Boz Scaggs "Silk Degrees" [1976]

A 70s session-hack nightmare felony if ever there was one, "Silk Degrees" is when Boz Scaggs oozed out of side-musician obscurity with his disgusting "Theme from Love Boat"-meets-crossover-Glen Campbell album featuring the chart-reading shitheads who would later form the godawful Toto. Singing exactly like Kermit the Frog in a smoking jacket, this clown ("Boz" must be short for "Bozo") transforms himself from a poor man's Lowell George into the glitziest, grossest pop-meister douchebag on the planet not named Elton John. As such, the album's skating-rink horns and strings production became the horrid primary-color palate for late-70s ABC TV. This necessarily constitutes not only "Silk Degrees" as one of the most notable abominations in a decade that already had far too many, but Boz himself as the runner-up to biggest sell-out of the century behind Rod Stewart. What should have been an hysterical but obscure joke on the music biz became, instead, the force behind future Debby Boone hits, Diane Warren's entire catalog and Kid Creole & the Coconuts. How he was able to live with himself after infecting the entire landscape with his scumbag phoniness I can only guess, though I'm sure the high-quality drugs he was now able to afford had a lot to do with it. I dare you to listen to his version of "We're All Alone" and tell me with a straight face he didn't single-handedly ruin the entire decade.