FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
IN THIS PHOTO: Walter Becker (right) and Donald Fagen during the making their album, The Royal Scam, at The Village Recorder studio on 23rd November, 1975 in Los Angeles, California/PHOTO CREDIT: Ed Caraeff
Part Five: Steely Dan
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ONE of the most rewarding…
IN THIS PHOTO: Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
features is A Buyer’s Guide: where I get to suggest the best and most underrated albums by well-known acts, in addition to an essential book. Today’s subjects are the incredible Steely Dan. Essentially Donald Fagen and (the late) Walter Becker and a cast of musicians, Steely Dan have crafted some of the best albums ever released. I almost feel sorry excluding some of their albums from this feature, as they are all awash with skill, beauty and wonderful music! Alas, I think it is important to advise of the Steely Dan albums to own, so one can start their discovery – or continue – of one of music’s greatest bands. Although, oddly, it is quite hard to get hold of Steely Dan’s albums on vinyl – I hope the back catalogue is remastered and re-released in years to come -, I have provided links of where you can buy the albums, but one can always buy the album on Apple Music if they cannot obtain a physical copy – or you are free to stream them instead. Here is my guide to…
THE wonderful Steely Dan.
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The Four Essential Albums
Can’t Buy a Thrill
Release Date: November 1972
Label: ABC
Producer: Gary Katz
Standout Tracks: Dirty Work/Kings/Reelin’ in the Years
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=16883&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4Gh6pRaXqXTtJx4plAJbBw
Review:
“Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were remarkable craftsmen from the start, as Steely Dan's debut, Can't Buy a Thrill, illustrates. Each song is tightly constructed, with interlocking chords and gracefully interwoven melodies, buoyed by clever, cryptic lyrics. All of these are hallmarks of Steely Dan's signature sound, but what is most remarkable about the record is the way it differs from their later albums. Of course, one of the most notable differences is the presence of vocalist David Palmer, a professional blue-eyed soul vocalist who oversings the handful of tracks where he takes the lead. Palmer's very presence signals the one major flaw with the album -- in an attempt to appeal to a wide audience, Becker and Fagen tempered their wildest impulses with mainstream pop techniques. Consequently, there are very few of the jazz flourishes that came to distinguish their albums -- the breakthrough single, "Do It Again," does work an impressively tight Latin jazz beat, and "Reelin' in the Years" has jazzy guitar solos and harmonies -- and the production is overly polished, conforming to all the conventions of early-'70s radio. Of course, that gives these decidedly twisted songs a subversive edge, but compositionally, these aren't as innovative as their later work. Even so, the best moments ("Dirty Work," "Kings," "Midnight Cruiser," "Turn That Heartbeat Over Again") are wonderful pop songs that subvert traditional conventions and more than foreshadow the paths Steely Dan would later take” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Midnite Cruiser
Pretzel Logic
Release Date: 20th February, 1974
Label: ABC
Producer: Gary Katz
Standout Tracks: Rikki Don’t Lose That Number/Any Major Dude Will Tell You/Charlie Freak
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=16984&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2OUYJtDV6EmLkVyoHSuGIp
Review:
“When Fagen, Baxter and the rest can’t give a track the right touch, they send out for it. The exotic percussion, violin sections, bells and horns that augment certain cuts are woven tightly into the arrangements, each with a clear function. Producer Gary Katz provides a sound that’s vibrant without seeming artificial. The band uses additional instrumentation in its live sets as well as on record, traveling with a different array each time they tour. For the current one, they’ve added a second drummer, a second pianist (who also sings) and a vocalist, so that now there are four singers and every instrument but bass is doubled. I don’t think any of their records can equal this band on a good night.
While Steely Dan for the most part succeeds in its efforts to force its character into the strict limitations of the short pop song, the music would benefit from more elaboration. Here they can only begin to convey the moods and textures that made Countdown To Ecstasy their most impressive album. But at the very least, “Rikki …,” “Any Major Dude …,” “Barrytown” and “Through With Buzz” are fine oddball pop songs, any of which would make a terrific single.
In a short time, Steely Dan has turned into one of the best American bands, and surely one of the most original. Their only problem is the lack of a visual identity to go with their musical one — as pop personalities, they’re practically anonymous. But with music as accessible and sophisticated as Steely Dan’s, no one should care” – Rolling Stone
Choice Cut: Night by Night
Katy Lied
Release Date: March 1975
Label: ABC
Producer: Gary Katz
Standout Tracks: Black Friday/Doctor Wu/Everyone's Gone to the Movies
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=16954&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/12N6IsuqIJzbTXdIrJnc9b
Review:
“Steely Dan made songs about the destructive force of male vanity that came from two people you knew were speaking from personal experience. They never hold themselves above their characters, but they don’t let them off the hook, either. On “Bad Sneakers,” we see a man bopping around the street near Radio City Music Hall like he owns the place. We feel what he feels but also see how ridiculous he looks, while McDonald’s background vocals suggest grace in his awkwardness, celebrating the energy that powers him even though his actions are laughable. “Rose Darling” is the third track in a row to mention money specifically, but on a more casual listen it sounds something like a pure love song. And then two cuts later, the A-side closes with “Dr. Wu.”
Lodged in the middle of the album that came in the middle of the decade and in the middle of Steely Dan’s decade-long, seven-album run is one of their very best songs, a weary and funny and specific and mysterious ode to longing and loss. “Dr. Wu” gave the album its title (“Katie lies/You can see it in her eyes”) and crystalizes its essential mood. One moment it’s about drugs, the next it’s about a love triangle, and then you’re not sure what’s next or even what’s real, and weaving through it all is the saxophone solo from Phil Woods, connecting dots between musical worlds both corny and elegant, from Billy Joel to Billy Strayhorn.
The characters flailing clumsily throughout Katy Lied are paralyzed by desires they aren’t introspective enough to understand, so all they can do is keep stumbling forward. “I got this thing inside me,” Fagen sings in a bridge on the late album highlight “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”, “I only know I must obey/This feeling I can't explain away.” Sometimes obeying those desires lead people to something ugly and inexcusable, as on “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a song about a guy who is almost certainly grooming kids for abuse. It’s a Todd Solondz film rendered in sound, and Fagen only shows us the lead-up, forcing us to assemble the pieces in our heads as he hides the crime behind the album’s cheeriest arrangement” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Bad Sneakers
Aja
Release Date: 23rd September, 1977
Label: ABC
Producer: Gary Katz
Standout Tracks: Peg/Home at Last/Josie
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=16921&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/51XjnQQ9SR8VSEpxPO9vrW
Review:
“Aja was (is) a very influential work. In Scotland Ricky Ross heard the song Deacon Blues and named his band after it, while Peg is widely known because of De La Soul’s sampling of it for Eye Know. The jaunty Josie and the sublime title-track are further stand-outs on a record that barely breaks its bossa-nova beat. It is impossible to hear this record without thinking about LA sunshine, even though Fagen's lyrics were often nostalgic, ironic and bitter; hardly suspiring for a group that named itself after a – ahem – marital aid from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
To complete the feeling that you were holding an old jazz album in your hands, the original pressings came in a gatefold sleeve with a note from ABC Records’ president Steve Diener and the mock reverential critique by ‘Michael Phalen’: "In this writer’s opinion, Aja signals the onset of a new maturity and a kind of solid professionalism that is the hallmark of an artist that has arrived." Phalen was, of course, Becker and Fagen.
To emphasize its importance, in 2011 Aja was deemed by the Library of Congress to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important" and added to the United States National Recording Registry. But with or without such an accolade, Aja remains a remarkable piece of work” – BBC
Choice Cut: Deacon Blues
The Underrated Gem
Gaucho
Release Date: 21st November, 1980
Label: MCA
Producer: Gary Katz
Standout Tracks: Babylon Sisters/Glamour Profession/Time Out of Mind
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/844094?ev=rb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5fIBtKHWGjbjK9C4i1Z11L
Review:
“Good times! Is it any wonder Gaucho—the seventh Steely Dan album, and the last one Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would make together until the year 2000—is the one even some hardcore Danimals find it tough to fully cozy up to? The almost pathologically overdetermined production is elegant, arid, a little forbidding, and every last tinkling chime sounds like it took 12 days to mix, because chances are it did. And underneath that compulsive craftsmanship, that marble-slick surface, there’s decay, disillusionment, a gnawing sadness. But that’s what’s great about Gaucho. It takes the animating artistic tension of Steely Dan—their need to make flawless-sounding records lionizing inveterately human fuckups—to its logical endpoint.
It’s their most obviously L.A. record, so of course they made it in New York, after spending years out West making music so steeped in New York iconography it practically sweated hot-dog-cart water. And it’s also the most end-of-the-’70s record ever made, 38 minutes of immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music by which to greet the cold dawn of the Reagan era. The characters in these songs have taken an era of self-expression and self-indulgence as far as they can. They’re free to do and be whatever and whoever they want, but all that severance of obligation has done is isolate them from other people” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Hey Nineteen
The Latest/Final Album
Everything Must Go
Release Date: 10th June, 2003
Label: Reprise
Producers: Walter Becker/Donald Fagen
Standout Tracks: The Last Mall/Godwhacker/Everything Must Go
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=65834&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1IZfi926sBgCgvIwIS2rcS
Review:
“Unique among contemporary musicians, the post-comeback Steely Dan make records that are more fun to read than to listen to.
Like this: "Now did you say that you were from the Netherlands/ Or was that 'Netherworld'?/ If you grew up in Amsterdam/ Then I'm the Duke of Earl." But in all other respects, this new set of songs fails to live up to such assured invention.
Thirty years on from their debut, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have reduced the musical content of their compositions to a series of beautifully machined gestures, virtually devoid of the bright hooks and bold flourishes that gave them such a vital role in the wasteland of the 1970s, and sent fans skipping down the street humming snatches of Barrytown or Deacon Blues.
Time spent with the lyric sheet of Everything Must Go will not be wasted, but only the hard-bop horns on Things I Miss the Most, the slick guitar lick of Godwhacker and the laconic strut of Pixeleen rise above the mood of well-heeled world-weariness” – The Guardian
Choice Cut: Slang of Ages
The Steely Dan Book
Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years
Author: Brian Sweet
Publication Date: 9th February, 2015 (paperback)
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Synopsis:
“Reelin' In The Years is the acclaimed biography of Steely Dan, now updated to include details of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's work during the Nineties and beyond, including the latest Steely Dan masterpiece Everything Must Go.The only book ever to have been published on Steely Dan. Brian Sweet, former editor and publisher of Metal Leg, the UK based Steely Dan fanzine, draws back the veil of secrecy that has surrounded Becker and Fagen. Here at last is the true story of how they made their music and lived their lives. Includes many photographs and a complete discography” - Waterstones
Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Steely-Dan-Reelin-Brian-Sweet/dp/1783056231