The Wiseacre Duos: Steely Dan, Part III

By the end of 1974, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker decided to burn it all down. They fired their manager, dismantled their original group, and stopped touring. After the satisfying experience of Pretzel Logic, during the recording of which saw an impressive array of highly sought after studio players, Fagen and Becker knew there was no looking back. Witnessing the skills of seasoned musicians like Hugh McCracken, Chuck Rainey, and Michael Omartian, the duo began to realize their original "vision." With each album, they were seemingly getting closer to what they were aspiring.

Like many geniuses, Fagen and Becker were able to conceive their art mentally before it was performed. Not just a general idea, but a note for note chart, played end to end in their cortices. Mozart was reputed to have had this ability. I imagine the film director Stanley Kubrick had storyboarded film scenes much this way. Fagen and Becker also had something else in common with Kubrick-an alarming obessiveness with getting just the right take. Over the next several albums, the Steely Dan masterminds would subject their musicians, producers, and engineers to the painstaking process of finding perfection. Subjective perfection, of course. Perfection being a relative term, and only the songwriters were able to discern what "perfection" was in regards to their output.

Katy Lied was to be SD's next album. What is most noticeable about this batch is how much darker the lyrics became. Steely Dan had always shoehorned collections of wry words into their melodies, but this time it got a wee bit more lurid. It has been said that Fagen & Becker's songs are like little pieces of cinema; if that's the case, Katy Lied is akin to a film festival of highbrow sleaze. "Rose Darling" seems to be a loving song about masturbation. "Bad Sneakers" is narrated by an insane asylum inmate. "Chain Lightning" is a recollection of two guys who once attended a fascist rally. "Doctor Wu" quite abstractly describes a love triangle: guy, girl, and drugs. "Black Friday" details the flight of a guy who absconds with quite a bit of money after a major stock market crash. The most strikingly dark song, however, is a calypso ditty called "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" which tells of a dirty old man who shows pornographic films to underage teens, and exclaims how excited he will be when his charges turn 18.

As mentioned earlier, all of these interpretations are just that, interpretations. We seem to want a hard and fast definition to everything in our lives, even our art. But then I remember that rather famous e.e. cummings quote:

"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."

Excellent advice, particularly when attempting the slippery task of trying to decode the writings of one D. Fagen and W. Becker. My above summations would doubtless be taken to task by the legions of Steely Dan lovers out there. I'm certain many an argument as to just what in the hell Fagen is singing about in 'Throw Back the Little Ones" raged over a bottle of Muscatel back in the day. The songwriters were tickled by all of the interest, but often admitted that the lyrics were only utilized for their musical compatibility. How a word rhymed, how it made harmonic sense, how it fit a time signature-these were the criteria. As a result, sometimes the narratives suffered. As Fagen stated more that once, "they come out like stories with a few pieces missing."

One theory as to why the lyrics had become so tantalizingly grim was how L.A. was affecting our narrators. Here you had two dyed in the wool New Yorkers, dropped into the spacious, sunny "wasteland" of Los Angeles (think Woody Allen in ANNIE HALL). It has been said that some of the best art is derived from suffering, and perhaps that was the case. The ennui and cultural barrenness weighed on the musicians from Day One. It was as if they were returning gunfire (lyrically at least) against their laid back environment. This theory is food for thought, but a bit simplistic. There is plenty of evidence that Fagen and Becker were already predisposed to a sarcastic point of view. I'll bet they would have composed a string of twisted tales even if they had settled in Bettendorf, Iowa. It would have been an interesting "heredity vs. environment" experiment to be sure. Was the predilection for gallows humor innate? A defense mechanism? Or a response to a slaughterhouse of a world?

The music itself was also transforming. The army of musicians, while under the strict direction of Fagen and Becker, were still often allowed to add their own fluorishes to written parts. Drummer Jeff Porcaro, hired during the Pretzel Logic dates, would take the basic drum track and supplement with 16th note patterns (in 2 bar phrases), among other stylistics. Each of his fills were precise. It seemed there was a reason why this 19 year old player was already a veteran of the industry.

The most stunning work on Katy Lied, to me, is Phil Woods' otherworldly sax solo on "Doctor Wu". It is so amazing that I remember rewinding my old cassette tape just to hear it again. Fagen and Becker were so stunned by it that they did not ask Woods to play it again (a rarity). He had nailed it on the first take.

All of the ingredients were there for a new Steely Dan classic. However, the (re) emergence of the SD gremlin was to plague the post-production. Said gremelin seemed to dog every SD album in some way. During recording on a previous record, it was discovered during playback that a particular guitar section would not record properly on a 3M tape, no matter how many times it was "punched in." After a modification, the track recorded properly. The defective tape was sent to 3M headquarters, where it was discovered after analysis that the tape had a tiny bubble that was filled with mustard. A tech had brought his sandwich into the room where the mylar sheets were coated with oxide. Evidently, when the tech bit into the sandwich, the mustard landed, as the Fagen & Becker describe, "on the exact spot where we were going to put (the) guitar part."

Good intentions abounded when engineer Roger "The Immortal" Nichols and his team acquired the then brand- new Dolby DBX noise reduction units for the mastering process of Katy Lied. To everyone's horror, every aspect of the recording sounded distressingly flat. After several abortive mixes and a lack of understanding of why everything sounded so poor, Nichols and company flew to the DBX headquarters in Boston to get some assistance/advice. Specially designed equipment with external controls that allowed simultaneous control of mixing and playback was provided by the firm. It did not help. So disappointed were producer Gary Katz, Nichols, Becker, and Fagen that Katy Lied was very nearly shelved. Nonetheless, the crew relented and the artists' 4th album was released in 1975 to general critical acclaim and respectable sales.

The following year, Steely Dan would produce their most sneering, nasty effort. The Royal Scam is the first Dan album with which I became familiar, and perhaps because of that, it remains my personal favorite. I think it also has something to do with how unrepentedly funky the whole affair is. Fagen and Becker have long been accused of being the authors of elevator music, smooth jazz, souless code. I disagree, especially when you consider Scam. How can one listen to Larry Carlton's scorching guitar solos on "Kid Charlamagne" or "Don't Take Me Alive" and call the music vanilla or white bread? Scam is often referred to as the "guitar album", and with good reason. Carlton's work positively blisters throughout.

Also lending support was the flamboyant dummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, who had lent his sticks to all manner of superstars in years past: Sinatra, Nina Simone, the Beatles, and so on. So confident and cocky was Purdie that he carried around a neon sign which read ANOTHER HIT BEING MADE. His shuffles were memorable foundations of kickin' rhythm sections that were supplanted by Chuck Rainey or Becker on bass.

We spoke of the corrosive lyrics on Katy Lied. That was just a warm up. The bitter tales on Scam play like a grotesque parade of many of the social and political ills plaguing the day (and still). We are treated to songs about out of favor drug dealers, apologetic jewel theives, quickie island divorces, interplanatary havens for ex-cons, mistreated immigrants, fetishism, highly pissed off cuckolds, and a murderous criminal who barricades himself with a case of dynamite during a stand-off with the police. Never were the tunes so scathing, or intriguing.

I listen to The Royal Scam probably more than any other Steely Dan album. Why? Does that say something about me? After an episode involving a nutcase who held a busload of hostages at gunpoint a few years after this album was released, Fagen conjectured that the gunman "probably had 67 scratched copies of The Royal Scam." Is it truly the sociopath's musical manifesto? Nah, it's too danceable for that. In fact, the Dan even does a disco song ("The Fez") this time out. "Haitian Divorce", with its gnarly fuzz box effects and faux raggae beats, is another sublimely boppable tune.

I could easily post a separate entry on this album, dedicating the space to some commentary of each of the songs. So dense, these tunes. I would raise an eyebrow over "The Caves of Altamira" the compact jazzer that curiously details a young boy's experiences taking in ancient cave murals. What about Paul Griffin's gorgeous piano in "Sign In Stranger", a nod to Fagen & Becker's sci-fi geekery? I would need to describe the potentous title track, its storyline of displaced Puerto Rican aliens and their eventual exploitation, all set to some of the most dissonant, goosebump inducing trumpet breaks you'll ever hear. And surely I would speak of the most blatant track, "Everything You Did", with its narrator running down the score once he discovers his wife's infidelity. Nothing enigmatic about that tune, and nothing pretty, either. The punchline at the end is vintage Steely Dan in its pungency.

So what we have with Scam is quintessential Dan: immaculate, yet groovy arrangements and twisted lyrics. It is a look into the shadows, an overturn of a rock with all sorts of frightening matter underneath, and ultimately, a violent shaking of the tacky shag carpet of the 70s, revealing despair and woundedness. So naked an examination of "the dreary architecture of (one's) soul", as described in a much later SD song, had not graced the record bins in years.

Yeah, sure. I bet Fagen and Becker would laugh themselves silly over that.........


to be continued