Still smooth sailing for Yacht Rock Revue

When Yacht Rock Revue held its first Yacht Rock Revival two years ago in the tented parking lot at Andrews Entertainment Complex, about 1,000 soft-rock loving fans donned their white captain’s hats and packed the pavement.

Last year, the crowd quadrupled as Atlanta’s Yacht Rock Revue took over Park Tavern on a steamy August afternoon along with ’70s and ’80s lite-FM treasures such as Gary Wright, Robbie Dupree and Walter Egan.

Clearly, the appetite to sing along with “Steal Away” and “Dream Weaver” is voracious, because this year’s Revival has graduated to Chastain Park Amphitheatre, where the event will land July 20.

“It seemed like the next step up to continue the path from pretend to being real,” said Nick Niespodziani, one of YRR’s two lead singers. “The last two years it’s been a self-produced festival, but now we get to play a real venue with real seating and be able to focus less on the logistics and more on the music.”

While Chastain is notorious for its wine-and-cheese crowd, this show is not only a nontable setup, but all seats will be removed from the pit in front of the stage, turning the area into a dance floor.

That will give fans — dubbed the Nation of Smooth — plenty of space to get their groove on to YRR’s spot-on renditions of easy-breezy hits from acts both obvious (Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, Lionel Richie) and tragically underplayed (Player, Climax Blues Band, Ace, Nick Gilder).

Recently, Niespodziani, fellow lead singer Peter Olson and drummer Mark Cobb (all formerly of the indie rock band Y-O-U) dialed in from Brooklyn, where the band was slated to perform that night.

The past couple of years, YRR has advanced from being merely a fun-loving party band — which earned such local accolades as Best Place to Get Drunk With Your Dad and Best Overall Music Act in Atlanta — to a bona fide touring act.

In the days leading up to the Revival, they’ll have played in Connecticut, Philadelphia, Maryland and D.C. Still, Niespodziani said, “Chastain represents the biggest shift in profile for us.”

The band has had good luck recruiting some of the genre’s beloved torch-bearers to play with them, including Dupree, Egan and Elliot Lurie of Looking Glass and “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl”) fame. Those three performers will join YRR at Saturday’s Revival, along with Bobby Kimball (former lead singer of Toto), Bill Champlin (formerly of Chicago), Jeff Carlisi of .38 Special, Starbuck (“Moonlight Feels Right”) and YRR’s offshoot band, Yacht Rock Schooner.

“For all these guys, sitting in with other bands is part of what they do at this point in their careers,” Olson said. “Once we explained the concept to Bobby, he was on board, and Bill is his buddy, so he suggested bringing him on. A lot of these guys do know who we are now.”

One act YRR hoped to attach to the lineup was a leader of soft-rock swooning, Christopher Cross. However, Niespodziani said, “Things fell apart when they asked for a big chunk of our business for five years going forward. But getting a guy from Toto and Chicago is about as big as you can get in the yacht rock phenomenon.”

While YRR is regarded as a primo cover band, the ensemble hasn’t lost its desire to create new material. Last year, the band released a self-titled, five-song EP and it usually plays a couple of those tunes live.

The response has been encouraging — based on the fact that fans don’t rush for the bathrooms, as usually happens when bands break out unfamiliar material.

“People still stay and dance,” Niespodziani said. “Our true fans support us no matter what we do. We don’t want (playing new songs) to be a take-your-medicine kind of thing. We just want (fans) to know we’re talented in other ways.”