An Ode to Christopher Cross: Musician Who's Also One of Yacht Rock's Best Crooners

For today's post, it's necessary to properly set the scene: I'll begin in the 1970's. During early-to-late 1970's, disco dominated much of the U.S. popular music scene. At the time, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor were all at the top of the charts. In 1978, the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack was named Album of the Year. An event that has the been inaccurately referred to as the "death of disco" better known as the Disco Demolition which took place in Chicago's Comiskey Park, in reality, the story was always more nuanced than that. Steve Dahl, was then a 24-year-old DJ who was involved with that Disco Demolition event in Comiskey Park, was pissed off about being fired from a radio station that he worked for when it changed formats to all-disco. But even he disputes the importance of the Comiskey Park event, calling those who suggest that event was the official death of disco revisionist history. However, the Chicago Disco Demolition event was also understood to be a not-so-subtle attack against disco's earliest adopters: blacks, Latinos and gays, and each group faced fairly widespread discrimination anyway.

Disco Demolition at Chicago's Comiskey Park Marked a Time of Transition

The Comiskey Park event wasn't the death of disco so much as it was a marker of a period of musical transition.

Think about it: around 1977 when "Saturday Night Fever" finally hit the box office, a group of Baby Boomers were in their mid-to-late twenties, and they still wanted to go out and party. They patronized dance clubs and disco music was one of their favorite genres. But they'd already been doing that for a good number of years, and Hollywood was late to the game when "Saturday Night Fever" was even released. By the end of the decade, going out all night, boozing it up at discos and looking for one-night-stands/hookups was already starting to fall out of favor. Many Boomers were simply getting older, and they now they had families to support. It was hardly a coordinated, nationwide effort to destroy a musical genre. By 1979, disco and funk were starting to fade. At the same time, the Baby Boomers who just a few years earlier were key were also becoming less important to record sales. Their era of dominating popular music was reaching its natural end.

As noted, a shift in musical tastes was happening. Consider the Grammy Award winners in the years before (during) and after. It was never all-disco, before or after. For example, in 1977, Debbie Boone won two Grammys as Best New Artist of the Year, and for Song of the Year for the sappy song "You Light Up My Life". She was joined by Barbra Streisand for the "Theme From A Star Is Born (Evergreen)" that year. Neither artist resembled disco (although Streisand's record label would later push her into disco with several collaborations with Barry Gibb including "Guilty", "What Kind of Fool", the Gibb-written solo "Woman in Love", and another duette with disco diva Donna Summer "No More Tears". Ms. Streisand has gone on the record saying that none of those tracks are ones she is particularly fond of and she rarely performs them in concert, although they were all big [money-making] chart-toppers for her at the time). Beyond those, The Eagles' "Hotel California" won Record of the Year in 1977, while Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" took home the Grammy for 1977 Album of the Year. The following year, Billy Joel won the Grammy for Record of the Year, and he also won several more next year, too. Some, although certainly not all, of these winners could arguably fall into the musical genre now known as Yacht Rock.

What is Yacht Rock?

If you are unfamiliar with the term, the term "Yacht Rock" is a type of soft rock that supposedly emanated from Southern California between 1976 and 1984. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, musical artists like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, the Doobie Brothers, 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.

On June 26, 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." http://www.yachtrock.com/ -- now known as the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast.

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.

A very short NPR story about Yacht Rock can be listened to below, or by visiting https://www.npr.org/sections/world-cafe/2017/03/15/520254333/that-70s-week-yacht-rock.

The term Yacht Rock was coined to suggest a kind of smooth, mellow "soft rock" music that early yuppies likely enjoyed while sipping champagne and snorting cocaine on their yachts at the time. They have several criteria used for a song classified as such, although the label is more tongue-in-cheek than reality, but it was also a term for a genre which existed but was largely undefined, yet was still taking over the radio airwaves at the time. In my mind (and has been acknowledged by many others, including those guys), perhaps no one is a better representative of that musical genre than Christopher Cross.

Christopher Cross Swept the 1980 Grammy Awards

Christopher Cross in 2014

In 1978, a musician, singer/songwriter from San Antonio, Texas landed a solo contract with Warner Bros. Records. (These days, he calls the funky Texas capital city Austin home). A self-described "Army brat", Cross is the son of a U.S. Army pediatrician stationed at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC in the mid-1950's, acting as physician for President Dwight Eisenhower's grandchildren.

The young Mr. Cross managed to land a record with Warner Brothers in 1978. In 1979, Christopher Cross (whose birth name was Christopher Charles Geppert) released his first, self-named solo album. The following year, Cross was nominated for six awards and he walked away with a stunning five (5) Grammy Awards, including each of the "Big Four" awards: album, record and song of the year, plus best new artist. He was the first person (and so far, ever) to win so many awards in a single evening.

Despite his quest during the 1970's to be signed with a major record label, Christopher Cross began with rather modest ambitions. He hoped his first album would sell 50,000 copies, enough for Warner Bros. to let him make a second album.

"I was hoping, maybe three albums down the stream, I could get something on the radio," Cross said. "So, when all that Grammy stuff happened, it took everybody by surprise."

Catching a Wave

Christopher Cross says that he caught a wave of change in pop music at the perfect time. Lightning struck again for him the following year, in 1981. Cross' bittersweet theme song for the hit movie "Arthur" reached No 1. "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" (from the movie "Arthur" which starred the late British actor Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli) also won an Oscar and a Golden Globe that year. Cross deserved all of the awards, too.

Although not by design, Christopher Cross arguably embodied (and pioneered) a musical genre now popularly referred to as Yacht Rock, and he and his music was decidedly not disco. But it was very popular and was a very refreshing change from the types of music that dominated the airwaves just a few years earlier, so people bought it -- lots of it. But, not surprisingly, it didn't last forever. It seldom does.

As The Advocate (see HERE) wrote about him (I should acknowledge that Christopher Cross is definitely not gay, but his music attracted a very widespread audience, including many gays and lesbians), he thought he had good odds of winning one Grammy.

He said: "I'd been told that I had a good shot at winning best new artist," Cross said. "Harry Belafonte and Herb Alpert presented that award to me. That was surreal. I went back to my seat, feeling content for the evening, ready to watch the show. And then, bang."

Cross won four more Grammys that night, including song of the year and album of the year.

"It was an out-of-body experience," he said. "We never imagined beating Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra and all these big artists."

Billboard magazine suggested (see the article at https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/awards/8527732/christopher-cross-grammy-sweep-billie-eilish for more) that his 1980 sweep at the Grammys may have triggered a backlash. Billboard wrote:

"It just may have been the worst thing that could have happened to Cross. If he had just won one or two awards, few would have paid much notice. If he'd won best new artist, he would have beaten critics' faves Pretenders, but critics were used to having their favorites lose in that category. Elvis Costello had lost to A Taste of Honey two years earlier. John Prine and Eagles lost to America in 1972. Elton John lost to Carpenters in 1970.

But Cross' undoing won everything. His eponymous debut album beat Pink Floyd's The Wall and Barbra Streisand's Guilty for album of the year. His serene ballad "Sailing" beat Frank Sinatra's "Theme from New York New York" in three categories -- record and song of the year and best arrangement accompanying vocalist(s).

The sweep practically invited people to say, "Oh, he's not that good." Instead of bringing people to his side, the sweep turned many people off. Cross was a talented pop artist -- not a groundbreaking artist, but a skilled hit-maker, the kind who might have had a solid, five-year run of hits.

The Grammy sweep may have actually shortened his [music] career. "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do," which he co-wrote with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen, topped the Hot 100 eight months after the Grammy sweep. It won an Oscar and brought Cross three more Grammy nominations (but no wins). Cross had two more top 20 hits, "All Right" and "Think of Laura," from his sophomore album, Another Page. But even a reunion with Bacharach and Sager to co-write the song "A Chance for Heaven," the swimming theme from the 1984 Summer Olympics in L.A., didn't reverse his flagging momentum. He hasn't appeared on the Hot 100 since 1985.

On August 31, 2014, CBS Sunday Morning (see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-cross-sails-back-with-a-new-album/ for more) offered this about Christopher Cross:

Remember Christopher Cross? In the early 1980's, his brand of silky-soft rock sailed up the charts. His songs were unavoidable on FM radio (as a side note: that soft-rock genre was commonly played in dentists' offices, and I vividly recall hearing it under the influence of nitrous oxide) -- and then as quickly as he burst on the scene, he seemed to vanish from it.

CBS Sunday Morning also let him share a funny story about an interaction he had with a TSA agent.

"I was going through TSA -- this has been a year, or maybe two years ago," Cross recalled. "And a woman took my boarding pass. And she said, 'Oh, Christopher Cross, there used to be a singer named that! He passed away! But he was a great singer.'

You can catch that entertaining video interview below, or by visiting https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/673jsTFk37BBHoWT1dxSWrdkuV8tWquy/:



In the end, and with the benefit of hindsight, there's nothing Christopher Cross would do differently. He's continued to release music since 1980, and while none have swept the Grammy's since then, he still believes he's been very lucky.

Christopher Cross credits a lot of his incredible success to timing.

"There were many great artists back then who didn’t get a chance to be heard," he said. "I worked hard and I was talented, but I also was lucky. People were ready for some pop music. It was a perfect storm."

He also seems very humble, and not bitter he did not enjoy decades more commercial success in music. Now at age 68, he is content. As noted, today he lives in the eclectic capital city of Texas, Austin. Just as the Austin Independent Business Alliance adopted the slogan "Keep Austin Weird" to promote small businesses in Austin, Mr. Cross has no regrets about how his career has gone. Instead, he seems grateful he's had the opportunity. If that perspective doesn't deserve to enjoy sailing on a yacht, perhaps nothing does!

Christopher Cross' own website has a Spotify playlist of his hits which can be listened to at https://www.christophercross.com/ -- I won't try to embed it here, since it seems to come and go, but the link to the Spotify playlist can be visited at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7y60oSM7fpOM1zLeO6upo6. His classic, Grammy-winning song "Sailing" can be listened to by visiting https://youtu.be/MEO6gYCFbr0. 

Rhinestone Cowboy Takes on Alzheimer's Disease

Glen Campbell, circa 1970

Anyone old enough to remember the late 1960s and early '70s is probably old enough to remember Glen (Travis) Campbell.  His radio hits included such famous melodies as "Rhinestone Cowboy", "Southern Nights," and the "Wichita Lineman" to name just a few.  His roots, of course, are in country music.  Yet he was also one of the first artists to crossover from country to pop, landing hits on both Billboard charts.  As of 2015, Glen Campbell was 78 going on 79 years old, and he’s still alive as I write this, but he has completely left public life and he’s also left the recording industry which made him famous.



Its perhaps no small irony that in the 2015 Grammy Awards, Glen Campbell also won a sixth (and in all likelihood, final) Grammy of his career, as he was honored with Best Country Song at the 2015 Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony, which is the presentation of the off-camera categories not included in the  regular broadcast. "I'm Not Gonna Miss You," is a bittersweet tune he co-wrote with Julian Raymond for a 2014 documentary called “Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me”, and his new song managed to trump songs by Kenny Chesney, Eric Church, Miranda Lambert and Tim McGraw with Faith Hill.

What happened to Mr. Campbell may well be his most enduring contribution to pop culture.  Before I get to that, some basics on who this man is or was may be relevant.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Glen Campbell was relatively good-looking, being both clean-shaven and clean cut (the antithesis to where popular culture was in those days, and especially among fellow country artists at the time), perhaps a comparison could be made to someone like today's country star Luke Bryan.  Campbell was native of Arkansas, so could make a legitimate claim that he had country bona fides, plus he was also a high school dropout, not uncommon among country music artists of that era.  But he left Arkansas (and more than 10 brothers and sisters) at age 16, staying for a time in New Mexico before settling in Los Angeles, where he struck it big in the music business.  Note that I previously addressed country crossover artists in a post I did on Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton which you can catch at http://goo.gl/9Lstp.

Remember, this was in the days before country had gone mainstream.

Before Kenny Rogers.

Before Tim McGraw.

Before Keith Urban.

Before Blake Shelton.

Aside from Patsy Cline, who became more famous posthumously than she ever did when she was alive, hardly anyone in country had even considered going mainstream.  Only a handful achieved crossover success (and usually by accident), including Johnny Cash.  It was kind of an unspoken rule of Nashville music producers (and record labels went along -- as long as artists were selling records) that crossing over was not something the country music industry saw as appropriate or supported.

But Glen Campbell didn't let any of country's traditional taboos stop him.  In the process, he won five (now six) Grammy awards, seven Academy of Country Music awards, and three American Music awards, and sold over 50 million records worldwide.  He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.  He may well be one of the first crossover artists, and was unapologetic about that, unlike some country "purists".  He even once had a TV show "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour", in which he used his commercial clout and down-home Arkansas charm to give face-time to lesser known artists he personally admired, such as Willie Nelson, who was best known for his scrappy beard and generally unkempt appearance.

As part of his crossover appeal, Mr. Campbell once toured with The Beach Boys, and even acted in a few movies – including 'True Grit' with screen legend John Wayne.  But over the years, his story was more one of tabloid fodder, including multiple failed marriages.  In fact, in the late 1970’s, Campbell and rising teen country singer Tanya Tucker began a tumultuous affair which did not end happily if the tabloids were correct.

But in 1982 Campbell married Kim Woolen, who helped lead him to sobriety and stability, though he suffered a relapse in 2004 when he was arrested for drunk driving and sentenced to ten days in jail. His problems with alcohol and drugs became headlines for tabloids like the National Enquirer back in the day, but ultimately, he found a spouse who got him to clean up his act.  Supposedly, that also caused him to find God, whatever that means - "finding God" has become a true cliché that many celebrities use, so its unclear what that means.

A Diagnosis With Alzheimer's Disease

In 2011,  in the liner notes to his then-new album, entitled "Ghost on the Canvas", Glen Campbell wrote that this is "the last studio record of new songs I ever plan to make."  At the time, some industry observers noted that listeners could tell his voice really wasn't what it used to be, and that he was showing signs of age.  But they were missing an important part of the story.

When he did his national farewell tour, Mr. Campbell had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, therefore he fully expected he'd be unable to record or perform his music ever again.  Today, Glenn Campbell is living in a Nashville long-term care facility that has people on staff who can care for him around the clock.  Like all Alzheimer's patients, he likely has brief periods of recall, followed by long periods where he doesn't remember anyone or anything at all.  Most famously, former President Ronald Reagan also had Alzheimer's at the end of his life.  In 2004, wife Nancy Reagan said famously at a dinner sponsored by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF):

"Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him. Because of this, I'm determined to do whatever I can to save other families from this pain. I just don't see how we can turn our backs on this."

Mrs. Reagan was, of course, speaking about embryonic stem cell research, something both she and the JDRF both supported.  The term "embryonic" is a misnomer; it involves blastocysts that are created in-vitro (in a laboratory), many created for the sole purpose of reproduction, but which are ultimately discarded as medical waste, usually because the fertilization procedure was successful, although some owners may choose to donate them for the explicit purpose of research.

Mrs. Reagan was extremely critical of then-President George W. Bush's decision to limit Federally-funded stem cell to a only a dozen or so stem cell lines, some of which proved to be unusable, created by the arbitrary date that he announced the policy, but he and his advisor Karl Rove was eager to make a key voting constituency happy.  That type of restriction was championed by social conservatives, yet it retarded a promising scientific avenue.  (California voters took matters into their own hands by starting the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine [CIRM] http://www.cirm.ca.gov/ which is not dependent on the vicissitudes of Federal policy driven by political ideology, but is funded by the State of California, which ranks as the world's seventh largest economy in its own right).  Those initial research restrictions placed on cell lines President Bush were subsequently expanded a bit after President Barack Obama took office, but because this type of research remains controversial in the eyes of some, it remains in a precarious situation because of politics, not because of the science.  For the record, I don't believe Mr. Campbell ever went on record as to what his view on the issue of stem cell actually were.

Back to Glenn Campbell's Alzheimer's diagnosis ....

Glenn Campbell was not shy in acknowledging his new reality, so he felt his farewell tour was bittersweet, both for him and his fans.  Knowing his diagnosis, in his farewell tour, Mr. Campbell allowed cameras to follow him throughout the tour, including behind the scenes.  The result became a feature-length movie called "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me" [http://glencampbellmovie.com/] which opened on October 24, 2014.  The trailer can be viewed below, or at
http://youtu.be/LAtgraWN5-I:



Interestingly, I suspect Mr. Campbell's (and his family’s) transparency about his diagnosis with Alzheimer's could be an even more enduring societal contribution.

During his final tour, he agreed to let cameras follow him to show how Alzheimer's was impacting his day-to-day life, the result being a movie which was released in late 2014.  For example, during that tour, the lyrics were put on a teleprompter so he didn't have to worry about forgetting them.  The movie was created by filmmaker James Keach, with his and his family's permission, and aims to use Glen's illness as a platform to campaign for more and better Alzheimer's research.  While the movie is meant to be a biography of sorts, it spends a great deal of time discussing his new reality which includes Alzheimer's Disease.

In 2012, the Federal Government announced several plans to try and address Alzheimer's, including a move by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to launch a broader BRAIN Initiative, which is a large-scale effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights necessary for treating a wide variety of brain disorders including Alzheimer's, as well as autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and traumatic brain injury.  Its not limited to Alzheimer's, but that is an important part of it.

Under the program, four federal agencies — NIH, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — stepped up to a "grand challenge" and committed more than $110 million to the Initiative for fiscal year 2014. Planning for the NIH component of the BRAIN initiative is guided by the long-term scientific plan, "BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision" [http://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/2025/index.htm] that details seven high-priority research areas.

Keep in mind that none of this is likely to help Glen Campbell himself, who has been checked into a long-term care facility in Nashville where his family is still able to visit him regularly but is cared for around the clock, but the publicity and the attention this has brought to Alzheimer's Disease may help people in the future, much as Mr. and Mrs. Reagan's public disclosure did a number of years ago.

For their part, Mr. Campbell and his family seem to be taking things in stride and are not allowing the diagnosis to bring them down too much.  Although Mr. Campbell is now living in a care facility that has people on staff to care for him all the time, the movie, which launched on October 24, 2014, could well do for Alzheimer's what other celebrities including Melissa Etheridge did for breast cancer.

Author P.S., August 8, 2017: On August 8, 2017, the celebrity news of the day was that Glen Campbell had passed away at age 81.  According to Tim Plumley, his publicist, the cause was Alzheimer's Disease.  As noted, in 2011, Mr. Campbell and his family announced that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and they even created a movie about the impact that had on his final days as a musician.  Obituaries were published in most major news outlets, including Billboard magazine (see HERE) and the New York Times (see HERE).  His passing marked the end of a fabled career that began with country music, but morphed into one of the earliest known crossover artists (catch my post about that HERE).