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Steely
Dan: Enigmatic Sophistcation by
Siegfried P. Duray-Bito During an era when disco blazed a mindless
swath through the cultural landscape, Fagen, and his cohort, Walter Becker,
forged a path of unique musical insight that proved to be a haven for serious
listeners. Though they named their band
Steely Dan, Becker and Fagen practiced pop music-making without regard for the
traditional "band" structure.
They brought to pop music a vision that accepted vastly different
influences and an emotional irreverence steeped in arcanic irony. From their early days as students at Bard
College in upstate New York, Becker and Fagen discovered a common interest in
bebop jazz and beatnik poetry but yearned for greater commercial success. Their early songwriting efforts included a
stint with Jay and the Americans, but the quirky, sophomoric songs of their
first project, the soundtrack to You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or
You'll Lose That Beat (Visa Records reissue, IMP 7005), revealed them as
angst-ridden New Yorkers, with lyrics like "It's dog, eat dog, eat dog,
Grab it fast and bite it". By the
early Seventies, they moved to California and proceeded to integrate West Coast
culture with their East Coast roots. As their pale faces soaked up the mellow
sunshine of L.A., the new lifestyle made a dramatic impact on their musical
development. The thin, nervous sound
and often frantic rhythms they brought from the East were now tempered by the
laconic pace and bass-heavy pop sound practiced in the West. Becker and Fagen kept many of the
high-strung lyrics, but added an earthy foundation and a relaxed atmosphere
that immediately captured an audience that was ready for a new amalgamation of
influences. While early Steely Dan was organized as a
traditional rock and roll band, Becker and Fagen saw the need for greater
control over the end product. To a
degree previously unmatched by any pop artists, the two, along with producer
Gary Katz, brought in virtuoso musicians to play carefully-charted portions of
the final song. The high level of
musicianship, combined with their widely-varying styles and influences,
guaranteed Steely Dan a fresh, continually evolving sound over many years. Like movie moguls casting the next
blockbuster, Becker, Fagen and Katz reached out for an astonishingly wide range
of talent. They combined Southern rock
influences from guitarists Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and Rick Derringer
with L.A. session men like Victor Feldman on vibes, Chuck Rainey on bass and
Jeff Porcaro on drums. To add an
element of funk and soul, they often looked to a chorus of black female singers
and Bernard Purdie on drums. For a cool
jazz sensibility, they recruited Tom Scott and Wayne Shorter on sax, Hugh
McCracken on guitar and the Brecker Brothers on horns. Drummer Steve Gadd and guitarists Larry
Carlton and Steve Khan added a touch of fusion fire to the mix. And to contrast Fagen's somewhat thin, reedy
voice, Michael McDonald's smoky vocals can be heard on several of the best
Steely Dan songs. Despite their newly-found status as
California wunderkinds, Becker and Fagen seemed wary of their new home. In songs like "Do It Again,"
"Kid Charlemagne" and "Show Biz Kids," Becker and Fagen
examined the sinister side of the Californian dream. Could the lyrics in "Show Biz Kids" from Countdown to
Ecstasy - "Show biz kids making movies of themselves/ You know they don't
give a fuck about anybody else" - reflect their own resistance to the
seductive L.A. lifestyle? Yet Becker
and Fagen were trapped, because songs like "Reelin' in the Years,"
"My Old School" and "Any Major Dude" evoked a sense of
bittersweet ambivalence about the past.
In "My Old School," also from Countdown to Ecstasy, Fagen
sang: "California tumbles in to the sea/ That'll be the day I go back to
Annandale." Only an apocalyptic
devastation of his new home would force him back to the past. Their vocal sophistication contrasted sharply
with Fagen's vocal tone: weak and whiney, he seemed the most unlikely of lead
vocalists. Yet within that lay much of
Steely Dan's charm. A more accomplished
vocalist would surely have been overly pretentious expressing the sort of
sardonic commentary that Fagen's nearly spoken lyrics easily conveyed. Many of the casually tossed references to
particular places and people emerged from Fagen in a very intimate way -
there's an uncanny sense that you're hearing from an old friend. Steely Dan released seven albums between
1972 and 1980. They can be roughly
classified into early, middle and late periods. The first two releases, Can't Buy a Thrill, in 1972, and
Countdown to Ecstasy, in 1973, revealed a guitar-based band with a surprisingly
mature sound. David Palmer's high
falsetto on some songs on Can't Buy a Thrill was out of character with the
band's intent and thereafter Fagen assumed all lead vocal duties. They supported these releases with a
now-legendary tour in 1974 and also discovered that touring wasn't their bag,
causing the break-up of the original line-up. Pretzel Logic (1974) was the real start to
the duo's studio album concept. They
borrowed George Martin's production style with several Beatles-inspired
phrasings as heard in "Barrytown" and "Through with
Buzz." Becker and Fagen also
reached deeper in the past to jazz with an Ellington instrumental ("East
St. Louis Toodle-oo") and the opening track, "Rikki Don't Lose That
Number," was their greatest hit, reaching fourth in the charts.
("Rikki," with the opening bars lifted from Horace Silver's
"Song for My Father," proved to be Steely Dan's most controversial
song, with fans debating whether its true meaning was related to marijuana or
homosexuality). By 1975, Steely Dan reached full maturity
with Katy Lied, featuring a sparser sound using more keyboards and greater
vocal articulation. This was the height
of their middle period and the next album, The Royal Scam, was an odd shift to
a harder, angrier sound, but with a very smooth integration between cuts -
almost a concept album in the Pink Floyd vein.
By this time, Becker and Fagen had mastered the studio rotation with no
two songs employing the same set of musicians. Aja was Steely Dan's masterpiece in that
it best captured Becker and Fagen's pop-jazz blend. They returned to a warm intimacy, while adding precision and
crispness borrowed from innovative disco production techniques. The title cut, "Aja," began as a
pop song, then added an extended fusion-jam bridge, featuring a spectacular
Wayne Shorter sax solo. Balancing this
unapologetic jazz vein were melodic pop jems like "Peg" and
"Deacon Blues." It's one of
those rare albums where you wouldn't want to change a single note. They waited three years before releasing
Gaucho, in 1980, and while it still was very listenable, one could sense here a
certain loss of innovation and freshness.
The sound, though, was yet another notch up from Aja and offered true
reference quality analog, which, in many ways, is still the best that can be
done ("Babylon Sisters" or "Gaucho" on vinyl clearly expose
digital's shortcomings). Following Gaucho, Becker and Fagen parted
ways, with Fagen releasing a solo project, The Nightfly, in 1982. By then an era had passed them by - the
newly-emerging punk sound was far too revisionist for Becker and Fagen to
handle. New Wave's linear style was an
anathema to Steely Dan's complex progressions and abrupt harmonic changes. Now, after years of false rumors of a
reunion, Fagen has released Kamakiriad with Becker as producer. They pretty much pick up where they left
off, with much of the signature Steely Dan sound intact. The bass is as prodigious as ever,
production values are superb (within a regrettably digital environment) and
Fagen's loony outlook on life takes on an almost vaudevillian quality. Similar in concept to The Nightfly, Fagen
sings about peculiar incidents that he experiences while traveling in the
future in a retro-styled "envirocar" called a Kamakiri. This unifying theme helps the album's
continuity, but still allows individual cuts like "Tomorrow's Girls"
and "Snowbound" stand out as well as any of Steely Dan's older hits. Those expecting startling innovations in
Kamakiriad may be disappointed. So
seamless is the transition from, say, Gaucho or The Nightfly to Kamakiriad,
it's as if the last ten years never happened.
Becker and Fagen rely on the same sort of hooks, minimally updating the
sound with conservative use of samplers to thicken the mix. It seems Becker and Fagen's contribution to
new musical forms reached a climax back in 1977, but this is no reason to
dismiss their current output as redundant.
Kamakiriad is just plain fun to listen to and I would expect it to wear
as well as any Steely Dan album. Ultimately, the way in which Steely Dan
records allow themselves to be heard over and over again ensures a certain
immortality to their music. Very few
bands of twenty years ago released even one album that still sounds fresh and
revitalizing - let alone a whole discography.
Thankfully, Kamakiriad carries on the great Steely Dan tradition and is
hopefully a harbinger of great things yet to come. Every Steely Dan release employed the
services of Roger Nichols as chief engineer.
While he clearly used a studio-based, multi-mic approach, Nichols'
evolution as an engineer showed a growing respect for audiophile
standards. You can hear improvements in
mike placement, cabling, mixing boards and a healthy reluctance to tinker with
the mix through equalization, compression and other nasty tricks of the
trade. Each successive Steely Dan album
had greater resolution, truer timbre and increased dynamic range. No discussion of Steely Dan's recorded
legacy can be complete without addressing the various pressings. The original ABC pressings were on a black
label. With Katy Lied, ABC changed to
concentric colored rings, red to orange to yellow, from center to edge. Prior albums pressed after 1975 also have
this new label. By 1980, MCA absorbed
ABC and Gaucho, Steely Dan's finest recording, is only available as an MCA
issue. Look for the letters
"RL" scratched near the inner grooved for the Bob Ludwig masterings. The Mobile Fidelity Original Master issues
were hot items back in the late Seventies.
It seems every audio store in the country was tracking the MoFi version
of Aja as demo material. Katy Lied was
among the earliest Mobile Fidelity issues and is hard to find these days
(expect to pay up to $100 for it).
Unfortunately, Mobile Fidelity tended to kick up the mid-bass and
upper-mids in their masterings and, while this added some apparent clarity and
inner detail, it altered the true spectral balance. For example, Wayne Shorter played the tenor sax during his famous
solo on Aja, but on the MoFi, it has
more of an alto balance. Also, the
MoFis were cut at lower groove modulation and they need more volume to get the
same fullness as the original ABC issues. The Japanese issues of Steely Dan offer
superior vinyl. Their only drawback was
a sense of grain that may be a result of the studio being reluctant to send the
first-generation masters overseas. They
are worth seeking out at reasonable prices, particularly the earlier issues
because of the fine vinyl quality. The original CD issues of the Steely Dan
catalog were absolutely dreadful. Dull
and hazy, they even seemed slow, almost out of tune, compared to the vinyl
issues. The Mobile Fidelity gold discs
sounded more refined, with less bloating and better definition. But even they came up short when compared to
the LPs. Then, about two years ago, MCA
engineers discovered that all the CD issues, including the gold discs, were
made from third-generation tapes. Current new stock MCA CD issues of Steely
Dan's material is light years ahead of the prior releases. For example, Aja is much cleaner, with
layers of grunge removed. The CD is now
quite warm and not nearly as fatiguing and dull as the first CD incarnation. There is still a sense of truncation that
the digital seems to have. At the
beginning of "Black Cow" you can hear a clavinet on the right channel
with its echo over on the left. On CD,
the echo is stark, unconnected, as if it were another instrument. On LP, you can hear the true phase
relationship between right and left, source and echo, and the unified whole
flows more like real music. The newly remastered Gaucho on CD is also
quite successful, comparing very well with the LP in terms of spectral balance,
inner detail and dynamic range. Again, when
judging transparency and a sense of real musicians out there, the CD comes up
short. Nevertheless, these CDs are very
appealing and you must replace the older versions if you already own those. At music outlets that still stock long
boxes, look for CDs that have a sticker on them reading "Newly Mastered By
The Artist." Otherwise, it seems
the inner ring of the new CDs say "MFD BY JVC" in block print. Around the inner ring of the older versions
there are various numbers scrawled on by hand. Every audiophile has a handful of key records that they use to evaluate changes they've made to their system or to just show it off. One of mine has been Gaucho, serving me well for over a decade. I heartily recommend that you experience its virtues. |