Gaucho - Steely Dan

Provenance: By the time I had purchased Gaucho I was deep into 'the Dan'. So, it was the purchase of a fan seeking to be a completist. About the only notable thing one could say is that I bought it in Kansas City. Fine BBQ out there, folks.

Review: The first time I slipped Gaucho into my stereo I frowned, wrinkled my nose and stashed it away for a few years. Something about it triggered an internal revolt. I struggled to square this with the questing solos of Countdown To Ecstasy or the deep jazz grooves of Aja.

I'd like to say that my innate natural curiosity and generous approach to reappraisal led me back, but the truth is I saw Steely Dan in concert and heard a few of the songs from Gaucho played live. They sounded great. I came home and put Gaucho on, and heard the same songs as I'd heard at Wembley Arena. They sounded great.

This would be the last album Steely Dan made before splitting in 1981 (they would reunite in 1993 and record two more platters) and it shows. Two years after Gaucho, Donald Fagen would unleash The Nightfly onto the world, and to say that these albums could be kissing cousins is an understatement. The production is similar, the arrangements have the same feel and even the synthesizer textures are alike. One crucial difference - I liked The Nightfly the instant I listened to it. I didn't need time to let it grow, or to witness the compositions in another context. So what's the difference?

For one, drugs. This is Steely Dan's drug album - or, more accurately, their cocaine album. It's not just the references in 'Hey Nineteen' and 'Time Out Of Mind', concealed with a gossamer-thin layer of metonym and allusion; it's also the backbone to the vignettes in 'Glamour Profession', which delineates a few of the characters involved in the coke trade game. Moreover, it's not only the subject matter at hand but even the very consistency of the sound you're hearing that screams Bolivian marching powder. Surfaces shine with a flat glossiness, rhythms snap with a jaw-grinding lockstep, synths gleam and shimmer with an antiseptic chemistry.

At first, this is what turned me off. Even when factoring in Becker and Fagen's notorious perfectionism, prior albums still had a human heartbeat and the odd ray of romanticism glinting through the carapace of cynicism, obscurantism and wisecracks. Gaucho, in comparison, felt tired, numbed, a kind of end-of-the-party sourness creeping in.

Well children, I started to buy the particular brand of weltschmerz the boys were selling. Leaning in, I found oodles to savour. The slickness combines nicely with the subjects - narcotics, ageing lotharios, Hollywood homosexuality scandals, possible PTSD - into a sickly brew of L.A.-flavoured sleaziness. As a downbeat chronicle of a gilded demimonde and the lowlifes slithering around in it, Gaucho remains unmatched.

So wallow in the reflective degeneracy of 'Babylon Sisters'; wince at rueful narrator of 'Hey Nineteen' determined not to act his age; and luxuriate in the frothing monument to perceived folly that is 'Gaucho' itself, a confection that starts off sounding like the theme to a low-budget breakfast chat show and builds to a mock-epic tower of grandeur, each jazzy augmentation of the usual rawk 'n' pop chord progression tugging you ever so slightly off centre. I've heard interpretations of the song talking about gauche (geddit?) roommates or friends, but to me I hear two film buffs ruminating upon the secret homosexual lives led by movie stars like Rock Hudson, or maybe some minor player like Perfecto Telles. The latter wouldn't surprise me.

There's great stuff all over - the bleak 'Third World Man', which hitches a mournful, swaying riff to harrowing tales of shellshock, is apparently one of Joni Mitchell's favourite Dan tracks; and 'My Rival' is possibly the most old skool track on this joint, which sounds like a larky, Sunshine Boys-inspired tale of two geezers with beef, but might also be about fatherhood. That their songs wind, twist, reflect and elide like MC Escher illustrations is just one of the buzzy little thrills afforded to the serious Dan fan.

Gaucho took its time to reveal its charms to me. At first, I didn't really understand it. Now, it's the Steely Dan album that most frequents my stereo. Funny how things shake out, isn't it?

Pretzel Logic - Steely Dan

Provenance: I became familiar with two Steely Dan songs right around the same time - 'Do It Again' from Can't Buy a Thrill and 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' from this bad boy, and I bought both albums close together.

Review: I struggle, sometimes. The easiest reviews to write, or so it seems, are those where I find some little scab to pick at, such as an undertow of misogyny; and goodness knows I enjoy giving a band a good shoeing every now and again. The tough ones are when I'm confronted with something I unabashedly love and, furthermore, take seriously. Case in point - Pretzel Logic.

I remember reading stories about how Persian carpet makers would deliberately introduce a single flaw into their otherwise expert designs. This was done to assert that only God's creations could be considered perfect, and that no man should get ideas about his station in life. Well, if there's a Persian Flaw in Pretzel Logic I'll be damned trying to find it. The first two Steely Dan albums were - are - superb, but here they shift gears into another realm altogether. Everything here is fine-tooled, finessed, wrought so delicately that the music itself seems to glint and gleam in a kind of audio pearlescence.

Attempting to play advocatus diaboli for a moment here, I'll try to level a charge or two against the album whilst giving it a listen. For one, it doesn't exactly throb with a primal swamp rhythm. It's certainly not shack-shaking primitivism of the stripe one would encounter with Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard or even Motorhead. This is music that wipes it feet before entering, for sure. It's an accusation heard often against Steely Dan - that in attempting to achieve technical ecstasy the finished product ends up rather bloodless. I get it. I'm not going to psyche myself up before playing sport by blasting 'Any Major Dude Will Tell You'. Of course not.

And hey, some people just plain don't like the Dan. And those people are wrong.

I'm not going to talk about key changes or thirteenth chords, though as my music professor father-in-law would assert, those things are totally legit to consider when unpacking why Steely Dan (and Pretzel Logic in particular) are so good. I will say that having so many jazz elements bubbling away underneath the surface of eminently hummable and hooky pop songs is a tough thing to pull off, however. And I guess this is why I take Steely Dan seriously, because hearing such consideration and sophistication in popular music is rare (and, I would argue, increasingly so).

Take, for example, the wonderfully kinetic 'Parker's Band'. As a tribute to Bird it's a canny and multifaceted little gem, one in which we don't even hear a snippet of Parker-inspired music until the cavalcade of horns ushering in the end of the track. The lyrics, meanwhile, begin on the same declarative note as music labels adopted to advertise their wares at the time - "Savoy Sides presents a new saxophone sensation!" Just how immersive is that! It's a small detail, no doubt, but exactly the kind of thing that Becker and Fagen agonised over to ensure that their music hit all the marks. Plus the middle eight is perfect:

We will spend a dizzy weekend
Smacked into a trance
Me and you will listen to
A little bit of what made preacher dance

In four lines we get a nod to Dizzy Gillespie, a nod to nodding out and the merest equation of jazz as a surrogate spiritualism. It's true that Steely Dan's lyrics can often seem elliptical to the point of opacity, but my counter to that would be what's the problem? Does everything need to be so literal? Is it not metonym, metaphor, allusion and the rest that work as the very stuff of poetry? Don't get me wrong, I'm not ordaining Steely fucking Dan as the inheritors of James Joyce's mantle. What I'm groping towards is that sometimes the hazy, ill-defined mirages conjured up on Pretzel Logic are perhaps more effective than a more prolix versifying at creating mood. It asks the listener to bring something to the game. I'm pretty sure Edgar Allan Poe was thinking of 'Charlie Freak' when he wrote "music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry."

(I should add, for the uninitiated, that Steely Dan is anything but hard to get into. Even the most teasingly obscure lyrics are wrapped up in the chewiest, sweetest jazz-rock you're likely to hear. Plus, if you watch movies there's always an olive branch to grab hold of - "If the dawn patrol gotta tell you twice / They're gonna do it with a shotgun" crops up in the flinty 'Night By Night', for example. I've mentioned before now the massive influence of cinema I have perceived in Fagen's songwriting.)

As someone who grew up away from American classic rock radio I don't have the ubiquity of Steely Dan to process. When I first became conscious of the fact I was listening to Steely Dan I was already (in law, if not in spirit) an adult. Thus, to a guy who had gorged on all the lumpen blooz-rock the 1970s had to offer, Steely Dan sounded fresh, curious and fizzing with musical ideas. A few years on, and now as the owner of their entire discography, nothing's changed. To me, Steely Dan represent the apogee of what popular music can be, which is a technicolour meld of virtuosity, wit and a blue flame of emotion. The only thing left to add is that, despite lacking the Persian Flaw, I don't even regard Pretzel Logic as their best work. That's for another day...

Can't Buy A Thrill - Steely Dan

Provenance: I heard a Steely Dan song or two on the radio and liked them. Consequently, I went and bought their first album. It's that simple.

Or, rather, it isn't. See, I don't just 'like' the music of Steely Dan - I am a swivel-eyed zealot, a slobbering devotee, a man for whom little else matters except the cool embrace of jazz-inflected, complex (but accessible!) soft rock. In short, I'm a fanboy.

For too long the Roman Catholic Church has held a monopoly on holy trinities. Subsequent to the crushing of the fourth-century Arian heresy, a few worthy challengers have appeared; Larry, Moe and Curly; Crosby, Stills and Nash; and of course, the adamantine and ever-victorious troika of McDonald's, Burger King and KFC. Well, here's another for the pantheon - Blue Oyster Cult, Judas Priest and Steely Dan. A triumvirate I esteem above all others.

Review: I don't listen to Steely Dan - I eat, sleep, breathe and shit Steely Dan. As with every album I review for this blog I have it playing as I write, but I don't need to. I know each and every word, the cues for all the instruments, the name of who plays what. I am a tiresome individual to be around, peppering my conversation with references to Steely Dan and acting with exasperation when my interlocutors haven't yet been exposed to the genius of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. I drive my friends crazy. I don't have many friends.

If I am to find fault, it's that Can't Buy A Thrill has a supremely ugly album cover. Like, what else is wrong? The songs are brilliant. The performances are virtuosic. The production is crystalline (and this on their first album; the quest for sonic perfection has come to define Steely Dan to a great degree. When did they reach their apogee? Aja for my money, though some argue that Fagen's solo outings The Nightfly and Morph The Cat push the envelope further).

Do I love Steely Dan, or do I need Steely Dan? Certainly, I'm not the only person who considers 'the Dan' a lifestyle choice. I too want to drink fruity cocktails, roll out world-weary witticisms in sparkling company, wear rollnecks or floral shirts and leave parties early. I want my Nathaniel West cynicism delivered in gnomic couplets and wrapped around a saxophone solo. I want jazz chords, but not too many. I don't own a yacht but I live on the coast and see many go by my window.

Let's be serious for a moment (because one should not be too fatuous about Steely Dan, you'll never win); Can't Buy A Thrill is a stunner, and if it receives fewer accolades than it should it's because it shares the limelight with Aja, Katy Lied, Countdown To Ecstasy and the rest. The two most recognisable cuts here are FM staple 'Reelin' In The Years', tripping along like an urbane Wishbone Ash, and the filmic 'Do It Again', a series of hard-luck vignettes accompanied by organ and electric sitar. In fact, it strikes me that much of Steely Dan's work is in thrall to the silver screen, either employing recognisable motifs or even terminology in their lyrics that is borrowed from cinema. Someone should write an essay on it, so long as it's not me.

Then you have the rueful, crumbs-from-the-king's-plate grooves of 'Dirty Work' and 'Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)'. Both seem to speak of a demimonde possessing a kind of flaccid, played-out glamour. It all sounds ineffably decadent, but remember kids, to be decadent you must first be civilised. That's the real secret to Can't Buy A Thrill - it's all so effortlessly cool. And as the 1970s wore on, Steely Dan would just continue to get cooler. Whilst other bands gurned and grunted their way through the most rudimentary riff-rock and catpiss guitar soloing, Steely Dan would be playing something miles more sophisticated, by the best musicians in the business, and it would sound great on the radio.

The thing is, it was never effortless. Becker and Fagen were martinets in the studio, demanding endless takes from their hired guns until it met their standards. Famously, there's a scene in The Shining where a slow zoom of Scatman Crothers took over sixty takes before Stanley Kubrick was satisfied (as legend has it, Crothers wept with joy and relief in a subsequent filming when the director called his scene a wrap within three takes). The appearance of serenity and the state of serenity are two very different things, and so Steely Dan, like Kubrick, split the difference and opted for the former. It's partly why Can't Buy A Thrill is such a full-bodied, kaleidoscopic success.

I've never seen Steely Dan and would drag my dick through broken glass in order to do so. The closest I came was one evening in Boston. I'd had a great time watching the Blue Man Group with my then-girlfriend - hell, I'd even participated in the show and had a fresh smudge of paint on my cheek as a memento - but emerging from the theatre I happened to glimpse the marquee opposite. It said STEELY DAN and I don't think I spoke another word that evening.