Tag: Steely Dan

Pazz and Jop 1974 #2

Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic

The word that always comes to mind when I listen to Steely Dan is “lush”. The music is complex and perfectly played, the lyrics clever and insightful. Listening, you can’t help but feel a bit more elevated than with the usual pop, with all its messy emotion and histrionics. It can feel downright extravagant to allow yourself to wallow in these songs. It’s music for a concert hall, not a bar or repurposed hockey arena or ballpark.

Yet, for all the richness, it somehow manages to be understated at the same time. Donald Fagen never once seems caught up in what he’s singing about – he is simply the reporter of others’ misadventures, calmly giving you the details. Is it wrong to want something else from them? I know Steely Dan isn’t that kind of band – and I love them for it – but can anything so absent of danger properly be considered rock ‘n’ roll? They seem more of a jazz ensemble playing within the pop idiom, which sounds great, but without the unpredictability that can make jazz so exciting to listen to, there is nothing here to get the heart racing.

To an untrained ear, which definitely includes my pair, it all sort of sounds the same – other than the hits, with their built-in goodwill, very little jumps out and makes you take notice. The band definitely play with genre – the mild salsa feel early in “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”, the funky guitar of “Night by Night”, the bluesy beat of “Pretzel Logic”, the rollicking hillbilly vibe of “With A Gun” (my favourite song on the record) – but it almost always ends up sublimated to the Steely Dan sound. The one strong exception is the goofy old timey feel of “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”, which would benefit from being a bit ragged – perfectly played, it has a sort of pointless wonderment to it.

In the end, for all its beauty, I felt unmoved by the seemingly effortless cool of “Pretzel Logic”. It is high end background music, the perfect accompaniment to an afternoon spent doing the laundry, or for when you’re stuck waiting to see a doctor and the magazines are all out of date. Certainly not what the band was aiming for, but worthy nonetheless – we all have unavoidable tasks to get through and they are made more palatable by a pleasing soundtrack.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1972 – #14

Steely Dan – Can’t Buy A Thrill

Steely Dan are, apparently, having a moment, which is excellent news. I’ve always enjoyed their music, though this is yet another band that I listened to passively. And they’ve been pretty much unavoidable throughout my listening life: lots of acts have three (or more) hits off their first album, but not so many have three songs that are iconic. “Do It Again” (sort of a Latin feel), “Dirty Work” (very melancholic) and “Reelin’ in the Years” (great guitar riffs) are classics of 1970s FM radio (and the band’s three most streamed tracks on Spotify). So, it made sense that when a film called “FM” came out in 1978, Steely Dan were recruited to deliver the theme song. I had this double album on vinyl, for reasons I can’t even slightly recall (maybe to fill out my introductory Columbia House selections), but it’s a great record that included my first introduction to Tom Petty. (Mostly great – who, even in 1978, needed back-to-back cover versions from Linda Ronstadt?) It isn’t available on Spotify, but it took me less than 5 minutes to create a playlist, populated as it was with hit after hit after hit.

Everything about Steely Dan radiates cool. It’s easy to be lulled into thinking it all sounds very similar, because the band definitely leans into a smooth jazz vibe on pretty much every track. I’ve never thought of these guys as making danceable music, but maybe that’s because we dance very differently in our 50s as compared to younger years. Dancing now is sort of embarrassing: head bobbing, jaw clenched, silly faced, arms chugging, switching from hip to hip. (Not that the flailing around of our youth was any less horrible to observe.) My cats look at me with confused eyes. There were lots of tracks here that brought that out in me, which was (thankfully) within the safety of my home. Of the unfamiliar tracks, I especially liked “Only A Fool Would Say That” and “Fire in the Hole”. “Change of the Guard” is one of the poppier things I’ve heard from them. I’ve been returning to this record again and again since the first listen, taking enormous comfort in the familiar rhythms. All in all, not too shabby for a band named after a steam-powered dildo.

(Originally posted on Facebook, August 2, 2021)