Listen to Tim Riley read this article:
Why Steely Dan Doesn’t Suck, Radio Silence, April 2014
The Countdown to Ecstacy vinyl reissue, remastered by Donald Fagen for Geffen/UMe for release on May 26th, makes a good peg for this Steely Dan overview. Dan Stone had me write it up for Radio Silence, that handsome Bay area journal. (In the first paragraph, I dig myself out of that defensive headline.) Plus, Quantum Criminals by Alex Pappademas and illustrator Joan LeMay just arrived from the University of Texas Press. More on that in a future issue. Walter Becker died in 2017, but Donald Fagen still tours as Steely Dan, and the tapes keep rolling.
Steely Dan tracks can seem not just overproduced but overplayed, overpraised, and catnip for the wrong kind of music nerd. Long before you dig into a five-decade career with countless buried pearls, the band inspires way too many harangues about everything rock supposedly squelched (instrumental pretension, phony intellectuals, and control-freak arrangers). Jazzers profess love for Dan tracks even if they hate rock; rock partisans get swept up in Dan fever even if they hate jazz. Steely Dan records didn't just thread stylistic needles, they turned style into a sardonic target.
If jazz suffered the rock sin of too much respect, Steely Dan reframed the rock mainstream inside its own limitations, countering three-chord passion with street jargon and inverted sentimentality.
Steely Dan’s first Top 10 hit, “Do It Again,” on 1972’s debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, combined improvisation, rebel snarl, and pop economy for a kinky, distracted energy. From the outset, the Dan trumped ambitious brass-heads like Blood Sweat & Tears (jazzers trying to rock) and Chicago (rockers aiming at jazz) to spring intricate relays of suspense and release, clench and relief. If jazz suffered the rock sin of too much respect, Steely Dan reframed the rock mainstream inside its own limitations, countering three-chord passion with street jargon and inverted sentimentality. Critics tweaked superlatives, radio gobbled it up, and the Dan’s sheer fecundity of melodic hooks inspired sales if not affection. Song narratives flummoxed, crackled, and burst. You could dislike a track while feeling pursued by its catchphrase (“Never gonna do it without the fez on,” “No static at all,” “And you could have a change of heart…”).
By the time Steely Dan’s defining year of 1978 rolled around, they lobbed a title track onto that summer’s lame youth exploitation flick, FM, casually tossing another conundrum onto the pile. It came out just as Steely Dan rounded a crucial curve—a dog-biting-hand coda to Aja’s triumph that straddled the twin virtues of aesthetic nerve and popular embrace. You couldn’t make it through a single day without hearing one of those puzzling refrains (“It’s your favorite foreign movie,” “Drink Scotch whisky all night long, and die behind the wheel,” “She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire”). With the Rolling Stones tilting toward irrelevance, Jagger curdling into self-parody, and this concert-monster Springsteen fella back-shifting into roots rock with Darkness on the Edge of Town, Steely Dan soared above rock’s impending niche markets to invent a netherworld all their own, some peculiar fourth dimension arising from rock, pop, and jazz but beholden to none. Many of this era’s tracks can still stop parties with partisan bickering. Does the magisterial sleaze of “Hey Nineteen” (on 1980’s Gaucho) inspire or provoke, or both? Hindsight bids us to note how, by that point, even as punk youth upstaged the patronizing senioritis of Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and the Eagles, the Dan had already dodged rock’s aging dilemma. With seven piquant albums between 1972−80, and all ears cued to rock’s future or who would be the “next Beatles,” Steely Dan adroitly changed the subject…
TEN DAN TRACKS WITH CURIOS: the mix
1. "Pearl of the Quarter,” streetwalker cliché redeemed by lap steel
2. “My Old School,” horns chase California into the Pacific, prompting guitar duel
3. “Aja,” Steve Gadd’s classic early-take drum solo
4. “Bad Sneakers,” a soundtrack to Catcher in the Rye
5. “Pretzel Logic,” the blues as rat’s maze
6. “Cousin Dupree,” time mocks dirty old men, philosophy mocks beauty
7. “Barrytown,” a cheery rebuke of cults
8. “FM (No Static at All),” hungry reggae, grapefruit wine
9. “Home at Last,” epiphany at sea
10. “Any World (That I’m Welcome To),” comforting, elegiac, post-ironic
Depending on how you feel about Mel Tormé, his old-school cover of “Walk Between Raindrops” diagrams the distance between grocery store wallpaper and Fagen and Becker’s new tensions. It’s either knowingly cheesy or unintentionally sublime, or peak trash. Then there’s this tricky matter of “Goodbye Look,” which Tormé sings convincingly, only you can’t figure out whether he gets the plot or deploys his vast indifference in the service of some larger irony. Never knew Poco covered “Dallas,” the Dan’s obscure first single, until I started poking around this week, and the 1975 studio album it appeared on (Head Over Heels) served up only on YouTube, for now. This Last Roundup show, culled from a July 1977 Santa Monica Civic Auditorium show, has Rusty Young char-roasting on steel. More bibelots unmentioned above include Feed Me Jack undermining “Reelin’ in the Years,” and the continuing sampling story unspooling into rap (3rd Bass and Tone-Loc). Batting clean-up, The Pointer Sisters hired Jerome Richardson for the sax solo on their version of “Dirty Work,” winking at his session work on Can’t Buy a Thrill and Pretzel Logic.
This Robert Christgau piece from 1975 holds up nicely, even though it takes him another twenty years to coin “technopathic misanthropes.” When Greil Marcus reviewed Aja for the Village Voice in 1977, he argued against: “They seem to believe that one deepens emotions solely by suppressing them, hiding them, as if emotion nakedly expressed is emotion trivialized, emotion lost…”
Here’s the Walter Becker (1950-2017) obit file from the Guardian (Joel McIver), the New York Times (Jon Pareles), and Pitchfork (Amanda Wicks). None of these mention his daunting leap from bass to lead guitar on Aja.
Finally, a two-episode Gaucho Amigos blowout on the 1993 Dallas Starplex show, insider talk with sound clips.
It Was Worth It:
newsletters
music journalism insider: “One of my favorite [Boston] gigs took place at the Paradise in the early 1990s, it was Nick Lowe’s Cowboy Outfit, and every other person there had sold me a used record…”
The Art of Cover Art: “Yet, there is a unique legacy of female-identifying artists reclaiming the blue overlay…” and its tumblr archive
The Music Help Desk: reports that “over 50% of all plays on Spotify were from user-created playlists. And another 10–20% were not from playlists at all; i.e. users seeking out music manually via search etc.”
noises off
substack archive: Leon Russell, RJ Smith’s Chuck Berry biography, Dylan’s folly
more links at the riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites
@timrileyauthor: likes: Notes ascendant, also spoutibles
Deep-listening details for Beatles tracks, newly visualized
gear
geekria: headphone accessories, like elastic earpads to repurpose aging foam
ifiaudio: 90-degree cables, Zen Air Can portable DAC amps, and LAN silencers
Bowers & Wilkins: thumping Px8 007 cans
Thanks, Tim. Being a Dan fan, this one was right up my alley.
There's a new book coming out on May 9 called “Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers and Other Sole Survivors From the Songs of Steely Dan.” It's written by Alex Pappademas with illustrations by Joan LeMay, and will be published by the University of Texas Press.
The authors will be on Zoom for a free webinar on 5/25. Here's the info and link:
https://www.literatibookstore.com/event/home-literati-alex-pappademas-joan-lemay
Anybody that has Home At Last and FM on their Steely Dan Top 10 is alright with me!