Boz Scaggs released Silk Degrees on February 18, 1976, and it peaked at number two on the Billboard 200, won the Grammy for Best R&B Song for "Lowdown," and produced four charting singles. That part of the story gets told. What gets told less often is the genealogy of the people in the room, because the session band Scaggs assembled for those Los Angeles recording dates was not just a collection of hired hands. It was, in embryo, Toto. And before it was Toto, it was a circle of musicians who had been sharpened by years of work inside the most demanding studio operation in American pop music: Steely Dan.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had bonded at Bard College in the late 1960s over Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus, and they carried that obsession straight into the recording studio when they formed Steely Dan in 1972. Their debut, Can't Buy a Thrill, featured hits like "Do It Again" and "Reelin' in the Years," but the more consequential move came gradually as Becker and Fagen stopped pretending to be a conventional band and became, in effect, a songwriting and production operation that hired the best available players for each session. By the time they were making Pretzel Logic in 1974, with its Horace Silver piano quote opening "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," the Dan's studio approach had become a training ground in precision. David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, two young musicians who had met at Grant High School in Van Nuys, were both on call for Steely Dan sessions during this period, absorbing the standard of exactness that Becker and Fagen demanded.
That standard traveled directly into the Silk Degrees sessions. Producer Joe Wissert recorded the album in Los Angeles, and Scaggs assembled a team that included Paich on keyboards, Porcaro on drums, and bassist David Hungate. Paich co-wrote more than half the album's songs with Scaggs, including both "Lowdown" and "Lido Shuffle." The collaboration was so generative that Scaggs later called Paich his favorite all-time collaborator. Paich was in his early twenties, and the two of them, as Scaggs recalled, both listened to the same side of the radio dial: Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers, Ray Charles. The result was a record that fused blue-eyed soul with jazz-inflected chord voicings and a rhythmic precision that owed something to the school Paich and Porcaro had attended in the Steely Dan sessions. After the Silk Degrees recording, Steve Lukather and Steve Porcaro joined the touring band. In 1977, that nucleus of players, with singer Bobby Kimball added, officially formed Toto and signed with Columbia Records. The debut album arrived in October 1978.
Steely Dan's own peak arrived in between: Aja, released on September 23, 1977, on ABC Records, produced as always by Gary Katz. For Aja, Becker and Fagen pushed their rotating-session-player model to its logical extreme, enlisting nearly forty musicians across sessions that ran from late 1976 through July 1977 at studios including The Village Recorder and Producer's Workshop in Los Angeles and A&R in New York. The title track alone featured Steve Gadd on drums, Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Larry Carlton on guitar, Joe Sample on electric piano, Michael Omartian on acoustic piano, and Chuck Rainey on bass. Gadd's drum performance, recorded in two takes, gave the Dan their first-ever drum solo on record. Shorter's solo was secured only after Steely Dan had a mutual colleague vouch for them, since Shorter's initial answer to the session invitation had been an unambiguous no. Jazz critic Ben Sidran later called the recording session "a moment when pop music suddenly took a turn left." The album peaked at number three on the Billboard charts, became Steely Dan's first platinum album, and won the Grammy for Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording.
The Los Angeles session world of the mid-1970s was small enough that these lineages were inevitable. Paich and Porcaro had played on Steely Dan records before they made Silk Degrees. Larry Carlton, who soloed on "Kid Charlemagne" from 1976's The Royal Scam and then appeared across the full breadth of Aja, also worked with Boz Scaggs. Michael McDonald, who sang backing vocals on Aja, had been part of Steely Dan's circle of session vocalists before becoming the new center of the Doobie Brothers. The Silk Degrees session musicians, as a collective, contributed to the records of Steely Dan, George Benson, Barbra Streisand, and eventually Michael Jackson's Thriller. What Scaggs did, perhaps without fully intending to, was give that community of musicians a single project ambitious enough to function as a proof of concept: here is what this group of people sounds like when the songs are great and the production is focused.
The lineage runs in both directions and keeps running. Toto IV, released in 1982, won six Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for "Rosanna," with Jeff Porcaro's drum part on that track becoming one of the most studied grooves in popular music. Steve Porcaro co-wrote "Human Nature" for Michael Jackson's Thriller. The same year Silk Degrees came out, Scaggs and Paich were writing songs that would define the sound of Southern California pop for the next decade, and the musicians who played them were about to carry that sound into a hundred other rooms. Scaggs himself joined Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald for the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue in 2010, a reunion that made the shared genealogy explicit. Three artists, one circle, one city, one remarkably productive stretch of years when the Los Angeles studio world was small enough that everyone kept showing up in the same place.
