what songs does yacht rock revue play

Best Yacht Rock Revue Songs of All Time - Top 10 Tracks

Best of Yacht Rock Revue

Yacht Rock Revue has performed in venues such as:

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Without further ado, here are Yacht Rock Revue top 10 tracks of all time:

2. Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) (Live)

3. tropical illusion, 4. somebody's baby (live), 5. she's gone - live, 6. ride like the wind - live, 7. the greatest american hero (live), 9. bad tequila, 10. give me the night, yacht rock revue details.

Yacht Rock Revue is an American rock band formed in Atlanta, Georgia in 2007. The band was formed by members of the now defunct indie rock band Y-O-U after an ironic performance of cheesy soft rock hits at a local club gig took off into a weekly residence.

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Sunday, September 22

Yacht Rock Revue

Sunday, September 22 at 8 pm

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Amphitheater at White River State Park

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Cadence Bank Amphitheater

Saturday, October 5 at 8 pm

Saturday, November 9

Mission Ballroom

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Friday, November 15 at 9 pm

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Confessions of a Cover Band: Yacht Rock Revue croons the hits you love to hate

"I never would've guessed I'd be doing what I'm doing now. The 23-year-old me would punch me in the face."

One night in 2012, a man in a Ronald Reagan mask paused beneath a stop sign in the Old Fourth Ward. Armed with a stencil and a can of white spray paint, he transformed the sign into a tribute to a 1978 hit by a mostly forgotten Canadian pop crooner named Gino Vannelli: “I just wanna STOP & tell you what I feel about you, babe.”

“I Just Wanna Stop” is the kind of song whose words most Americans over 40 know despite never consciously choosing to listen to it. After peaking at no. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978, the tune never quite disappeared, becoming the aural equivalent of a recurring wart. The song found a second life—an endless one, as it turns out—in the musical nether region where the smooth, soft-rock hits of yesteryear remain in heavy rotation. Yes, that’s “Africa” you’re hearing in the dentist’s office. And “What a Fool Believes” in line at CVS. And that faint melody burrowing into your brain while on hold for the next available customer service agent? That’s “Steal Away.” Songs like these, disparaged by critics in their time then jokingly christened “yacht rock” by a comedy web series in 2005, are now the soundtrack to American tedium.

They’ve also become the source of a very good—if conflicted—living for the man who defaced the stop sign: Nick Niespodziani, the singer, guitarist, and de facto leader of the wildly popular cover band Yacht Rock Revue , which tours the country, headlines 1,000-plus capacity venues, and occasionally even plays with the original artists behind these hits.

At the time of the Vannelli vandalism, Yacht Rock Revue had begun to graduate from a local curiosity to a national one. Niespodziani’s sister videotaped the incident and posted it on YouTube. They then printed T-shirts of the sign and, when Vannelli performed at the Variety Playhouse, they got one to him.

On a gray Monday afternoon not long ago, Niespodziani was standing at this crossroads, looking at the sign, trying to explain the motivation behind the prank. “We had this idea, so we videotaped,” he said. “It was definitely guerrilla marketing.” Also, he was pretty drunk.

The episode seems to capture something ineffable about Yacht Rock Revue—part fandom, part joke, part self-promotion, each element infused with irony. When YRR takes the stage at Venkman’s, an Old Fourth Ward restaurant and nightclub co-owned by Niespodziani and bandmate Pete Olson, the band is fully in character, complete with gaudy shirts and sunglasses. They crack jokes about each other’s moms and theatrically highlight multi-instrumentalist Dave Freeman’s one-note triangle solo during America’s “You Can Do Magic.”

“This music isn’t easy to perform,” Olson says. Yacht rock songs tend to be filled with complicated chord changes. All seven band members are accomplished musicians, and Niespodziani, who trained for a spell as an opera singer, is a rangy vocalist, capable of gliding through the high notes in Hall & Oates’s “Rich Girl,” Michael McDonald’s gruff tenor in “I Keep Forgetting,” and Dolly Parton’s amiable twang in “Islands in the Stream,” without seeming to strain. He, Olson, and drummer Mark Cobb first played together in Y-O-U, a band they formed at Indiana University in the late ’90s. They found scant support for original music there, so they relocated to Atlanta in 2002.

Photograph by Mike Colletta

Y-O-U built a buzz in Atlanta, thanks to Niespodziani’s catchy, Beatles-esque songs and the group’s playful gimmicks. They performed, straight-faced, as Three Dog Stevens, a sad-sack trio playing what they called “sandal-rock” (a made-up, synth-heavy genre defined by its purveyors’ predilection for wearing sandals with socks); they covered Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” entirely on keyboards while dressed as the Royal Tenenbaums; they created a YouTube mockumentary series about a competitive jump-roping team. “Comedy has always been part of what we do,” Niespodziani said. “We were doing anything to get noticed because we felt we had good songs but just couldn’t break through with them.”

“I said, ‘That sounds like hell on Earth.’ He was like, ‘But you’re going to make a lot of money.’ So we did it.”

In 2008, Y-O-U was booked every Thursday at the 10 High club in Virginia-Highland. They’d stage “Rock Fights,” playing dueling sets of covers by artists like Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, and INXS, or rejigger Y-O-U songs as soul rave-ups with horns and backing singers, or do a standup comedy night. Yacht Rock Revue was just another of these goofs: Put on silly clothes, and play songs everybody knows but nobody really likes—or claims not to. It was Cobb and guitarist Mark Dannells who came up with the idea. Dannells thought about calling it “A.M. Gold” but Cobb had recently seen a viral web series called Yacht Rock and felt like the term would resonate. Niespodziani went along because his friends needed his vocals. Two band members wore wigs to that first show, and, at one point, Niespodziani stripped off his shirt. People loved it. The club’s booker invited them back the next Thursday. The gig sold out. He asked them to do it every Thursday.

“I said, ‘That sounds like hell on Earth,’” Niespodziani recalls. “He was like, ‘But you’re going to make a lot of money.’ So we did it.”

Most cover bands are awful. But because they play well-known songs, they often secure regular, paying gigs that bands playing original music can’t. Even for the good ones, there’s a ceiling. Few ever perform further than 20 miles from wherever they played their first gig. What’s more, performing other people’s music for a living carries a degree of shame. Cobb has heard the mutterings about Yacht Rock Revue: “Why are these guys playing covers? They could write their own songs. They don’t need to hide behind a gimmick.”

Most of the guys in Yacht Rock Revue—which also includes bassist/vocalist Greg Lee and keyboardist/vocalist Mark Bencuya—had already spent half a lifetime dragging gear into dank basement bars to play for a few bucks and even fewer people. They did this in an era when the music business was cratering. The rise of the internet taught a generation of consumers that music is free, devaluing the dream to which musicians dedicate their lives.

When Yacht Rock Revue started in 2008, Dannells was nearly 40. “It’s not like the world is beating down the door of 40-year-old rock stars,” he says. Today, Yacht Rock is a business, owing its success partially to the corners of the business that haven’t collapsed: live music and merchandising. Besides their public shows, Yacht Rock Revue plays a steady stream of well-paying corporate gigs. They also sell lots of captain’s hats, T-shirts, and other swag. The success of the franchise means it’s been more than five years since any of them had a day job. Niespodziani and Olson created a company, Please Rock , that provides the bandmembers and their families with health insurance, 401Ks, and all the other trappings of comfortable, upper-middle-class stability few musicians ever achieve. All this grants bandmembers some real creative freedoms. “I just released a whole record of orchestral music,” Dannells says. “I don’t care if it sells. I just do it for enjoyment.”

Niespodziani shuttered Y-O-U years ago but still writes elegant power-pop songs for his other band, Indianapolis Jones . But the difference between his two bands’ profiles is stark. Troy Bieser, who has been working on a documentary about Yacht Rock Revue, says he’s seen this in the juxtaposition of the footage he’s compiled. “I’ve seen Nick going through the journey of being thankful for the success but it also feeling ill-fitting,” Bieser says. “That existential dilemma has followed him.”

Niespodziani knows whenever Yacht Rock plays anywhere, that’s a slot a band like Indianapolis Jones can’t get. “We’re a big part of the problem,” he says. As a 39-year-old father of one, who’s worked hard to get what he has, he isn’t about to give it up, but he’s also honest about the compromises he’s made and doesn’t hide from the question that is a natural byproduct of his own success: When a joke becomes your life, how do you keep your life from becoming a joke?

“I never would’ve guessed I’d be doing what I’m doing now,” he says. “The 23-year-old me would punch me in the face and leave me for dead.”

Yacht rock was mostly made in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but the genre wasn’t named until 2005 when JD Ryznar, a writer and actor, created the Yacht Rock web series with a few friends. The video shorts imagined the origins of songs like the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes,” Toto’s “Rosanna,” and Steely Dan’s “FM.” The music, Ryznar says, was well-crafted, like a yacht, and recurring nautical imagery in songs like Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” or on Loggins and Messina’s album Full Sail made the term fit. According to Ryznar, true yacht rock has jazz and R&B influences, is usually produced in California, and frequently involves a rotating group of interconnected studio musicians. The term was never intended to be a pejorative—“we never thought it was silly music,” Ryznar says—but the web series is most definitely comedy, and feelings about the music itself tend to be buried under layers of hipster irony, warm nostalgia, and veiled contempt. Yacht rock songs are finely constructed: They’ve got indelible pop hooks, but they’re decidedly professional, not ragged and cool like punk or early hip-hop, which were canonized among the music of that era.

For the first Yacht Rock Revue gig, much of the set list came from a compilation CD that Cobb had burned titled The Dentist’s Office Mix. It included songs like Player’s “Baby Come Back,” Ambrosia’s “The Biggest Part of Me,” and Rupert Holmes’s “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” “I’d put it on at parties and just see what the reactions would be,” Cobb says. “It was a weird, guilty pleasure.”

Niespodziani’s initial feelings about the music were uncomplicated. “I wasn’t a fan,” he says. “I was really into music that made people feel something, that had some grit and humanity to it. The ethos I thought was important in rock ’n’ roll was rebellious fun crossed with a heart-on-your-sleeve kind of thing. Yacht rock doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t rebel.” He found a lot of yacht rock to be technical, clinical, and sterile. “Sophisticated for the sake of being sophisticated.”

Onstage, Niespodziani is the picture of unapproachable retro cool. Tall, with shaggy hair and an angular face, he hides behind large, dark sunglasses and frequently surrenders a thin half-smile. In other words, he personifies the classic, arrogant, coked-up, late-’70s rock frontman. In person, he gives off nearly the opposite impression. Over coffee, he’s thoughtful, earnest, and self-deprecating. His sharp facial features are accentuated by wide-lensed prescription glasses, and, having traded the polyester shirts he favors onstage for a camouflage green hoodie, the vibe Niespodziani exudes is hardcore music geek. Olson, who has known Niespodziani since they were in fourth grade in Columbus, Indiana, says when they met, “Nick was the nerdy kid who was good at math and jump-roping.”

Photograph by Emily Butler

Yacht Rock Revue, for Niespodziani, is a part he plays: “I’m almost more an actor than a musician.” He and his bandmates spend hours prowling vintage stores looking for the retro leisure wear that they don onstage—and then a not inconsiderable amount of money getting those old clothes tailored to fit. “It’s a war of attrition,” he says. “You find something that might work, and then it’s itchy or it smells or holes develop because the shirt is older than I am. You have to be shopping at all times.” They once did a gig in street clothes, but it felt wrong. “Polyester,” he says, “is our armor.”

Sometimes that armor hasn’t been enough for Niespodziani. During the band’s first few years, they played weekly at the 10 High. “I would drink a lot and almost sabotage myself, sometimes onstage, and make fun of it,” he says. “People would ask me about the band, and I’d talk down about it and act like I was too cool. I didn’t lash out at people, but it was strange to get well-known for something that didn’t make me feel good about myself. I’d get drunk onstage to deal with it.”

His bandmates certainly noticed, but, for the most part, they let their friend work through it. “He’s been the moodiest about it,” Cobb says. “He just hates Rupert Holmes’s ‘Escape (The Piña Colada Song).’ Hates it. But he knows it goes over well.” So when Niespodziani’s got to play it, he’ll often deadpan an introduction comparing Holmes to da Vinci and Picasso. “By talking about how great it is, it helps me shed that song’s terribleness.”

Niespodziani believes the ironic distance he puts between the guy he is onstage and the guy drinking coffee at Ponce City Market is fundamental to the band’s success. “Because we thought—or at least I thought—I was too cool to be doing this, everything has keyed off what the audience reacts to, whether it’s the clothes we wear, the sidestep dance we do, whatever. The audience has been the head of the snake. We’ve just been following it.” It helps that with more than 500 songs in their repertoire, the band doesn ’ t burn out too badly on any tune. “The only song we have to play is ‘Africa.’” The 1982 hit by Toto, by a band made up of talented but largely anonymous studio musicians, has become something of an Internet meme itself, with multiple think pieces devoted to untangling its allure. “Part of it may be the audacity of the synthesizer sound,” Niespodziani says. “They’re just so cheesy. The chords are fairly complex and pretty unexpected. The way it goes to the minor key in the chorus is kind of a cognitive disconnect. And when you listen to the words, it’s not really about anything. Maybe that’s why it’s so quintessentially yacht rock. It’s not so much what the words are saying, it’s how they make you feel, this combination of pure joy crossed with reminiscing.”

Despite his ambivalence about the music, Niespodziani is first among equals within the band. He sings lead on more songs than anyone else, and it’s his judgment they trust when adding songs to their catalog. He has a system: “Generally, the more a song annoys me, the more likely it makes sorority girls want to eat each other’s brains. Also, almost every song would be an encore for the band we’re covering. So, those are the basics: Does it annoy me? Are girls going to like it? Would it be an encore for the band we’re covering?”

“I’m almost more an actor than a musician.”

Others in the band are more unabashed about the music. “I’ve always loved all this stuff,” says Lee, the bassist. “You have to love it before you can play with it in that comedy sense and do it right.” This ability to walk that line between having fun with the music and making fun of the music has won over many of the original artists. When the band first reached out to guys like Dupree, Gary Wright (“Dream Weaver”), and Player’s Peter Beckett, some artists disdained the term “yacht rock” and feared being treated as a joke. Dupree was an early convert and evangelized about the band to his peers, touting their musicianship and enthusiasm. He says those who eventually performed with Yacht Rock Revue were “staggered that they were playing in front of 4,000 people who knew every word to their songs.”

The genre’s rise as a cultural touchstone—Jimmy Fallon has been a big booster, inviting Dupree, Cross, McDonald, and others to perform on TV, and there’s now a SiriusXM station devoted to it—has benefited these artists. Their Spotify and YouTube streaming numbers have risen noticeably. “It’s made a big impact financially,” Dupree says. “Even the skeptics have seen the power of it.”

For a while, the band had a bit of a good-natured Twitter beef with the creators of the Yacht Rock web series. Ryznar admits he initially felt like the band had hijacked his idea, but now his only real gripe is Yacht Rock Revue’s liberal definition of yacht rock. “Half their set is incredible yacht rock,” Ryznar says. “The other half, they play way too much Eagles, America, and Fleetwood Mac. Those aren’t yacht rock bands.”

The band makes no apologies. As Niespodziani puts it, “Yacht rock is what we say it is now.” That’s not just bravado. Yacht Rock Revue trademarked the term “yacht rock” for live performances, so other acts can’t use it without permission. The maneuver helped snuff out competition from other cover bands but occasionally puts them in conflict with some of the genre’s originators. When Cross’s manager tried to assemble a “Yacht Rock” tour featuring Cross, Orleans, and Firefall, it ran afoul of the trademark.

“We said, ‘If you want to call it Yacht Rock, we’ve got to be the [backing] band,’” Olson says. That compromise collapsed when Cross’s manager “wanted a piece of the trademark and of all our earnings over three years.” Yacht Rock Revue sent a cease-and-desist letter instead.

The band’s set list is anchored in the classic late ’70s, early ’80s yacht-rock era but can stretch to include songs as old as the late ’60s or as recent as the early ’90s. Of course, there’s a balance to be struck: If they go too far afield, they risk becoming just another cover band, but there are other considerations to take into account, too. As Cobb explains, “Nothing about Whitney Houston is in the genre, but when we play ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody,’ the chicks go crazy, everybody orders another round, the bar sells out of Tito’s and Red Bull, and they’re like, ‘When can you come back? You broke alcohol records.’”

The band’s audiences have evolved over time. The earliest shows were heavy on hipsters and fellow musicians. Then, those fans brought their parents. At a Buckhead Theatre gig in March, the crowd leaned toward balding guys in button-down shirts and platinum-blond women wearing expensive-looking jewelry. Niespodziani once called yacht rock “the music of the overprivileged,” which was a joke, but also not. Getting older, wealthier fans out to shows is an impressive accomplishment most artists would envy, but it has changed something fundamental about Yacht Rock’s appeal. “When we started, it was people elbowing each other, laughing at this music,” Niespodziani says. “Now, there’s no irony.”

On a night off during a Vegas stand in 2015, the entire band went to see Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band perform at the Pearl Theater in the Palms Casino. Starr began doing these tours in 1989, fronting a band of aging rockers like Gary Wright, Steve Lukather (Toto), and Gregg Rolie (Santana, Journey), whose names and faces you might not recognize but whose songs you certainly would. Just past the midway point in the show at the Pearl, Lukather stepped to the mic, and Starr began beating out a familiar rhythm on the drums. As Lukather picked out the first few notes on the guitar and the synths pumped out the insistent melody, the song was instantly recognizable: “Africa.” In the theater balcony, Cobb recalls looking across at Niespodziani and seeing something change in his friend. “I just watched Nick’s face and, all of a sudden, it was as if this weight lifted off him.”

The Beatles had always been Niespodziani’s favorite band. “Now, I’m watching Ringo Starr, and he has to play fucking ‘Africa’ every night, too,” Niespodziani says. “He was in the Beatles! That was a life-changing moment for me.” Starr and his band were touching many of the same nerves in the audience at the Pearl Theater that Yacht Rock Revue touches all the time. “When we started Yacht Rock, I didn’t like the music we were playing. I didn’t like myself for being in a cover band. I had some dark times. It’s been a journey for me to get okay with it. That was a pretty key moment. Once you get to a certain point in the music business, everybody’s hustling. I’m not going to look down my nose at anybody for doing anything that makes it possible to feed their family by singing songs.”

Seeing Starr go yacht rock was a significant step that’s made enjoying Yacht Rock Revue’s triumphs a little easier. For years, Olson and Niespodziani waited for interest in yacht rock—and their band—to fade. Opening Venkman’s was a hedge against that. But Yacht Rock Revue’s stock continues to rise. Their touring business has grown 375 percent since 2014. “It’s not a fad,” Niespodziani says. “This is going to be our biggest year by far.” They play increasingly larger venues and have recently started booking dates overseas, including this summer in London.

The question is, where else can they take this, literally and figuratively? Back in 2013, the band quietly released a five-song EP: four original songs and a cover of—what else?—“Africa.” They used to occasionally drop an original tune into their shows, sometimes announcing it as a “Hall & Oates B-side.” The crowds were amenable, kind of. “It’s hard when they know every word to every song,” Niespodziani says. “They don’t come for discovery; they come for familiarity.” That’s a truism any band who has ever had a hit knows all too well. The essential appeal of Yacht Rock Revue—and yacht rock—is a combination of nostalgia and escape, a yearning for the simpler, easier time these songs evoke. Yet Niespodziani has been wondering lately if it’s possible to pivot fans to his own songs, either with Yacht Rock Revue or Indianapolis Jones.

“That’s still my dream,” he says, “to have one song that matters to somebody the way ‘Steal Away’ matters to people. No matter what else I do in life, if I don’t ever get over that bar, part of me will feel like I failed at the one thing I wanted. I don’t know if I can ever let go of that. I don’t know if I’m ready to face that darkness.”

In 2013, during a commencement speech at Syracuse University, the author George Saunders told graduates, “Success is like a mountain that keeps growing as you hike up it.” Niespodziani brought this quote up to me while we were having coffee. He knows his life is nothing to complain about. He lives a rarefied existence where he gets paid a lot of money to play music. But clearly, the mountain grows in front of him, and the hike up isn’t always easy. He’s still prone to self-deprecating asides about his band, he still kinda envies the Robbie Duprees of the world—but, hey, he doesn’t need to get drunk onstage anymore, and he doesn’t lose sleep wondering if he’s a force for good or evil in the world. That stop sign at the crossroads in the Old Fourth Ward isn’t an omen or a cautionary tale. It’s simply a funny story that makes people smile. He’s just working on becoming one of them.

“The way I really made peace with it is, it occurred to me that everywhere we went, everyone was so happy to see me,” he says. “These people, it’s the highlight of their week to come sing along with these tunes. If your job is making people happy, that’s a pretty good calling.” He leans back in his chair and smiles. “My job is to make it okay for everybody else to have fun. That’s kind of cool.” He gets quiet for a moment and shrugs.

This article appears in our  July 2018 issue .

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Yacht Rock Revue

• September 1, 2022 Setlist

Yacht Rock Revue Setlist at Ravinia Park, Highland Park, IL, USA

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• She's Gone ( Daryl Hall & John Oates  cover) Play Video
• Somebody's Baby ( Jackson Browne  cover) Play Video
• Heart to Heart ( Kenny Loggins  cover) Play Video
• Escape (The Piña Colada Song) ( Rupert Holmes  cover) Play Video
• Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) ( Looking Glass  cover) Play Video
• Dancing Queen ( ABBA  cover) Play Video
• Hold the Line ( Toto  cover) Play Video
• Africa ( Toto  cover) Play Video
• Give Me the Night ( George Benson  cover) Play Video
• Let's Hear It for the Boy ( Deniece Williams  cover) Play Video
• Don't Bring Me Down ( Electric Light Orchestra  cover) Play Video
• Right Down the Line ( Gerry Rafferty  cover) Play Video
• I Keep Forgettin' ( Michael McDonald  cover) Play Video
• Cool Change ( Little River Band  cover) Play Video
• Ride Like the Wind ( Christopher Cross  cover) Play Video
• Whenever I Call You Friend ( Kenny Loggins & Stevie Nicks  cover) Play Video
• Hotel California ( Eagles  cover) Play Video
• Bette Davis Eyes ( Jackie DeShannon  cover) Play Video
• Under Pressure ( Queen & David Bowie  cover) Play Video
• Baker Street ( Gerry Rafferty  cover) Play Video

Edits and Comments

8 activities (last edit by event_monkey , 30 Aug 2024, 09:20 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Africa by Toto
• Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty
• Bette Davis Eyes by Jackie DeShannon
• Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) by Looking Glass
• Cool Change by Little River Band
• Dancing Queen by ABBA
• Don't Bring Me Down by Electric Light Orchestra
• Escape (The Piña Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes
• Give Me the Night by George Benson
• Heart to Heart by Kenny Loggins
• Hold the Line by Toto
• Hotel California by Eagles
• I Keep Forgettin' by Michael McDonald
• Let's Hear It for the Boy by Deniece Williams
• Ride Like the Wind by Christopher Cross
• Right Down the Line by Gerry Rafferty
• She's Gone by Daryl Hall & John Oates
• Somebody's Baby by Jackson Browne
• Under Pressure by Queen & David Bowie
• Whenever I Call You Friend by Kenny Loggins & Stevie Nicks

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Yacht Rock Revue Gig Timeline

• Aug 26 2022 Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park Atlanta, GA, USA Add time Add time
• Aug 27 2022 Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park Atlanta, GA, USA Add time Add time
• Sep 01 2022 Ravinia Park This Setlist Highland Park, IL, USA Add time Add time
• Sep 02 2022 Marathon Music Works Nashville, TN, USA Add time Add time
• Sep 08 2022 Lava Cantina The Colony, TX, USA Add time Add time

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Yacht Rock Revue Post-Game Concert

Ohio Lottery Post-Game Concert featuring Yacht Rock Revue

presented by Dunkin'

As part of the Ohio Lottery Post-Game Concert Series, Yacht Rock Revue will perform a live concert from the field. Free to all fans with a game ticket.

YACHT ROCK REVUE TICKET PACKAGE

This special package includes an exclusive yacht captain’s hat plus your ticket to the August 18 game. Packages are limited, so reserve yours today!

*Offer subject to availability. Must purchase your August 18 game ticket through this special offer to receive the hat.

HAT PICKUP INFORMATION

Hats will be available for pickup on August 18 near Gapper's Alley (Terrace Level near section 120) until the bottom of the fourth inning.

About Yacht Rock Revue

What is left for Yacht Rock Revue to prove? This top-notch group of musicians has already rocked onstage with John Oates, Eddie Money (RIP), and both versions of the band Player. They’ve trademarked the term “yacht rock,” both metaphorically and literally (U.S. Registration Number 3834195). From humble beginnings in a basement, touring in partnership with Live Nation and Sirius XM, they now headline sold-out shows across the country, from Webster Hall in New York to the Wiltern in L.A. While rising from bars to amphitheaters, t hey’ve ticked every box on the Rock Star Accomplishments bingo card. Except for one: Writing and singing their own songs.

Yacht Rock Revue’s first original record is ten songs inspired by the smoooooth sounds of the Seventies and Eighties. They’ve brazenly titled it Hot Dads In Tight Jeans – forgive them for bragging, but that’s what they are – and it returns Yacht Rock Revue to their roots in original music. It’s rare that musicians in their 40s chase their rock star dreams. You’d have to be crazy to try. YRR knew they were underdogs, but resolved to take one more shot at the Top 40, and maybe even become a Cinderella story of midlife fulfillment.

Yacht Rock Revue began in the least-yachtiest of states, 2,000 miles from breezy Marina del Rey. Nick Niespodziani, the group’s singer, guitarist and spiritual leader, and Pete Olson met in the fourth grade in suburban Indiana, went on to Indiana University in the late Nineties, formed the band Y-O-U, then escaped – Rupert Holmes reference intended – to Atlanta. One night, Y-O-U tucked their tongues deep in their cheeks and played a show of Yacht Rock songs. The rowdy (a nice way of saying drunk), sold-out crowd loved it. When the club owner asked them to do it again, Niespodziani didn’t want to. But the club owner had an ace up his sleeve: money.

Over the years, YRR (there’s also a Dave, a Greg, and literally three guys named Mark) have turned themselves into human wine spritzers, playing 120 to 150 shows a year, mastering Yacht Rock’s slick chords and mellow grooves, and partying like it’s 1979. What began as a joke among friends soon put a ripple in the zeitgeist, starting a national trend through YRR’s concerts, lauded as “unabashedly joyous affairs” by Entertainment Weekly. They accumulated an extensive wardrobe of white belts and polyester shirts. Yacht Rock Revue were revered and well-compensated! Their life was a tenor sax solo! This is what every musician wants.

But even as YRR was sailing the smooth seas of tribute-band superstardom, and the band members all became dads, Niespodziani was still writing original songs. These new tunes had the spirit of Yacht Rock, but were more modern – akin to Phoenix or Air, the hip bands that adapted Yacht for a younger audience. They brought the songs to a hot producer, Ben Allen, who’s worked with Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective, and Neon Indian. Allen gave the songsa lustrous shine, for both new audiences and their ever-loyal fans, the Nation of Smooth. Niespodziani and Olson even co-wrote a song, “Big Bang,” with Yacht Rock master Matthew Wilder, famous for his massive 1983 hit “Break My Stride.”

“Step,” the record’s first single, is a peppy number replete with falsetto and bumping bass, a cross between the Bee Gees and Steely Dan’s “Peg.” It’s also the mission statement for the album in a way, because it’s about deciding who you want to be, and making space for that in your life. The seven-piece band display tight chops, and the songs incorporate Yacht Rock Revue’s sense of humor, especially on the funky, pro-margarita “Bad Tequila,” the flute-fired “Another Song About California,” and opening track “The Doobie Bounce,” where Niespodziani brags, “I used to sleep on couches/Now I sleep on nicer couches.”

Hot Dads In Tight Jeans is as plush and shiny as Kenny Loggins’ beard. And YRR are already dropping these new songs into their sets, to great response from longtime fans who are thrilled to hear new smooth. While others in YRR’s position stick with the tried-and-true, Niespodziani hopes the album will let them welcome aboard new fans, too. To paraphrase a notable mariner… they’re gonna need a bigger yacht.

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Groups of 15 or more can receive special savings off regular ticket prices. For more information, call Reds Group Sales at (513) 765-7600.

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Sail Away: The Oral History of ‘Yacht Rock’

This story was originally published on June 26, 2015

I n the late 1970s and early 1980s, musical artists like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, Toto, Hall and Oates, and dozens of others regularly popped up on each other’s records, creating a golden era of smooth-music collaboration.

More from Rolling Stone

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Stormy Daniels Versus the World

And on June 26th, 2005, an internet phenomenon was born. In 12 short but memorable episodes — first via the the short-film series Channel 101 and then online — JD Ryznar, Hunter Stair, Dave Lyons, Lane Farnham and their friends redefined an era and coined a term for the sultry croonings of McDonald, Fagen, et al.: “yacht rock.”

As “Hollywood” Steve might say, these guys docked a fleet of remarkable hits. This is the story of Yacht Rock, told from stem to stern — a reimagining of a bygone soft-rock renaissance, courtesy of hipsters with fake mustaches, impeccable record collections and a love of smoothness. Long may it sail.

The Michigan Connection JD Ryznar (Director, “Michael McDonald”): I moved from Ann Arbor to L.A., and ended up making friends with all these other guys from Michigan, like “Hollywood” Steve Huey, Hunter Stair, and David Lyons. Pretty much every weekend I’d have “Chinese Thanksgiving” at my apartment — we’d eat BBQ chicken and burgers, drink beer and listen to records of what I called “yacht rock.” You know, like Michael McDonald is singing background vocals and like there’s guys on boats on the covers; it feels like you’re on a yacht listening to it. And the guys were like, oh, we know this music.

Dave Lyons (“Koko”): You know how, in the Seventies, these big bands started playing arena rock? We liked the idea of these smooth bands playing “Marina Rock.” I thought it was a better name.

“Hollywood” Steve Huey (“Hollywood Steve”): What I mostly remember is JD playing Journey records all the time. He was so into Journey that he had photocopied a photo of Steve Perry and pasted it onto his liquid soap dispenser. He wrote “Steve Perry Soap: Clean as all fuck” on it.

Lane Farnham (editor, “Jimmy Messina”): JD and I had talked about Journey for a year before we did Yacht Rock. In the third episode, that whole “you need to fly like a pilot” bit? Those are direct lines from Steve Perry in this crazy documentary we found. He’s coked to the gills, in the Eighties, just blabbering about who knows what. We got a kick out of that stuff.

Ryznar: My musical tastes are not that interesting, and they never were.

Huey: I turned 30 right before we started doing the series, and I thought, well, this is a nice round number. What do 30-year-olds do? I feel like it’s time I get into Steely Dan. I bought most of the catalogue and was like, This is my new identity. I’m gonna unwind, start listening to Steely Dan, and leave parties early.

Channel 101 Hunter Stair (“Kenny Loggins”):  At the time, JD had helped me get a job at a production company, and he asked if I wanted to shoot this thing they were doing for something called Channel 101. I didn’t know anything about it, but I saw that it was started by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab — who I knew because I had a copy of Heat Vision and Jack [the failed 1999 pilot they wrote that became a huge underground hit, directed by Ben Stiller and starring Jack Black ]. So I was super pumped.

Ryznar : It was a cool scene at the time: Justin Roiland had [Channel 101 series] House of Cosbys, Dan Harmon had Laser Fart. Our friends Drew Hancock and Wade Randolph, who would go on to play Hall and Oates, they had a show about a regular guy who got angry, and turned into a smaller, shirtless weaker guy who didn’t turn green or anything.

Drew Hancock (“Oates”): That was called “Man to Man: Metamorphosis Ultra.” It was the lowest stakes Incredible Hulk show you could possibly have.

Justin Roiland (co-creator of Rick & Morty and House of Cosbys, “Christopher Cross”): Every single month you’re making something, and then you’re testing it in front of a live audience. You see what works, what doesn’t work.

Ryznar : It was a January 2005 screening where we started the school of Channel 101, where you’re showing the stuff you made in front of 200, maybe 300 people. And then they put it on the “internet,” which was very hard to do back then. There was no “YouTube.” Listen to Old Man Ryznar here.

Farnham: JD and I would go down to the beach and play something called “smash ball” — there’s no rules to the game, so we’d just make them up. And he said, this is fucking hilarious, we should make a short film about this. So we got Hunter to direct SmashBoys — and it was funny.

Lyons: Two paddles and a ball that you hit back and forth on the beach. We turned it into a soap opera .

Stair : We started playing Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With the Boys” [from Top Gun ] on repeat as we drove a convertible around Playa del Rey. Just to get in the mood.

Ryznar : There were some Phil Collins music cues, I think. A lot of sports music from Eighties movies — “You’re the Best Around” and whatnot. We used a great Kenny Loggins song for the climax. It’s from Caddyshack II . . .

Stair : “Nobody’s Fool”! It ended up winning the Best Failed Pilot of that year; we lost by eight votes to the Lonely Island guys, who did “The ‘Bu.” They just stuck their middle fingers up at everybody and said, we didn’t make a show but we made a hilarious music video. That was the night I had the idea for Y acht Rock.

Christening the Ship Ryznar : Hunter and Dave Lyons came up with an idea for a show about a couple of jewel thieves who lived on a yacht and listened to that music.

Stair : That was actually called Steal Away.

Lyons: I believe Hunter and I were talking about a private eye detective team called Loggins & Loggins that lived on a houseboat and solved mysteries — like Simon & Simon.

Ryznar : I said: How about we play Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald as they co-write “What a Fool Believes” together? We had Stevie Nicks in there originally, for some reason. And then Drew Hancock and Wade Randolph said, we want to be Hall and Oates. I had gotten into the H&O song “Portable Radio” pretty hard. I needed to introduce it to the world. That was very important to me.

Stair : The seed of Koko the manager is . . . there’s a Doobie Brothers album that has a sweet looking manager dude on it. I remember sitting there with JD and being like, look how awesome this guy is.

Ryznar : Dave Lyons invented the Koko character while out drinking with Hunter one night. He just put on a bunch of garbage Seventies clothes he had around the house, and had a little stupid whistle around his neck. All these little touches — that’s what Dave is so great at.

Lyons: No, [Dan Harmon] wasn’t an immediate fan. That’s because he doesn’t get music. Just listen to the theme song for  Community — it’s terrible. Dan looks at things differently than most people, and I don’t think he loves music the way we do. But he came around. He came to really enjoy it. [Harmon would eventually play record producer Ted Templeman in two episodes.]

Ryznar : We thought maybe people would get it, maybe they won’t. But we submitted it. At the prime time panel, everybody but Dan Harmon like it. I think that because he’d never heard of the guys, he didn’t realize how much that music had meant to other people. People knew who everybody was. That’s why we put Hollywood Steve in there to say, hey, this is the deal. Hollywood Steve was a friend and an actual music critic. If you look up a lot of Nineties rap albums on All Music Guide, chances are Hollywood Steve wrote the review.

Huey: I was a published music writer, and that lent me a voice of authority that I might not have otherwise had amongst a hardcore group of music nerds. “Oh this guy’s viewpoint has to be legitimate! He’s published.”

Steve Agee (“Steve Porcaro”): Channel 101 at that point in time was really known for people making videos kind of purposely shitty. So we couldn’t tell if it was made to look bad on purpose.

Hancock: When Wade and I saw the first episode, we were like, eh, this isn’t very good. We didn’t like it. I didn’t understand it. So when it had this meteoric response, I was very surprised.

Ryznar : So Yacht Rock got screened, we were very nervous, and it went over like gangbusters. Just bona fide love from beginning to end from the audience. And we got voted number one on our first try, which hadn’t been done too often on Channel 101.

Stair : It got the biggest laugh of the night. As soon as it was over, we knew we were in. We weren’t totally sure it was going to be number one, but we knew we’d be up there.

Ryznar : A lot of people wanted parts. People had ideas. So we got to work with people we wanted to work with. Before we even knew we were picked up for a second episode, Hunter came up to me and said, “Uh, just talking to Doug Benson. I told him he could play Peter Cetera in the next episode.”

Lyons: The thing about the Channel 101 screenings, they’re always at a place that serves lots of alcohol. And after we saw how well it went over, we’re all drinking at the bar; Dan Harmon is doing a show with Sarah Silverman [ The Sarah Silverman Program ] at the time, and Doug was there with her. Yes, Hunter promised him the role of Peter Cetera. Which is great casting.

Episode Two: The Songwriting Contest In the second episode, Hall and Oates challenge Loggins and Messina to songwriting contest. It ends with the creation of some of the greatest smooth music ever.

Ryznar : I mean, imagine if you saw Hall and Oates where Oates, with all that hair and the mustache, was the top, and Hall was the bottom? They were sort of the opposite of the smooth California scene. So they sort of made the perfect antagonists.

Huey: The only reason they were picked as antagonists is because they’re from Philadelphia, which is a mean place.

Hancock: The wigs we got from our friend Willy, who just happened to have two of the most perfect wigs ever.

Wade Randolph (“Daryl Hall”): The Hall wig is named the De Carlo. I don’t know why.

Hancock: I remember for the mustache, I think I tried a regular handlebar mustache but it just wasn’t thick enough. So I just ended up taking a lock of the wig and fashioning a mustache out of that.

Stair : And Justin Roiland coming in, doing “Sailing.” The way the whole thing flowed, it’s so fast and perfect. I think that was Yacht Rock ‘s the finest hour.

Roiland: JD asked me, would you play Christopher Cross? I’d never heard “Sailing” before, believe it or not. I remember the first few listens going I don’t get the appeal of this fucking song. It’s an acquired taste.

Huey: We didn’t quite know what we had at that point, and so you kind of had to establish the value system. Smoothness is the main value in this world. The second episode, when that screened for the live audience, I’ve never seen a Channel 101 audience go that apeshit for anything. I remember walking out of the screening going, we’re rock stars! Granted, it’s only this one room, with like 300 people in it, but in that one room of 300 people, I think we might be rock stars.

Koko Makes His Final Voyage Lyons: As soon as we got in for the first one, JD called me and said here’s the idea for the second one: I’m gonna kill off Koko. Well, thanks a pantload, JD. He’s like, no it’ll be great. You’ll come back later as a ghost or something.

Stair : So JD wanted this guy Koko to have this totem at this fight; I suggested a trident, since it’s more nautical. But Anchorman had come out, and they had the fight scene with the trident. We still needed something, so we settled on a harpoon.

Lyons: In the second one, I’m supposed to get run through with my own harpoon. And Hunter showed up with a child’s little trident, taped to the handle of a barbecue fork. I was like Hunter, we can do better than this. So my roommates had a woodshop in the backyard; I went out there and drilled some holes, made some dowel rods, and wrapped the handle in rope. When I showed up with it, everyone said holy shit — you made a fucking harpoon, dude! It also split in the middle, so you could run it through someone. And that episode elevated Koko to this mythic level that nobody expected, least of all me.

Stair : You can’t kill Loggins. You can’t kill McDonald. These are real people. Koko had to die.

Lyons: My thought is that Koko fell on his own harpoon and martyred himself. I like to think that Koko was the Jesus Christ of Yacht Rock. [ Pause ] That’s going to sound arrogant. How about: Koko died to deliver smooth music to the rest of the musicians.

Huey: I don’t think it was ever decided who killed Koko until the very end. The important thing is, like Jesus, he died for a cause. Which, in this case, was smooth music. But you know what’s gonna happen if you’re in the middle of a melée with a bunch of guys from the mean streets of Philadelphia. You’re going to die of a harpoon injury. That’s why they call it the city of harpoon murders.

Randolph: I always assumed it was Oates.

Wyatt Cenac (“James Ingram”): Who killed Koko? You know, very good question. If I had to go with anybody… I’d say maybe Loggins and McDonald together. That’s the secret twist. I think they’d been slowly poisoning him for years, and the harpoon was just to throw people of their scent.

Ryznar : I don’t know. Is Tony Soprano dead? Hollywood Steve took the “Koko” answer to his grave.

Stair : I would never name names. Only Hollywood Steve knows for sure, and someone would have to give him big Hollywood dollars to spill.

Any Port in a Storm After 10 stellar installments, including a guest appearance by “Cleveland” Drew Carey ,  a case for Jethro Tull (the 18th century farmer, not the band) to be considered smooth and a primer on how Michael McDonald influenced Nineties G-Funk , Yacht Rock was canceled by Channel 101 after “FM” — about a gang war between the Eagles and Steely Dan. But help was on the horizon.

Ryznar : The record at the time was 12. We really wanted to beat it — but we didn’t. There might have been Yacht Rock fatigue in the audience.

Lyons: It’s not one of my favorites. I’m not a fan of the Eagles, and not a lot of people get Steely Dan.

Huey: Some people come back to Channel 101 month after month after month. But you always get some new people in there who don’t know what’s going on. You cross your fingers that general audience goodwill is enough to get you by this month. Unfortunately, in this case, it wasn’t.

Ryznar : It was heartbreaking, man. Because the great thing about Channel 101 is, you can feel when the audience isn’t into it. And the audience was not into this. I knew the 101 days were over as soon as the screening was done.

Stair : Nowadays, things have two- or three-year runs at Channel 101. Back then, 10 episodes was a lot.

Ryznar : Not even two weeks after we were canceled, I got an email from someone who booked a bar in Chicago — The Empty Bottle — and wanted to screen all the Yacht Rocks. I forget if they flew us out or if we just happened to be there, but we screened all the episodes back to back. There was a line down the block; the place was filled to capacity. People were quoting lines.

Huey: The show had started to go viral. Working lower level jobs in reality television, and then walking into a bar and being the most famous person in that room didn’t match up with my everyday experience at all.

Cast Off . . . Again After successfully touring the country, JD & co. starting making new episodes, beginning with Footloose. Featuring the likes of Jason Lee and Wyatt Cenac, it tells the story of how Loggins being kidnapped by Jimmy Buffett led to one of the Eighties’ most rockin’ soundtracks.

Huey: Yeah I was really excited to get back into it, because I didn’t really have too much else going on at that point. Let’s do that thing that made me semi-famous again!

Ryznar : We did the Footloose episode. And it turned out even better than I could have imagined. It was nice, since we weren’t limited to five minutes, even though we tried to keep it close: one of the keys to Yacht Rock is jamming everything into five minutes. I had done some work with Jason Lee, who would quote lines every time I saw him. So I asked if he’d play Kevin Bacon, and he was throwing chairs around.

Lyons: We kept talking about the stories that we never got to tell, one of them being Footloose. And I hate Jimmy Buffett ‘s music; I think it’s a soundtrack to date rape. I think it’s garbage music for people who have no interest in listening to anything good.

Ryznar : We portrayed parrotheads being brainwashed idiots. You kind of have to be if you’re into Jimmy Buffett. Or just want to be so tuned out of life, that like hey, whatever — kick back with flip flops, drink some margs, listen to some sweet Jimmy Buffett music and let him paint a rosy picture of a reality that does not exist.

Lyons: I always like that artists like Bertie Higgins, Rupert Holmes and Andy Kim have an authentic longing in their music. Buffett is a rich dude getting richer off of the lack of taste of the poor and stupid. He represents the lowest common denominator in music, even worse than country singers profiting off of 9/11. To summarize: I’m not really a fan.

Ryznar : You might be able to argue that Jimmy Buffett music is about escaping from a dark place, but there’s no soul in there. So we just wanted to make him an absolute idiot. Our good friend Vatche Panos, who is super funny, really hit a home run with that one.

Cenac: I remember when we were shooting that, I had no idea there was a song called “Cheeseburgers in Paradise.” Much less that people actually listened to it and liked it.

Ryznar : I hope he doesn’t mind me telling this story, but Wyatt Cenac had just auditioned for The Daily Show , and he was flat broke.

Cenac: Yeah, I was definitely very broke. That isn’t why I did it. I did enjoy it. But there was also a part of being broke where you’ll do anything.

Ryznar : And then a month later, he becomes Wyatt Cenac, the international sensation.

Cenac: Do I want to say that Yacht Rock was the thing that changed my life? Someone can say it. You can find someone to connect the dots and make that leap on the Internet.

Huey : We did one more, and I didn’t feel like the last episode came together as well as it could have for whatever reason. I think Footloose was a more cohesive episode. Also the original idea for the finale was Gene Balboa was going to kidnap all these people from the “We Are the World” session , take them to an island, and force them to write soundtrack hits for him. Anyone who tried to escape would get hunted down like in The Most Dangerous Game.

Ryznar : That was a hard one to write — the space battle, Hall and Oates shooting lasers, Loggins starting his soundtrack phase. I’m proud of killing off Hollywood Steve and making it a pain drug-induced hallucination. I think that let us go nuts with it. The “We Are the World” part was a fun shoot. You just look around and go, wow, I know so many talented people that are bringing so much to this thing.

Stair : The Hollywood Steve “character” was on morphine, not Huey. Well, he might have been on morphine, I don’t know. That’d be an awesome salacious story about Yacht Rock. Just write that, it’s even better.

Huey : When I was using, it did get increasingly harder to tell where the character stopped and I began. Once you’ve been on VH1’s “100 Greatest Songs of the Nineties,” the public expects you to maintain a certain image, and I guess I got caught up in a myth. [ Pause ] I’m kidding. But I did murder a homeless woman. Just to see what it felt like.

Farnham: One of my favorite moments of all of Yacht Rock is when Giorgio Moroder is whispering into Kenny Loggins’ ear about “the Danger Zone.” I love that. It’s such a good moment.

Ryznar : Loggins going soundtrack is kind of like the end of Yacht Rock. If “Sailing” is one of the greatest yacht-rock songs ever, and that’s in Episode Two, it’s all death from then on. “Danger Zone” — there’s just nothing smooth about that song at all. By 1985, Michael McDonald had released his last great album. The Doobie Brothers were done. Toto didn’t have any more good songs in them. Steely Dan was broken up. It was over.

How did the actual musical artists react to their portrayal in the show? John Oates (speaking to the Seattle Weekly in 2007): “I think Yacht Rock was the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection. They were the first ones to start to parody us and put us out there again, and a lot of things have happened because of Yacht Rock. “

Ryznar : People actually contacted me and wanted to see if I wanted tickets to [their] shows at the Hollywood Bowl. We went backstage and met Hall and Oates. There’s a picture out there somewhere of Drew Hancock and Wade Randolph with Hall and Oates — and it’s awesome.

Randolph: I don’t know who contacted who, but Oates had seen the show and was apparently a fan of it. Hall didn’t give a fuck about us at all. He was just like whatever.

Hancock: Oates actually understood what we were doing. First of all, he’s the shortest dude on the planet. I’m 5’8, and he looked at me and said, man you’re way too tall to play me. I think he’s 5’4 and had thick heels on too.

Cenac: Oates is the unsung hero in that group. The moment he decides to turn the jets on, watch out.

Lyons: The only negative thing I’ve ever heard from any of the actual people we’ve portrayed was that Kenny Loggins wasn’t a huge fan. My wife met him once, and said my husband played Koko in Yacht Rock. He just got all, huh. Not mean, not nasty. Just: Huh.

Stair : I’m not sure Loggins liked it, [but] I know his son did. A lot of the kids of the guys in the show like. You know, some serious artists. Michael McDonald, I’m pretty sure he liked it.

“I met Steve Porcaro at a book-release party, and he asked, ‘Do you guys hate us?’ We’re writing a love letter to this music and we meant no ill will toward anybody. Except for Jimmy Buffett.”

Michael McDonald (speaking to Time Out New York in 2008): “I thought Yacht Rock was hilarious. And uncannily, you know, those things always have a little bit of truth to them. It’s kind of like when you get a letter from a stalker who’s never met you. They somehow hit on something, and you have to admit they’re pretty intuitive.”

Lyons: Did JD tell you the story of when we went to see Steely Dan? We got contacted by somebody in their camp, I don’t remember who, but they gave us four or five tickets to see them in Irvine. We were in the third or fourth row, and Michael McDonald was the opening act. Those guys got recognized at the concert. Later, when Michael McDonald came out to perform with Steely Dan, they were all wearing captain’s hats. They were singing the song “Showbiz Kids”: “Showbiz kids, showbiz kids making movies themselves/Showbiz kids, don’t give a fuck about anybody else.” And during that line they threw their hats on the ground and stomped on them. We just looked at each other and went, oh my god, they know who we are.

Agee: About a year ago, I was at Largo, and one of the guys that works there is married to Steve Porcaro’s daughter. He was like, yeah, Steve is actually here tonight; he loves Yacht Rock, and said he wanted to meet me. I cut out early because I was honestly too nervous.

Stair : I met Steve Porcaro at a book-release party, and he kind of pulled me aside and asked, “Do you guys hate us?” And I was like, oh no, I hope that’s not the impression we gave anybody. We’re writing a love letter to this music and we meant no ill will toward anybody. Except for Jimmy Buffett.

Farnham: I actually worked with an editor who was good friends with the Toto folks, and they said it’s uncanny how close some of these stories are. Apparently there’s a lot more truth than we know.

Agee: So I can see how bands would be like, oh, they’re making fun of us. But I’ve known JD for awhile now, and I know for a fact that he loves that music. I don’t think someone who hated what’s now called yacht rock . . they wouldn’t spend so much time making videos about it.

Stair : The way I always looked at Yacht Rock was that we kind of did what the Blues Brothers did. We took the music that we really loved that we weren’t really part of, and reintroduced it to our own generation a little bit. The one thing that I hope we got across is that the music is really good, and that we were huge fans of it. The whole reason we did the show is because we loved it.

Lyons: I felt we always treated the music lovingly. It was always treated with respect; what we were trying to make fun of was all these guys hanging out and the ridiculous things they were into. I heard a story that Kenny Loggins got married in the nude. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But that’s the kind of late Seventies/early Eighties Southern California horse shit that is so delightful about Yacht Rock. Like wanting to find out what your root chakra is. That’s what’s funny about it. [ Pause ] I mean of course Kenny Loggins and Steve Perry are going to be into karate!

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