For all its surface smoothness, yacht rock — and the artists who created it over the last few decades — can be turbulent below deck. Some of the musicians and singers associated with the genre (whether they want to be linked to it or not) can have dark sides, illicit pasts, insecurities, and surprising rock & roll antics sides.
As he reveals in his new memoir, What a Fool Believes, no one encompasses that dichotomy quite like Michael McDonald. That gently huffing mellow voice and electric piano often hid a wild lifestyle, at least during his early, pre-sober days in the music business when he was a member of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. McDonald unpacks some of those stories in the book, cowritten with, of all people, comedian Paul Reiser.
Here are a few things we learned from taking a ride on the good ship Cali Macca.
At least once, he and Walter Becker toyed with being part-time dealers.
For a period before he joined the Doobies, McDonald sang on Steely Dan records (“Peg,” of course) and was part of their touring band. He describes Becker and Donald Fagen’s “ball-busting” methods in the studio, as when Becker would chide him with, “Gee, I remember liking the sound of your voice much more on the last sessions.”
But their adventures extended outside the studio. McDonald writes about how they came up with a scheme to “buy about a half ounce of some of that exceptionally pure cocaine” from a friend and “make some easy money (selling only to our friends, completely under the radar) but end up with a fair portion of blow for our own recreational consumption, free of charge …. What could possibly go wrong?”
Well, for starters, the two “snorted most of it before even getting around to cutting it, let alone selling anything.” He says they never strayed far from the dining room table in McDonald’s apartment except to pee. After “a couple of harrowing days” of doing nonstop coke, they were left with barely a gram.
You mess with Yacht Macca at your own peril.
In the mid Seventies tension began to develop between McDonald and Doobies guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and their conflicting ideas on musical arrangements. When Doobies co-founder Pat Simmons told McDonald and others that he was thinking of “breaking up the band” around 1979, McDonald used that to make, he writes, “changes I felt had to be made before we could move forward.”
Without being super explicit about it, McDonald makes it clear that the Doobies had to choose him or Baxter. In light of McDonald’s “What a Fool Believes” being a ubiquitous hit at the time, the decision was apparently an easy one for someone to make. “I’m not sure what that says about me exactly (other than perhaps I’m more than capable of being an asshole),” he writes, “but at the time, I felt if we were to continue, it was necessary for the band to re-emerge as a different and cohesive entity.” He did say that Baxter — who, ironically, suggested the Doobies recruit McDonald in the first place — “didn’t take it personally.”
There’s enough McDonald music trivia here for a special yacht edition of Jeopardy!.
For McDonald music geeks, the memoir is tidbit heaven. Reflecting its origins as a social-commentary song, the working title of “Takin’ It to the Streets” was “Falling Through the Cracks.” An extensive discography at the end lists all of McDonald’s credits — who knew he sang backup on records by Wang Chung and Toto He recalls reading RS’s “scathing” (his word) review of the Doobies’ Minute by Minute album. “Not being a glutton for punishment, I normally wouldn’t read reviews, but being that this was Rolling Stone, I couldn’t help myself — though it only took a couple of sentences for me to regret that,” he writes.
Ray Charles once chewed him out.
Later in his career, McDonald and his hero were on the same bill for a benefit concert. McDonald assumed Charles knew about “the charity aspect of the event,” but apparently not. “The boss wants to talk to you,” Charles’ road manager told McDonald the day of the performance. McDonald ventured over to Charles’ trailer, finding him chilling in a bathrobe. “Man, you got to give me something,” Charles told him. McDonald had a feeling he knew what Charles meant but played dumb and asked about backstage perks. “No, man,” Charles told him, “what I’m saying is you gotta give me something! … I can’t be doing this shit for free!” As McDonald came to realize, that meant cash before Charles went onstage.
McDonald told him that all the proceeds had to go to the foundation and that the musicians had agreed to that setup. “With that,” McDonald writes, “he kind of stopped rocking for a moment, turned in my direction, and in a slightly elevated pitch explained, ‘I don’t give a fuck about your arrangement! I’m an old man, goddamn it! I don’t got time for this shit!” McDonald says that Charles did do the show but wouldn’t sign off on use of footage of his performance for a film of the event. “Was I disappointed?” he writes. “Sure. But I honestly felt worse about the idea that he was angry with me. Feeling I’d let him down seemed to trigger old feelings of disapproval I’d felt long ago from my dad.”
He has a sense of humor about himself.
That self-effaciing side of McDonald has been evident in his acceptance of the term “yacht rock,” as he told RS in 2020. In his memoir, he writes about The 40-Year-Old Virgin, in which co-stars Paul Rudd and Steve Carell play appliance-store employees in a showroom filled with TV monitors. The manager, played by Jane Lynch, is, he writes, “a pathetically fervent Michael McDonald fan” who insists that only his music be heard in the store.
At one point, referring to McDonald’s 1983 hit with James Ingram, Rudd’s character barks, “If I hear ‘Yah Mo B There’ one more time, I’m gonna yah mo burn this place to the ground!” An industry friend was worried McDonald would be offended, but McDonald writes that he found it “hilarious,” adding, “And in the end, the film even boosted our summer ticket sales.”
