Boz Scaggs - Sierra

Boz Scaggs - Sierra
After learning guitar at the age of 12, Boz Scaggs met Steve Miller at St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas. In 1959, he became the vocalist for Miller's band, The Marksmen. The pair later attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison together, playing in blues bands like The Ardells and The Fabulous Knight Trains.

Leaving school, Scaggs briefly left Texas to join the burgeoning rhythm and blues scene in London. After singing in bands such as The Wigs and Mother Earth. He travelled to Sweden as a solo performer, and recorded his solo debut album, Boz in 1965, which was not a commercial success and did a brief stint with the band The Other Side with fellow American Jack Downing and Brit Mac MacLeod.

Returning to the U.S., Scaggs promptly headed for the booming psychedelic music center of San Francisco in 1967. Linking up with Steve Miller again, he appeared on the Steve Miller Band's first two albums Children of the Future and Sailor, which received good reviews from music critics. After being spotted by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, Scaggs secured a solo contract with Atlantic Records in 1968.

Despite good reviews, his sole Atlantic album, featuring the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and slide guitarist Duane Allman, was met with lukewarm sales, as were follow-up albums on Columbia Records. In 1976, he linked up with session musicians who would later form Toto and recorded his smash album Silk Degrees. The album reached number 2 on the U.S. charts and number 1 in a number of countries across the world, spawning three hit singles: "Lowdown", "Lido Shuffle", and "What Can I Say", as well as the MOR standard "We're All Alone", later a hit for Rita Coolidge and covered by Frankie Valli. A sellout world tour followed, but his follow-up album, the 1977 Down Two Then Left, did not fare as well commercially as Silk Degrees.

The 1980 album Middle Man would spawn two top 20 hits, "Breakdown Dead Ahead" and "Jojo," and Scaggs would enjoy two more hits over 1980 and 1981 ("Look What You've Done to Me" from the Urban Cowboy soundtrack, and "Miss Sun" from a greatest hits set). But Scaggs' lengthy hiatus from the music industry (his next LP, Other Roads, wouldn't appear until 1988) slowed his chart career down dramatically. "Heart of Mine" in 1988, from Other Roads, was Scaggs' final top 40 hit but was a major AC success.

Scaggs has continued to record and tour sporadically throughout the 1980s and 1990s, although he has semi-retired from the music industry, and now owns the San Francisco nightclub, Slim's.

Boz Scaggs recorded Other Roads in the mid-1980s, took another hiatus and then came back with Some Change in 1994. He released Come On Home, an album of blues, and My Time, an anthology in the late 1990s. He garnered good reviews with Dig although the CD, which was released on September 11, 2001, was lost in the post-9/11 melée. In May 2003, Scaggs released But Beautiful, a collection of jazz standards that debuted at number 1 on the jazz charts.

He tours each summer, has a loyal cadre of fans, remains hugely popular in Japan, and released a DVD and a live CD in 2004.

Words to Sierra
What about the one who said he loved you
What about the one who said he cared
Don't bother trying to find him
Way up in the icy air

O you played with his heartstrings
And you played without a care
But not up in the high sierra
You won't play his heart out there

The angels lay their clouds across his sky
They line up for him every night
Some have wings and others sing
The rest do lazy ballets in the air

There he's got a bird to give him warning
And he's got a lookout too
The beauty of the high sierra
And she's looking out for you

What about the one who said he loved you
What about the one who said he cared
He's off in the high sierra
But don't bother looking there


Discography

Boz Scaggs first album coverBoz - 1965
Boz Scaggs - 1969
Moments - 1971
Boz Scaggs & Band - 1971
My Time - 1972
Slow Dancer - 1974
Silk Degrees - 1976
Down Two Then Left - 1977
Boz Scaggs - 1977 remix of 1969 album
Middle Man - 1980
Other Roads - 1988
Some Change - 1994
Come on Home - 1997
My Time: A Boz Scaggs Anthology - 1997
Fade Into Light - 1999/2005
Dig - 2001
The Lost Concert (live) - 2001
But Beautiful - 2003

The Sierra Nevada stretches 400 miles (650 km), from Fredonyer Pass in the north to Tehachapi Pass in the south.[1] It is bounded on the west by California's Central Valley, and on the east by the Great Basin. Hetch Hetchy Valley, Yosemite Valley, Kings Canyon, Tehipite Valley and Kern Canyon are the most well-known of many beautiful, glacially-scoured canyons on the west side of the Sierra. Yosemite National Park Mount Whitney Sequoia National Park Giant Sequoias