I’ve been a fan of Boz Scaggs for a long time, going back to his days in the original Steve Miller Band, roughly since I first heard “Baby’s Calling Me Home” on Children of the Future (1968). I flipped over his self-titled album on Atlantic the following year. When he became a major star with Silk Degrees in 1976, I wondered what had taken so long.
I’ve seen Boz several times over the past 15 years in the Twin Cities. In 2009 we saw Boz perform live with a jazz combo in Minneapolis at the Dakota Restaurant and Jazz Club. Boz put on an unforgettable show in an intimate setting, covering some of the standards he had recorded in recent years as well as reinterpreting his hits of the ’70’s. He utterly silenced the room with the performance of his ballad “Harbor Lights.”
Boz returned to town later that year with a new touring unit to play the State Theater before a sold-out crowd of old fans. With a larger audience the emphasis was naturally on his old hits rather than his new recordings. That night he spoke fondly of Minneapolis, recalling his first time through town many years before at the old Guthrie Theater as well as subsequent stops at First Avenue.
In 2010 Boz returned, this time to the State Fair on a cold and rainy night in Minnesota to perform with Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald. I thought Boz was the first among equals in that lineup. In concert Boz always plays his first hit, the irresistible “Lowdown,” as he did that night I think I could name that tune in two notes from the drum riff alone.
In 2017 Boz Scaggs played with a hot touring band before a packed house at the State again. I thought his performance that night was special. The appreciation of the audience was so intense you could feel it. Something was different. I couldn’t figure out what it was was. Even in the several lesser known blues numbers that he interspersed among the hits in his two-hour set, the crowd was ecstatic. Boz responded with three encores. I didn’t want the show to end but found it completely satisfying.
The crowd appreciated the singing — it even cheered Boz’s leaps to his falsetto — the musicians, the solos, the musicianship. At age 73, Boz was still lanky and cool after all these years. He turned back the hands of time.
We stopped in at the bar next door to the State at the Capital Grill to come down from the show. There was only one open seat, but a gentleman named Rick Thompson got up to let us take his seat next to it. He told us that he books the shows into the State and other downtown venues operated by the Hennepin Theater Trust. I asked Rick why the crowd feeling for Boz was so intense this time around. Rick had a ready answer that he provided with great certainty. “Tom Petty,” he said, referring to Petty’s death that week. You can’t take it for granted that Boz will be back, he said. I was dubious, but it seemed like a reasonable hypothesis.
When Rick headed to the other end of the bar, a group of Power Line readers — Darcy Sperle, Derek Brigham, and Brian Mason — approached to say hello. They had seen the show too. It was their first time seeing Boz perform live. Derek had come with his friends to see him perform this time around, he said, because of Tom Petty. Conclusion: Rick Thompson knows his business.
When Boz came through town again for another show at the State in 2018 we had front row seats as guests of our friends Tom and Randy Edelstein, I snapped the nearby photo. Where we sat the sound was perfect. I could not believe how great Boz sounded. He has carefully tended to his vocal instrument. At the age of 74, he seemed to me never to have sounded better.
At age 81, Boz is now out with Detour. It was released on October 17. According to the Concord label announcement, it was recorded over the past several years. It’s his first new American release in seven years and it is full of the kind of ballads that silenced the room when I saw Boz in 2009 for the first time.
“If I look at myself as a musician over the years, I’d have to consider my primary instrument to be my voice,” Boz said in the Concord press release announcing the album. “Early on, I was really influenced by rock ‘n’ roll guys like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and R&B and soul singers like Marvin Gaye and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, but there was something about jazz and standards that always fascinated me.”
The recoding grew out of Boz’s casual work on demos in the vein of jazz standards with pianist Seth Asarnow. Boz’s vocals backed by Arsanow’s accompaniment on piano lie at the heart of these recordings. The Concord release quotes Boz: “At first, we were just meeting up in musical conversation. I was taken with his piano work, he with my voice, and we both sensed the possibilities.”
I want to bring the album to your attention and pluck a few favorites that have touched me, starting with “It’s Raining.” The song was written by the late, great New Orleans native Allen Toussaint under the name Naomi Neville. Toussaint arranged and produced it with Irma Thomas on the vocal in 1961. Boz’s cover is beautiful.
“Angel Eyes” was written by Earl Brent and Matt Dennis. If you’re a fan of the great American songbook, you’re familiar with at least two or three compositions by Matt Dennis. “Angel Eyes” is one of the highlights of Frank Sinatra’s great Only the Lonely album. Sinatra’s “unusual performance” — beginning with the release instead of the first verse — “served to remind us that Dennis was an unusual songwriter,” according to Alec Wilder in the last chapter of his influential American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. “With its tension between driving music and restrained lyrics,” Philip Furia writes in Poets of Tin Pan Alley, “‘Angel Eyes’ is in the tradition of the greatest of all torch songs — Mercer and Arlen’s ‘One for My Baby’ (1941).” Boz seems to me to step right into the tradition.
“Once I Loved” is the bossa nova standard written by Antonio Carlos Jobim. The English lyrics are by Ray Gilbert.
“The Very Thought of You” goes back to 1934. It was a number 1 hit written and recorded by Ray Noble with a vocal by Al Bowlly. If you’re a Richard Thompson fan, you know “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven.” I’m in heaven as Boz and his accompanists luxuriate in their cover of the song.
Boz himself wrote “I’ll Be Long Gone” for his self-titled 1969 album on Atlantic. It fits in comfortably with the standards and classics on Detour.
I’m skipping over a few songs to get to “Tomorrow Night,” written by Sam Coslow and Wilhelm Grosz. The song goes back to 1939. It has been covered since then by everyone from Elvis and Dylan to Willie Nelson and others in between. If you have followed along so far, please don’t miss Boz’s cover.
Burton Lane and Alan Lerner wrote “Too Late Now” for an otherwise forgettable 1951 movie. Remember this!
Boz winds up the album with “We’ll Be Together Again” by Carl Fischer and Frankie Laine. It’s a bittersweet conclusion to a mostly bittersweet collection of standards. You gotta believe.
