STILL ALRIGHT

A breezy journey through a prolific musical career and some personal turbulence.

Loggins (b. 1948) comes across as a genial guy who is eager to please. He details relationships in which he was the disciple who followed the leader only to resist and resent that sort of direction. Case in point: Jim Messina, the author’s longtime collaborator. Loggins had the voice, songs, and onstage charisma, but Messina was indisputably the leader who retained control (and had a more lucrative contractual detail). We also see this pattern in the breakup of Loggins’ second marriage, to a younger woman who had served as a kind of therapist and spiritual guide. When he developed ideas of his own about the relationship that conflicted with hers, she left him. With such narrative framing suggesting a lot of soul searching, the author mostly keeps things light, hitting all the marks common to rock-star memoirs: family struggles during childhood; the salvation through rock music, especially the Beatles; confidence gained through successful performing; and the drugs, groupies, depression, and dependence on antidepressants. Loggins doesn’t come across as the deepest thinker, but he’s clearly someone who works well with others, as his relationships with Michael McDonald, Stevie Nicks, Barbra Streisand, and a host of top-flight producers and studio musicians attest. As changing trends scuttled the careers of so many of his peers, he was able to navigate his way from country-tinged rock to blue-eyed soul to what would become known as yacht rock. In addition, Loggins scored big with soundtrack hits such as “Footloose” amid the music industry’s upheavals through disco and MTV. It has been decades since the author’s commercial peak, and he lost his major-label contract in 1998, but he has a fairly interesting story to tell, and he enjoys telling it. “At this point in my life,” he writes, “the struggle for the kind of acclaim I knew in the ’80s is a waste of energy.”

A good beach read for the yacht-rock generation.