After pretty much having his way with the ’70s, Boz Scaggs took a vacation. A long one.
“I decided explicitly to take a six-month break, and it turned into six years,” says the dapper, 49-year-old San Francisco resident, whose soft voice still bears a strong residue of Texas, where he was brought up.
“I had other things to do, personal things like wanting to spend time with and raise two small children, and the idea of going back into the routine of being in the mainstream just seemed less and less appealing,” he says. “I felt guilty because I was letting a career go by the wayside after working as hard as I did to achieve a level of success . . . but there just wasn’t any music in me. It sort of builds up month after month and you think about what the next album is going to be, but you’re not really writing any songs.
“And when I did put myself to the task of doing another project (for the 1988 `Other Roads’ album), I tried to pick up where I’d been eight years before and still sort of be cutting edge, whatever that is. And I didn’t succeed. I think I had to get through that one to get to this one.”
This one is entitled “Some Change” (Virgin), and it’s a spare, bluesy shot of blue-eyed soul, the type of record that has nothing to do with what’s happening in contemporary pop but that’ll still sound good 10 years from now.
It’s also a departure for Scaggs, as intimate an album as he’s ever made. “Some Change” accentuates the understated yearning in his silky voice, with the singer’s unflashy but evocative guitar-playing providing an emotional and melodic counterpoint. Scaggs and producer Ricky Fataar played virtually all the instruments on the album, recorded in a 3,000-square-foot sound stage they leased in San Francisco.
“You have to hunt and peck around a lot more for your sounds, you can’t just plug in and put the microphone in the same place you always do to record an acoustic guitar,” he says. “There was a lot of down time, but we liked that, we made that a part of what we were doing. Nothing was uncomfortable, nothing was outside of this time and space that we defined ourselves.”
Scaggs says he got the idea for the informal recording session from hanging around with Daniel Lanois at his spacious house-cum-studio in New Orleans. “You could hunker down in a section of the house that you feel good in and start playing and very unobtrusively record it.”
The singer also recalls isolated instances from his career that were an inspiration, like the track “Harbor Lights” from his multiplatinum 1976 album, “Silk Degrees.”
“The song wasn’t fixed, it just evolved with the musicians in a very relaxed sort of way,” he says. “I remember thinking that I’d like to make a whole record like that. There were a few times like that in Muscle Shoals (the famed Alabama studio where Scaggs started his solo career in the late ’60s). It was after a body of work had been done and everybody knew everybody else and it gets comfortable. I wanted to start a record at that point.”
One such Muscle Shoals session yielded an epic version of Fenton Robinson’s Chicago blues classic “Loan Me a Dime,” with Duane Allman on guitar.
“The studio was only about 25 feet by 15 feet, and we wanted to cut the track live, no overdubs,” Scaggs recalls. “So we had to get the horns back in the office, I was in the space where the Coke machine was supposed to be and Duane Allman was stuffed into a small closet, sitting on a sink, feet on the toilet, scrunched into the corner with his amplifier shoved in next to him and the door pushed closed.
“You couldn’t have stopped it because the room was pretty much lit up for that song. It became as long as it was because Duane was playing a solo, and nobody was going to interrupt that. It just kept progressing rhythmically and building and building.”
Scaggs’ affinity for the blues and R&B was formed at an early age in Dallas, where he heard the music of T Bone Walker and Jimmy Reed on the radio and saw Ray Charles perform. Soon, he was playing the blues with his boyhood friend Steve Miller.
“Some Change” is straight out of that tradition. “A lot of that music is written with a plaintive air,” he says. “And a lot of the music for this album came out through sitting around the house in a room by myself with a piano, and I drifted toward the melancholy.”
Never more so than on the stunning ballad “Lost It,” in which the spacious arrangement gives Scaggs’ voice room to roam and ruminate.
“It’s a difficult song, a very elusive enigma that runs through that song,” Scaggs says. “I think it tells a story in itself of how confusing that whole emotion (of regret and loss) is. I think it rings true because it’s ambiguous. It’s not that I prefer to be misunderstood, but it’s truly a question.
“Singing the song, on the other hand, was easy. It came out of sitting at the grand piano in an empty room, and playing those (chord) changes over and over again. Those notes came naturally to me, and that’s characteristic of a lot of this record. We designed these songs to allow my voice a range and freedom that I’ve never given myself.”
– At the Riviera last weekend, Bob Dylan announced that his bassist, Tony Garnier, would soon be departing to tour with the Rolling Stones this summer. If so, it’s a surprise, because Garnier hadn’t previously been mentioned as a candidate to replace the retired Bill Wyman. Chicagoan Daryl Jones was believed to have the inside track; he played on the upcoming Stones album.
