Boz Scaggs: My Time : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Boz Scaggs has one of the sweetest, most engaging voices around, and his recent albums have been on the sweet and friendly side, too. Records as lavish as Moments (Boz' second LP, the new one is his fourth) may be successful on their own terms, but Boz' predilection for misty, caressing music has both startled and let down many of the listeners he picked up as the other key member of the Steve Miller Band. Those who know and love Sailor and Children of the Future are well aware of Scaggs' well-developed rock & roll sense, but he's kept it pretty well hidden since that first solo album he made for Atlantic three years ago. People who have sampled Boz since have been given nary a clue of his past as a rocker—a friend told me after listening to a few of Scaggs' mellower tunes that he thought Johnny Mathis did it better.

I've grown to both admire and enjoy Boz Scaggs' soft side—Moments was a favorite morning album last year. But I haven't lost my craving for more of that great roaring stuff Boz and Steve used to whip out so winningly when they were partners. Well, hold everything because Boz Scaggs has finally decided to kick out the jams again—at least some of the jams. On My Time, Boz has unleashed a generous amount of the hot, elemental rock & roll inside him to mix and simmer with the elaborate sturff, so the album is about half-refined and half-raging. As you might expect, the hot, powerful music completely overwhelms the pretty, polite tones here—listening to the whole album is like watching poor Johnny Mathis getting run over by James Dean in a chopped and channeled '56 Chevy. It's downright exhilarating.

The best songs have titles that sound like they were lifted off the counters of a speed shop: "We're Gonna Roll," "Dinah Flo" (sounds like a gas-tank additive) and (get this) "Full-Lock Power Slide." The first has that tight, cruising-blues feeling that pervaded the song-collection side of Children of the Future; "Dinah Flo" is a chugger, with sharp, barely-in-control gospel piano in the foreground and a "dooduh-dooow" chorus of voices and horns back a ways; and the last song sounds just like I hoped it would sound after reading the title in the liner credits. "Full-Lock Power Slide" rivals Boz' great "Dime-a-Dance Romance" (from Sailor) for furious, crunching, impassioned rock & roll. Note in particular the Leslie-amped guitar of Scaggs and George Rains' headlong drumming. All three tunes are Scaggs originals, and top-notch.

"Slowly in the West" sounds like Boz wrote it too, even though it comes instead from David Brown, the bass player in Scaggs' band for the last couple years. The track subtly combines the two extremes of Scaggs' music: It's silkily tense through the verses, but it uncoils in the middle section, with Boz' great yearning vocal as its focal point. Boz' music has often been compared to Van Morrison's, and at no time have the similarities in arrangement and tone been any more obvious than on this track, which should fit nicely between "St. Dominic's Preview" and "Redwood Tree" on a cassette I plan on making. Like Morrison, Scaggs likes to fill out the sound of his normally R&B-oriented rhythm section with a prominent piano, horn section and chorus. Boz, again like Van, is usually able to avoid the obvious in employing these overworked and generally ill-used elements, and to consequently add depth and force to the music without obscuring his own performance.

Boz may not quite be a Van Morrison, and he may not be able to completely rekindle the old Steve Miller Band fire single-handed, but those four tunes mentioned above, plus a neat Al Green cover, come within a hair on both counts. And the rest is easy to live with—just nocturnal funk, placid coastal evocations and a suggestion of Ruby and the Romantics drifting in now and then. Between the summery pastels and "Full-Lock Power Slide," Scaggs has it all pretty well covered. His albums are all eminently playable, but none more so than this one.