Classic Soft Rock: Summer Breeze
Seals and Crofts: Summer Breeze * Gary Wright: Dream Weaver * Orleans: Still The One * The Doobie Brothers: What A Fool Believes * America: You Can Do Magic * Air Supply: Even The Nights Are Better. 30 songs in all!
Maybe it's the climate, for some reason, California prospered as a major center of soft rock, particularly during the 1970s and '80s. It's not so much that so many of the genre's practitioners hailed from the Golden State (though almost a quarter of the artists on this volume were in some way associated with California). It has more to do with soft rock's evolution out of several California-born styles: the sunswept harmonies of the Beach Boys and the laid-back aspects of country-rock as it progressed from the Byrds through the Flying Burrito Brothers to the Eagles.
There's also the matter of that little record label from Burbank. While its roster featured rockers, funk groups and even a few leftover Rat Packers, Warner Bros. Records was, for a period, practically synonymous with two genres', the singer-songwriter movement of James Taylor and others, and soft rock as exemplified by such acts as America, Ambrosia, Christopher Cross, Seals and Crofts and mid-period Chicago. Roughly half of the performers on Summer Breeze were signed to Bugs Bunny's waxworks or one of its affiliate imprints.
The earliest selections here date from 1970, two the work of what was then a brawny, brass-baring septet from the Windy City. The irresistibly swinging Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? comes from Chicago's 1969 debut album, when it billed itself as the Chicago Transit Authority. The more ambitious [and in spots not so soft: dig that wah-wah solo) 25 Or 6 To 4 preceded Time into the top 10 and is from the group's second album, Chicago (or, as it was subsequently designated, Chicago II}.
Other early entries include a pair from the quartet that practically invented soft rock. Producer-singer-pianist David Gates, drummer Jim Gordon and guitarists James Griffin and Robb Royer met as session musicians on the busy Los Angeles studio scene in the 1960s. Make It With You and The Guitar Man, both Gates compositions, display uncommonly sophisticated writing and arranging. The former, from 1970, was Bread's debut single and first hit, while the latter, from 1972, is a slinky second cousin, thematically at least, to the Carpenters' Superstar.
Like Gates, Todd Rundgren eventually won his wings as a producer (Badfinger, Meat Loaf, Grand Funk's The Loco-Motion), but he also saw his own chart action—specifically in 1973, when the bittersweet pop ballad Hello It's Me brightened up the airwaves (an earlier version of the song, by Rundgren's Philadelphia band the Nazz, had made Billboard's Hot 100 four years earlier). Jim Seals and Dash Crofts had likewise tasted pop stardom before. From 1958 to 1965, they toured as members of the Champs, the Los Angeles-based combo behind the chart-topping Tequila. In the fall of 1972, the delicate Summer Breeze ushered in a string of subtle Seals and Crofts singles that ran through the late '70s. Concurrently, their Warner Bros, labelmates America and the Doobie Brothers were starting to make their marks. Despite its lyrical ambiguity, there's something undeniably appealing about 1974's Tin Man, You Can Do Magic, from 1982, marked the last significant hit for the trio (by then dwindled to a duo). The Doobies, too, would prove a durable group. The folk-tinged Black Water, from 1975, became their first No.l single, while the prototypical What A Fool Believes, from 1979, was their second and last. Fool's then pervasive influence can be heard in the chorus harmony and raindrops rhythm of Robbie Dupree's Steal Away from 1980.
From the mid-'70s to late in the decade, the gospel of gently rocking music spread to a variety of stylistic quarters. In 1976 alone New York's Orleans applied it to modified boogie on Still The One; Daryl Hall and John Gates made soft rock out of what was essentially a soul/doo-wop ballad in the graceful Sara Smile, their first hit; and Gary Wright, the New Jersey-born keyboardist for British psyche-rockers Spooky Tooth, took the form into space with the effects-laden, period-defining Dream Weaver. Texan Michael Martin Murphey stuck closer to home with 1975's atmospheric tale of a ghostly apparition on horseback on a cold Nebraska night. The top-10 Wildfire sparked Murphey's still-active career as a singer-storyteller of Western lore.
Montana-born backup singer Nicolette Larson, who'd recorded with Neil Young, Graham Nash and others, gave Young's Lotta Love a sprightly treatment, taking it into the top 10 in late '78. By then, Larson's former roommate, Linda Ronstadt, had been batting them out of the park for a while, with a long line of covers of '50s and '60s classics; her take on Little Anthony and the Imperials' Hurt So Bad, from 1980, was her last significant chart single until her 1986 duet with James Ingram, Somewhere Out There.
Like Larson, the Kentucky quintet Exile falls info the "one big hit" category, though the band's smoldering, quasi-disco Kiss You All Over (1978) romanced its way to the very top of the tunedecks and lingered there for nearly half a year. Exile in the '80s eschewed pop altogether to take up a successful career in country music before officially disbanding in 1993. While she didn't recast herself as radically as Exile, Rickie Lee Jones has continued—except for a dry spell in the '80s—to make albums, though she never recaptured the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of 1979's jazzy Chuck E.'s In Love.
As the '70s closed and the '80s dawned, soft rock was firmly ensconced within the institution of popular music. "Adult contemporary" radio formats catered to the style, and it was claiming a major portion of space on the singles charts—with acts like Little River Band and Dr. Hook having already racked up two or three years of singles success. Cool Change was LRB's sixth top-20 entry, and the flute-accented, disco-lite Sexy Eyes was the last of Dr. Hook's six fop-10 singles.
The early 1980s introduced at least three of soft rock's most prominent flag bearers. His total tenure as a star may not have been as long as some, but when he was hot, unassuming San Antonio singer-songwriter Christopher Cross was hot, grabbing five Grammys in 1981 alone. Co-written with Burt Bacharach, 1981's Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do), from the Dudley Moore film Arthur, was his second chart topper; Never Be The Same (1980) followed his first No. 1, Sailing.
Although it first enjoyed singles action back in 1975, Los Angeles trio Ambrosia (David Pack, Joe Puerto and Burleigh Drummond) broke bigger later. The vaguely Doobies-ish You're The Only Woman was the follow-up to the soul-styled Biggest Part Of Me; both discs are from 1980. Another soft-rock superstar act of the '80s was the Melbourne, Australia, duo of Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell. The catchy mid-tempo piece Even The Nights Are Better, from their third platinum LP (1982's Now And Forever), was Air Supply's seventh consecutive single to reach the top five. Fellow British Commonwealth acts John Waite and Alannah Myles also ascended in the '80s, but their reigns were much briefer. Waite, former lead singer of English band the Babys, got off to a fast start. His debut single, Missing You (which, like many records of the period, appropriates the plink-plonk rhythm pattern of the Police's Every Breath You Take), went straight to No. 1 in 1984, but follow-ups flopped and, in 1989, Waite and new bandmates debuted as the multi-platinum Bad English, Canadian vocalist Myles likewise started at the top of the charts, with the bluesy Black Velvet in 1990, but failed to deliver on her initial promise.
Florida drummer Bertie Higgins also found fame fleeting. Formerly a backup musician for '60s singer Tommy (Sheila and Dizzy) Roe, Higgins went top 10 in 1982 with Key Largo, his evocative paean to the Bogart and Bacall 1948 film noir classic—then slipped from sight. The most recent track on Summer Breeze is Beautiful In My Eyes by California singer-songwriter Joshua Kadison. The piano-driven top-20 single was the best-performing of three chart singles from Kadison's 1993 debut, Painted Desert Serenade.
—Gene Sculatti
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