Crofts sums it up very well.”

I’ve collected 30 songs from a variety of “yacht rock” playlists (including 15 from Yacht Rock Revue’s setlist last week) and included my own preferences in the playlist below. If you’re a yacht-rock naysayer, I’d bet good money there are at least five or six songs on this list that you admire, even if only secretly as a “guilty pleasure.”

One of my friends summed up one of the appealing things about yacht rock: “This should be your playlist of choice if you’re trying to get laid.”

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