"Lowdown," Boz Scaggs
This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Silk Degrees, the commercial-breakthrough album from William Royce "Boz" Scaggs, who had been a member of the Steve Miller Band before going solo.
"Lowdown" was typical seventies pop-rock fare - a smooth, sleek, blues-based rocker that had a groove you can dance to, anchored by the crack rhythm combination of session musicians (and future Toto members) David Hungate on bass and Jeff Porcaro on drums. "Lowdown" is a song with ambiguous lyrics of shady deals, schoolboy-like games, and thoughts and trash talk gone astray.
"Lowdown" was released as a single - an edit two minutes shorter than the LP track - only after a rhythm-and-blues radio disc jockey in Cleveland gave the five-minute album version heavy rotation, and Columbia sent it out to other R&B stations for airplay. It would be released as a single in June 1976 and would peak at number three on the Billboard singles chart. Disco fans loved to dance to it, while rock fans loved the guitar solo and Scaggs' husky vocal, and pop fans found it a song to tap your foot to.
Scaggs later said that he, David Paich (another future Toto member who cowrote the song with Scaggs), and others involved with recording "Lowdown" thought there "wasn't a chance in hell" that it could be a single, and characterized its success as accidental. It would be used in other media, including a scene in the singles-bar thriller movie Looking For Mr. Goodbar. Saturday Night Fever director John Badham filmed a scene of his movie with John Travolta and Donna Pescow with "Lowdown" playing in the bacvground; however, Columbia Records refused to grant permission for the song to be used and a generic track was dubbed in its place. Columbia executives (Clive Davis had already left to form Arista) probably ended up kicking themselves and each other when the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album, which used all of the songs employed in the movie, became the bestselling double album in history (until Pink Floyd's The Wall surpassed it), which could have meant extra profit for Columbia in leasing fees.
This clip, my Music Video Oof the Week, is the official video for Boz Scaggs' "Lowdown" - a live performance with a humorous introduction. Enjoy.
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