Touring production · Yacht rock
The smoothest records of the late seventies and early eighties, played by a horn band that means it.
The records filed under yacht rock were made by the best-paid, best-rehearsed session players in America, working for producers who would spend a week getting eight bars right. The chords come out of jazz. The vocals sit high and exposed with no distortion to hide behind. The horn charts are not decoration — they are the arrangement. It is the most demanding material in this series to play properly, and the gap between a band that can execute it and a band that cannot is audible from the back of the room.
Haul ’N’ Boats is that band. Full horn section, the harmony stacks the records were built on, and a rhythm section that understands the whole style rests on restraint — on the pocket sitting a shade behind the beat and nobody overplaying. It is the most deceptively difficult material in the series to get right, and the easiest to enjoy once it is.
The name is the show in miniature: a pun on Hall & Oates that tells a room in three words exactly what kind of night it is in for. The wardrobe leans in, the between-song patter leans in, and then the band plays “What a Fool Believes” with every part intact and the wink stops mattering. Audiences arrive smiling and leave impressed, which is a better order than the reverse.
The songbook runs from about 1972 to 1984 — Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers and Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Toto, Hall & Oates, Boz Scaggs, Kenny Loggins, Ambrosia, Little River Band, Player, Pablo Cruise and the rest of the smooth-radio canon. It is a catalog nearly everyone knows without having chosen to: songs absorbed from car radios and grocery stores and their parents’ kitchens. That recognition is the whole engine of the show. Nobody needs to be taught these songs.
It is one of the most flexible nights in the series. It plays a theater as a seated concert, a festival stage as a headline slot, a Mardi Gras ball, a casino ballroom or a corporate party, and it works as well outdoors as in. The material is upbeat without being loud, familiar without being tired, and it skews across a wider age range than almost anything else on the roster — which makes it a safe call for a mixed corporate room where a harder show would split the audience.
One of the most flexible nights in the series — a theater concert, a festival slot, a Mardi Gras ball or a corporate party, and equally at home indoors and outdoors.
The songbook
Fifty from the yacht rock canon, roughly 1972 to 1984. The set is programmed to your room and your night rather than played straight down this list — tell us the crowd and we will build the arc.
More from the series
Book it
We’ll come back with availability, what each show needs, and one price — usually the same day. If you have more than one night to fill, say so and we’ll program the whole arc rather than quoting you a band.
