| I refuse
to write about Silk Degrees because some things are off limits, and
Silk Degrees is one of them. The album and its mythology are well
worth looking into, and I’ve had to ration the amount of time it gets
to spend on my turntable because it has the power to coax a person into
some pretty dark corners, but that’s all I really want to say about
it. Luckily for me, there’s plenty of other Boz Scaggs albums worth
talking about: Juxtaposed with You, say. It, too, cuts so close to
the bone that I get nervous when I start to say anything about it; somewhere
two or three paragraphs back I dropped the needle onto it and within three
or four minutes I was faltering. By the third song I was nearly paralyzed.
There are a few factors that go into this: there’s the singing, which
comes from the white-boy soul school of the English late sixties, but which
has to it a restrained and unpretentious character that’s missing
from, say, Steve Winwood. There are the chord changes, which are more like
jazz changes than rock, and which, whatever their role in shaping the face
of le jazz lite, which pretty much everybody hates (except me, but
that’s a defense I’m not yet willing to mount), are here so
thoughtful and cooly deliberate in their attempts at effortlessness as to
seem almost sadistic. There’s the dripping melancholy of even the
most upbeat songs on the record, which, while not quite as where’d-I-put-my-razorblades-it’s-finally-time-to-die
devastating as the stuff on Silk Degrees, is still nearly overwhelming
in its better, brightly weightier moments. |
