Whatever Happened to Boz Scaggs?
Forty-nine years ago, on Feb. 18, 1976, Boz Scaggs released his breakthrough album, Silk Degrees. His seventh (!) solo album delivered a smooth soul-pop sound that brought it all the way to No. 2 on the Billboard charts, earned it a Grammy, and eventually helped it go platinum five times over.
But while Scaggs had a few other top 20 hits in the early ’80s, he took an extended break from music and has pursued a few other avenues as well. So where is the “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle” singer today?
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Becoming Boz
As you may have wondered, Boz Scaggs’ real first name is not Boz — it’s William. William Scaggs was born on June 8, 1944, in Canton, Ohio, to a military family. They moved quite a bit in Scaggs’ childhood, to Oklahoma and then Plano, Texas. In Texas, he began attending St. Mark’s School in Dallas, Texas, where classmate Steve Miller (yes, that Steve Miller) taught him how to play guitar so that Scaggs could join Miller’s first band, the Marksmen, where he also sang. One other important thing happened at St. Mark’s: A classmate decided that Scaggs should have a nickname. After trying out Bosley and Boswell, they eventually settled on Boz.
Miller and Scaggs both went on to attend University of Wisconsin Madison in 1962, where they played in the blues band the Ardells. However, Scaggs left school and Wisconsin the following year, first signing up for the Army Reserve and then finding himself in Europe, where he explored London’s music scene and released his first solo album, 1965’s Boz.
The Steve Miller Band years
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After receiving a letter and a return ticket to the U.S. from Miller, Scaggs returned stateside, and joined the Steve Miller Band from 1967 to 1968, supplying both guitar and vocals. He appeared on the Steve Miller Band’s first two albums, Children of the Future and Sailor, both released in 1968. While the first album didn’t make much of a sale impact, Sailor hit No. 24 on the Billboard charts.
But, Scaggs said in a 2019 interview with AXSTV, “It was a temporary thing. I filled in for eight or nine months.” From there, Scaggs once again set out on his own, releasing his self-titled album, which featured the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and Duane Allman. But while the album was a critical success, it wasn’t quite a hit with listeners.
Silk Degrees (and helping Toto get started)
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Scaggs released four more albums, each embraced by critics but not quite connecting with the public, until 1976’s Silk Degrees. For that album, he gathered a new backing band — David Paich, David Hungate and Jeff Porcaro, who would soon form the band Toto. According to Paich, the men were quickly offered their own record contract. “I’m not sure if Toto would have happened as soon, or quite the same way, without Silk Degrees.” (Paich also cowrote “Lido Shuffle” and “Lowdown.”)
Silk Degrees yielded the No. 3 hit “Lowdown” — a song that, famously, was supposed to be used in the dance studio scene in Saturday Night Fever, until Scaggs’ record company denied the filmmakers the rights.
Despite getting the boot from the disco soundtrack, Scaggs did well. “Lowdown” won the Grammy for Best R&B Song, and sold over 1 million copies as a single in the U.S. alone; “Lido Shuffle” hit No. 11.
In 1977, while touring in support of Silk Degrees, Scaggs was part of a historical moment that had nothing to do with music — he was 15 minutes into a concert in New York City when the blackout of 1977 hit. Scaggs ended the show and told the crowd to hold on to their ticket stubs for the rescheduled show.
Scaggs had a few more hits in the late ’70s and early ’80s, including the Grammy-nominated “Look What You’ve Done to Me” off the Urban Cowboy soundtrack (so he did end up playing music in a John Travolta movie after all!). However, he soon decided it was time for a break.
Stepping back
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As Scaggs told The Providence Journal in 2016, “I sort of burned myself out in about 1980.” The pressures of touring and constantly releasing music were too much, he told Dan Rather in a 2019 interview, and “I knew I had to take some time off. I worked seven days a week for 10 years … I had a personal life that was calling, with my children, I had a marriage that was failing, I had personal things to attend to.”
Scaggs took an eight-year break, in which time he got divorced from his first wife, Carmella, with whom he had two sons. He also traveled, and even climbed part of Mount Everest. But, he eventually realized, “I started out a musician, and I don’t have any other great interests in my life, professionally. So I just sort of naturally got back to it, to what I call Part 2 of my career. I began writing again, got a new recording contract and just started over again.”
Part 2 of Scaggs’ career began with 1988’s Other Roads. Though the singer has released nine other albums since then, most recently 2018’s Out of the Blues, none of them have been a “Lowdown”-level success, which seems just fine for the musician. In 1992, he married second wife Dominique Gioia, and in 1996, they founded a vineyard in Napa Valley; in 2000, they released their first wine from Scaggs Vineyards, which the couple owned and operated until 2016, when they sold the business to Newfound Wines.
Scaggs’ later life has involved some painful moments, too. Scaggs’ son Oscar passed away in 1998, at the tragically young age of 21. In a 2019 interview, Scaggs revealed that he had not spoken about Oscar’s death in public because he hadn’t yet come to terms with it, “and I never will come to terms with it.”
In 2017, Scaggs and Dominique lost everything they owned when their Napa home burned in that year’s California wildfires. “It simply all is gone,” Scaggs told WBUR in 2018, noting that his collection of handwritten lyrics, which spanned his entire career, had gone up in flames. “Some songs take a couple of pages to write, and some songs take 15 or 20 pages to write. And they’re all there, all the ideas, and you can feel everything that went into that song. I regret having lost those papers, specifically.”
Boz Scaggs today
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Scaggs, who will turn 81 this year, still performs; he had his most recent tour in 2023. He has also received a boost in popularity due to the next generation’s enthusiasm for “yacht rock;” Silk Degrees was given an 8.8 out of 10 rating by hip music website Pitchfork in 2021.
However, Scaggs is no fan of the term, as he revealed to Rolling Stone in 2018: “I don’t like it at all. The image of [yacht rock] is just pretty corny. I’ve been invited to participate in some kind of programming and activities, these tours on boats. I guess they’re keeping [it] in the yacht vein … I just wish they would change the name of it.”
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1974 (50 Years Ago)
January 2024
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