Steely Dan: "Steely Dan's name has been popping up as a hip musical crush. Remember, this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock's stone-throwing in the late 70's. People fought

Hey Susan, show some respect for the Seward pater familias!

I really should like Steely Dan - there's something willfully perverse about their focus on aesthetics at the expense of, well, everything. I have to assume two well-read fellas like Fagan & Becker were making a Huysmans reference in titling an album Two Against Nature. Such madness I would normally find endearing.

The PopMatters article hints that they sowed the seeds of their disfranchisement by blazing a path for the likes of Mangione, et al. While I can't blame any artist for the sins of their progeny, is Steely Dan's sound merely dated?

Are there any covers of Steely Dan songs - preferably acoustic solo performances - that anyone can recommend? I suspect my trouble with their stuff is embedded in the music itself (I find the chord progression of the chorus in "Everyone's Gone To The Movies" irritating), but a different take on the material might give me some perspective?

js, I take back what I said about you writing the dumbest thing I've ever read here.

It may have been mentioned already, but the Minutemen do a fine "Doctor Wu."

the minutemen one and the Mountain Goats track i mentioned are good, tho.

It's not a strawman, and it mostly came from returning to the board after a brief break and reading the Beatles unreleased materials thing. But I was already thinking about the irony of the way people still defend SD here with an air of going against the grain somehow. (Maybe that's a strawman, but it is my impression.)

re: covers. Good point, Alfred, I love The Minutemen's "Dr. Wu" - just wondering if others have had similar luck. Is it striking anyone as ironic that the two bands noted for covering Steely Dan are indie bands?

I certainly don't find fault with folks who don't enjoy SD. I can honestly see how someone who Loves Music might find it offensive - be it personal associations, Fagens's voice, antiseptic musicianship, or SD's perceived cynicism (which I think may be often overstated). Of course, these are some of the very reasons I love 'em. Go figure...

I'm kinda surprised Pitchfork excluded Steely Dan from their Best of the 70s list, honestly.

look for them in two years when they "reassess" that 70's list.

Point is: Did anyone else think the description, "Glass guitar and percussion clink along steadily like a chorus of jangling Tag Heuers, automatic Lexus locks, popping Le Croix cans, clicking laptop covers, crystal Cristal toasts, and smacking Hollywood cheek-kisses" made it sound really, really awesome? A chorus of jangling Tag Heuers sounds like the absolute shit.

Madly OTM. And I don't see many people defending Steely Dan because they think it's a subversive thing to do. It's just one of my favorite bands ever. I can only speak for myself.

Mine changes frequently, but right now its probably Brian Jonestown Massacre or Spiritualized or Meat Puppets. Never Steely Dan.

I don't think it's terribly surprising. There is no way they could sell Steely Dan to their audience without switching up the rest of their game.

Suspicious? Hell, why? None of this rock stuff lasts that long for me. It is an amusing bauble. A shiny diadem. I look for no great menaing in it, becuase it is almost all treacly poetry wrapped in candyfloss.

I AM a jazz douchebag. I wake up listening to Lee Morgan and go to bed listening to Cecil Taylor. I have to stifle a yawn or a chuckle when in some thread about the supposed importance of some rawk gawd someone said that creativity in jazz ended when Miles left the scene in 1975. Steely Dan is pleasant. It's lightweight. In six months time, I'll think the same about BJM.

My point was that most jazz douchebags would be loathe to proclaim a love for Steely Dan unless their love for jazz was firmly rooted in Bob James and Grover Washington, Jr. Both nice guys, really, but Steely Dan is to rock as Eric Gale is to Jazz. Pleasant. Cheery. Nonconfrontational.

Has nothing to do with whether I'm suspicious of BJM. WTF is that supposed to mean???

No. It was the Platonic ILM hip-hop thread where that contention took place. Sorry. Not rawk gawd, hip-hop hop head.

I love Joe Jackson, and he loves Steely Dan! i saw him live in 2003, and he commented on some fan who was in front writing down the set list, "i've only written down the set list for one band ever, and that was steely dan in 1994". then he did 'any major dude'. great.

Your mother was an accomplished singer. Did you ever see her perform?

She stopped performing when she got married. From when she was five, she performed at a hotel in the Catskills -- she was like the Jewish Shirley Temple. But she'd sing around the house all the time, like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night."

As a child you'd take a bus to New York, and sometimes miss the bus home, to see jazz gigs.

When I was thirteen, I'd come into the city, and Max Gordon, who owned the Village Vanguard, would put me in the banquette near the drums and give me Cokes. Sometimes I'd stay for two shows -- I'd get to Port Authority and miss the last bus and have to sleep in the station.

Did one of those shows at the Vanguard change your life?

Charlie Mingus. Not only was he musical, he was cultural and political. And he was crazy -- manic-depressive, really. One night in '62 or '63, Coleman Hawkins opened for him, so Charlie comes onstage in a terrible mood and went on a rant about record companies cheating musicians. Hawkins had retired to the bar in the back and proceeded to get drunk, and Mingus started letting into him: "Yeah! That's it, Coleman Hawkins. You Uncle Tom motherfucker! You been workin' for whitey your whole life, makin' that money, and you don't say a word. . . ." I'd just come in from the suburbs, so that was quite an education in the real world [laughs]. In Mingus' reality, at least.

Without Armstrong's innovation, unquenchable optimism, fearlessness and outright virtuosic brilliance, no Sidney Poitier, no Coltrane, no Bird, and no Martin Luther King. Research the rise of black cultural and political consciousness in America. The legitimacy, and the support of black culture all starts with him.

Jazz is not just Bop. Becker and Fagen were far more influenced by Ellington and Armstrong in terms of composition and knew that the reason bop and progressive Jazz had primarily died by 1970 was because Bop compositions could not ever reach a manistream audience. They deeply appreciated the innovation and virtuosity of people like Mingus, but knew that following that path meant you were playing in small clubs for ten other musicians in the East Village. Romantically tragic sacrifice for music, no doubt. But why not try and reach the masses while retaining some level of musical excellence?

Anyone who wants knock Armstrong, or Ellington's band in favour of Bop shoots themselves in the foot because all of the first Bop musicians learned how to play in highly regimented, big bands in the 30's and 40's. Those that came later like Mingus and Taylor reacted against the big band psychology of playing to white tastes, possibly a valid point socially, but utterly ridiculous musically. All the language they tried to re-work was based big band Jazz! They didn't invent a new language until they had completely exhausted twisting and morphing classic jazz tunes.

Getting back to Steely, they are not JAZZ or POP. They are Rock' n' Roll. What the hell was "pop" on the charts in 1973? David Cassidy,
Neil Sedaka and Bread! How is "Do It Again" remotely similar to "Crocodile Rock"? If someone out there understands harmonic theory, please chart the Steely Dan chords, syncopated rhythms and then conversely chart any top 10 song from 1973 and show me how Steely Dan isn't quite innovative. Also please note that the lyrics in "Do it Again" are probably one of the best and most subtle descriptions of obsessive addiction. The criticsim that their job was easy because they flew in all the best musicians in the country to make albums is absolutey retarded. Does anyone understand that this was the first time it ever happened? It is also the ultimate sublimation of Becker and Fagen's egoes. As a professional musician who today (or then) has the balls to say that any composition of theirs warrants a dozen killer studio musicians play on it? The only way to convince a record company to cover this expense is a guarantee of chart success. My previous band recorded an album with Greg Leskiw, who was also a huge Jazz fan. Greg replaced Randy Bachman in the Guess Who only weeks after "American Woman" hit #1. After he left the Guess Who in 1973, he formed his own very progressive project called Mood Jga Jga. While they were recording their first album, he got to know Jeff Porcaro who was doing some of the drums on "Countdown to Ecstasy" by Steely. The stories Porcaro told Leskiw about Becker and Fagen's relentless pursuit of perfection in terms of meter, groove and sound, intimidated everyone and put Porcaro at his wits end. Not because of their tyranny (which is a myth), but because of the level of perfection expected in every aspect of the production. It was completely unheard of.

This is the genius of Becker and Fagen. They are one of the only bands ever to take on sophisticated (for Rock) harmonic and lyrical ideas and make them chart toppers. Why these studio musicians played some of their best performances on these albums is because they respected the music as well as Becker and Fagen. The studio smoothness is unparalleled (and had to be to communicate the multi-instrumentation) until the digital recording revolution. Becker and Fagen were first and foremost STUDENTS of music - not of celebrity. Most Rock and Pop Stars are "perfomers" (entertainers/celebrities) first and musicians second. B & F were in love with music to the extent that they devoted all energy to creating the perfect sound. To do this they had to maneuver a way to remove limitations created by the industry. If someone finds this music too smooth, then spend ten bucks and get the CD reissue of "Gold" which features a live version of "Bodhisattva". How is that song not capturing very similar energy to what Punk has so dearly hung its existence on?

As for the punks in the late-70's reacting to Steely or Led Zeppelin so radically, the explanations is quite simple. The majority of them were moronic, untrained reactionaries - not musicians. They would had to spend years learning how to compose and play like Steely. It was much easier to spike your hair, spit on the Queen, and swear on the BBC, than it was to learn how to play. Punk rock did nothing that added to music vocabulary, Gen-X, Sex Pistols, Siouxsie, Black Flag, were all pale rip offs of the original "garage" sound created by The Stooges, MC-5 and the Seeds. Until Bad Religion, the whole movement was a teenage masturbation fest against authority.

The proof of this is when you listen to PiL or Idol's "Whiplash Smile". Funny, both projects feature virtuosic guitarsits and compositions that veered very far from their fundamentalist punk roots... I'll let someone else dissect the hypocrisy of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones....