Michael McDonald in 1975.Photo:Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Michael McDonald performing on Soul Train in 1982.Soul Train/Getty/Courtesy HBO
Soul Train/Getty/Courtesy HBO
Yacht rock wouldn’t get its name until more than 20 years later, via a web series calledYacht Rockthat debuted in 2005. The mockumentary’s 12 episodes were spread out over five years, and various actors played yacht rock legends like Loggins, Cross and McDonald.
Michael McDonald (left) and Christopher Cross in ‘Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary’.Courtesy of HBO
Courtesy of HBO
“My son couldn’t wait to show me this thing he found on the Internet, and it was hysterical,” McDonald recalls. “I couldn’t deny that it was funny. I thought it was kind of uncanny at the time how they made up these personalities that more or less had some basis of truth, whether they knew it or not.”
“I always thought it was kind of flattering to be made fun of because obviously it made an impression on somebody. Whether it’s good or bad doesn’t really matter at that point.
Michael McDonald in ‘Yacht Rock: A Documentary’.Courtesy of HBO
Loggins, who also appears in the documentary, had a different reaction — at least initially. It took him a minute to realize thatYacht Rockthe web series was laughing with him, not at him.“At first I felt a little insulted, like we were being made fun of,” he admits. “But then I began to see it was kind of an ass-backwards way to honor us.”
“And it was pretty funny, the whole sort of alternate-reality history that they were creating. They had taken what we were doing and defined it as a genre. We hadn’t really seen it that way. To us, it was just the next logical step in making pop music.”
Yacht Rock: A Dockumentaryis now streaming on Max.
source: people.com
