Chuck Mangione, "Feels So Good"

There was a very narrow and specific band of soft, groovy music that was approved to play over PA systems in the late 1970s. Or at least this was the case in the Midwest and in Florida, where I spent my time growing up. For all I know, things were different on the coasts, with New Yorkers humming along to “Heroin” (Apple Music, Spotify) and Suicide’s “Cheree” (Apple Music, Spotify) on the floor of Macy’s, and “TV Party” (Apple Music, Spotify) and the Germs rocking hotel lobbies in Santa Monica. Anything’s possible, I suppose.

But in my neck of the woods, if you were out and about, it was necessarily against a backdrop of Carly Simon, Dr. Hook, James Taylor, Captain and Tennille, and like artists. Yacht rock, they call this music now. There’s a certain appeal to that term—it conjures an image of the upper crust sitting cross-legged on the decks of their private boats, swirling mixed drinks, seasoning their badinage with late-era Eagles tracks played from eight-track tape. You can hear six notes or six seconds of a yacht-rock track and conclude right away that, yes, this is white-wine, watch-the-sunset, outdoors-at-room-temperature, all’s-right-with-the-world-but-still-let’s-adjust-the-tax-brackets music.

Yet for the rest of us, what they’re now calling yacht rock was backed-up-in-the-checkout-line-at-JC Penney’s, smell-of-disinfectant, under-the-buzzing-dead-white-fluorescent-lighting music. And for us Gen X kids it was dragged-along, Mom-and-Dad-shopping-for-interior-paint, 150-minutes-in-and-all-this-beige-looks-the-same, climb-the-walls music. For at least the stretch of time between the invention of the suburbs and the invention of the Walkman, there were two classes of people in American society: Those Who Chose to Listen to Yacht Rock and Those Who Had It Thrust Upon Them at Every Turn. Looking back on this period, would we be surprised to learn that there were miles-long lines of unspooled speaker wire leading from the Haves’ boat slips to the Have-Nots’ dental exam rooms? That they chose this music for us as a kind of sedative, or at least a distraction? Sure, you could tear up the floor mats and carpets of your car to find the source of the smell, but here: take this pine-tree shaped air freshener instead.

Speaking of embattled air fresheners, I spent a lot of time in bathrooms growing up. Who am I kidding? I still do. This is because on the question of other people, I’ve always been just about half-in. If I could split my waking hours evenly between raucous hilarity/ meaningful one-on-ones with family and friends on one hand, and on the other, time spent alone flooding my consciousness with content—formerly books, but lately podcasts, sports, music, peak TV, short-form Internet writing—that would be the perfect balance. And growing up, the best (and really only) place to go for that latter alone time was the bathroom. My parents still tell stories about how I’d break off from a game of tag or kickball to go pee, then an hour later my friends would ring the doorbell asking where I’d gone.

I noted before (see “Uno in Più”) that we ate out a lot when I was a kid. My family owned and operated an Italian restaurant ten minutes from my house. We’d go to Abruzzi’s Café 422 three or four times a week. This was at least a 90-minute commitment: drinks, menu, salad course, entrée, then another half-hour catching up with family after all that. Now I loved going to the Restaurant. Loved the food; loved schmoozing with the waiters and bartenders and managers and hosts; loved seeing my grandfather, uncles, and cousins on their shifts. I especially loved having the run of the place. I would go behind the bar and mix my own drinks with the soda gun, and I would grab live lobsters out of the tank across from the cash register, to show off to other kids.

But there was also a time when I was just done with it and wanted only to take a book into the Men’s room and sit and read for twenty minutes.

A public restroom doesn’t provide a complete sanctuary. Old men come in and make infernal noises: grunts, belches, hairball hacks. It seems like someone’s always jiggling the door of your stall: either they can’t tell that it’s occupied (really?) or they think you’re taking too damn long in there (fair). And oh, the irrelevant discussions. Back in those bygone days two men standing at the sinks felt more compelled to speak to each other than they do today. How are you hitting ’em? one of them would ask, as it was a truth universally acknowledged that a man of a certain age in a restaurant this nice must be a golfer. And some stultifying recap of the back nine of Candywood would follow.

Goddam, Misters: I’m in here reading the last chapter of The Phantom Tollbooth, and you’re KILLING IT for me.

In the pockets of time when you actually did have the restroom all to yourself, here came the yacht rock to put the squeeze on your sanity. Soft enough that you couldn’t complain, loud enough that it couldn’t be ignored. Looking back on those days, I wonder where the feed was coming from. It couldn’t have been Sirius XM’s dedicated Channel 17. And not terrestrial radio, either, because I don’t remember any ad spots or DJ banter in between the tracks. Was there a regional standards authority charged with piping in background music to Midwestern businesses? Some yacht-rock utility charging $10 monthly for a perpetual stream of Little River Band, Doobie Brothers, Kool & the Gang, and more, with the further guarantee that each of “Arthur’s Theme” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Just the Way You Are” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “I Just Called To Say I Love You” (Apple Music, Spotify) played no fewer than five times per day?

The songs and artists I’ve called out thus far are only low-level co-conspirators, and some of them unindicted at that. (I like that Stevie Wonder track a lot.) It’s time now to name the real kingpin, the Final Boss, the music I identify most with the hours I spent in the Men’s room at the 422—and for that matter, any of six department stores in the Eastwood and Southern Park Malls, my optometrist, Reyer’s World’s Largest Shoe Store, and so on. And that’s Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” (Apple Music, Spotify).

Why Chuck should loom so large in my memory is an open question. But possibilities abound:

• The Horns. Trumpets were a fixture in my family and a feature at the restaurant. My grandfather was an accomplished musician, first chair in the local concert band. Depending on availability, he, my Uncle Bob, my Uncle Joe, or an old beat-box cassette player (I may have taken those last two out of order) would play trumpet arrangements of “Happy Birthday” or Al Jolson’s “Anniversary Song” for customers celebrating their special days at the restaurant. So maybe Chuck Mangione’s trumpet and flugelhorn were especially favored at Café 422, to the extent any local control was exercised over the Men’s room mix. But this wouldn’t explain why I heard it everywhere else in town.

• The Length. I’m seeing now that “Feels So Good” is ten minutes long. It’s therefore possible it was just playing on background in my life for a longer time, in aggregate, than any other single yacht-rock track of that era.

• The Catchiness. This music is a weapons-grade earworm. Click the link above, steep in the melody for even three minutes, and see if at any point over the next ten days it’s not still ringing in your ears.

All of the above is the most likely answer. And “Feels So Good” is at least partially responsible for the decision I made, shortly after I was issued my first portable cassette player, to wear headphones in public settings as often, as long, and as loud as applicable social norms of the day would allow. The logic was simple: the technology was available to control what you hear—you’d be a fool not to use it. And for decades now I’ve been using it: whiling away MBTA delays on train and platform, rocking out in lines at the rental car counter, tuning out The Guy in Seat 12B hitting on The Girl in 12A for the duration of the flight. In fact, I credit my over-ear headphones for getting me through law school without losing my mind. While my classmates sweated out loud over their grades and clerkship applications, I was happily bopping along to the Ramones and Pogues.

Not so long ago I was riding an elevator up to my office, and a woman tapped me on the shoulder from behind. I pulled an earbud out. “Your music is leaking out of your headphones,” she told me. Every bone in my body was screaming at me to answer with Your voice is leaking out of your mouth, but I held back because Larry David’s Law dictated that if I did, there was a 100% chance I’d walk right into a meeting with this woman later that day. I’m not telling this story because I had that snappy rejoinder locked and loaded and for my own vanity I need you all to know about it. Well, maybe I am, in part. But really I’m telling it to make the point that, in the moment, I did feel there was moral equivalence between her position and mine. We both had a legitimate interest in controlling what we were hearing.

iPhones are awesome. Not only can you load your 17,000 songs onto one of them to play over headphones, wherever you go, for as long as your battery allows—you also have the Internet with you. There came a point in my teenage years where bringing a book to a meal, then carrying it across the restaurant into the bathroom, wasn’t gonna fly anymore. But these days I can politely excuse myself from the dinner table to check baseball scores, do the Times crossword, whatever. There has never been a better time for Me Time. And if I Bluetooth into my earbuds, I can listen to Jane’s Addiction instead of the guy next to me scraping loogies off the back of his throat.

During COVID I got into the habit of driving into Lexington to the Cumberland Farms on Waltham Street. For those of you not in New England, Cumby is a gas station/ food mart chain. I’m really, really into the cinnamon rolls there. They play early ’80s new wave hits over the PA system in Cumberland Farms, and I’m all in for that. The other day “Electric Avenue” (Apple Music, YouTube) was playing, and the manager gave me a free Diet Coke for correctly naming Eddy Grant as the singer. Have the decades turned “Come on Eileen” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Mexican Radio” (Apple Music, Spotify) into today’s yacht rock, or have the standards for PA airplay materially changed? I like to think it’s the latter. The arc of history bends toward good taste, after all.

But here’s a funny thing: Tuesday afternoon I was driving in my car¹, and on a lark I decided to stream “Feels So Good” on Apple Music. Played it straight through beginning to end, with the volume jacked … and I loved every second of it. Whatever I feel generally about jazz, pop, or the unholy notion of combining the two, I was fully and unironically rocking out to Chuck Mangione. In the five days since, I’ve played this track probably another ten times, and I haven’t soured on it yet. (Has it played in my dreams, so that I wake up again and again in the middle of the night with its main theme steam-training through my head? Yes, and I’m coping.) The horns are lovely, I’m digging the wah-wah deployments and other guitars, and I’m even tolerating the saxophone.

Friday night I went to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions. Turns out a dozen other folks in my age bracket had the same idea and were there first. This was going to be a ten-minute wait. The PA system activated in the ceiling, but I acted quickly to load my earbuds, so that it didn’t get even a second to dig into me. I cued up “Feels So Good” and hit the play button.

Turns out when you choose it for yourself, it’s a damn fun listen. Time to go buy a boat.

1. Alone in a car might be the very best and most perfectly distilled form of Me Time, see “Four Score and Seven.”