Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs

Summary

BOZ SCAGGS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MUSICAL ARTIST OF COMPLEXITY

Boz Scaggs founded his connection to music through the blues, but his lasting legacy is one of glamorous and romantic pop songwriting. He possessed a somewhat shy and sensitive demeanor never totally at home in the public eye, yet his claim to several chart-topping singles and albums, particularly the millions-selling and critically acclaimed Silk Degrees (1976), demanded constant exposure. The persona he expressed through his music was laid-back, effortlessly cool, sophisticated, stylish, romantically charming, and suave. But the immense success he achieved in his career pointed in part to the driven and determined artist within.

Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs examines the uniqueness of these contradictions throughout Boz Scaggs’s sixty-plus-year career and his rich and diverse musical catalog. Over the decades, Scaggs collaborated with an array of talented heavies, from the Steve Miller Band to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (which included a young Duane Allman) on Boz Scaggs (1969), from the session players on Silk Degrees who would form the hit band Toto to Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald in the Dukes of September supergroup.

This first-ever book on Scaggs is constructed around intensely thorough analysis of his complete discography, and new and exclusive in-depth interviews with a selection of Scaggs’s music colleagues from his vast career.

“In the world of popular music, the hardest thing to be is a true original. Boz is that and much more. He is a national treasure.”—Gerry Beckley, founding member of the band America