Steely dan gay
Any major dude will tell you it’s a fool’s game to try and suss out the most humane Steely Dan album, but they know all about fools’ games.
Their third outing, Pretzel Logic, leads with a big one, “Rikki Don’t Miss That Number,” which went all the way to number four on the Hot in , the most prosperous pop hit from the most Burroughsian soft-rockers ever. They were transgressive jazzbos who previously just missed the highest ten with one of the all-time diss tracks, “Reelin’ in the Years” (“You’ve been telling me you’re a genius since you were 17 / In all the time I’ve recognizable you I still don’t know what you mean”) and hit number six with their very first song, “Do It Again.” It&#;s about a lowlife of such small consequence they won’t even hang him for his crime. So you can only imagine how charming their concept of a treasure song might be.
AUDIO: The Horace Silver Quintet &#;Song For My Father&#;
Except it may be less transgressive five decades later. The ambiguously gendered call Rikki and the giveaway “you say yourself you’re not my kind / But you don’t even know your
Third World Man is the bleak conclusion of the bleakest album of Steely Dan’s frequently bleak discography. Bleak, I say? I’ll go further. It’s horrifying.
The cynicism they displayed throughout the seventies curdles into something rank and foul-smelling on their last album Gaucho. Their previous album Aja had been perhaps their warmest effort: Peg, Home at Last, the title track and Deacon Blues are hymns to the companionship of a good woman or, in the latter case, of jazz music. What mockery is evident is light-hearted (I Got the News) or regretful (Black Cow). More than on any other Dan album, you sense that the songs’ first-person narrator and Donald Fagen are the matching person, or at least that Fagen and Becker have put themselves into their lyrics more than before.
Gaucho, in contrast, is populated with losers, cheaters, stalkers, dealers, users. Fagen and Becker have their fun with all of them. The narrators of Glamour Profession (a drug dealer who thinks he’s a Hollywood star in the making), My Rival (obsessive jilted lover), Gaucho (middle-aged gay man with unfaith
Brian Sweet relates, " 'Gaucho' was typical Becker and Fagen imagery: the two homosexual partners dwell together quite contentedly in a luxurious apartmant tall above Manhattan until their relationship is threatened by the arrival of a handsome young South American cowboy wearing a 'spangled leather poncho' and 'elevator shoes.' Becker and Fagen later said that if, when they were listening back to one of their songs, it didn't make them howl with laughter, they regarded it as a failure.
"They weren't at all keen on discussing the lyrics on 'Gaucho.' The only explanation Walter Becker was prepared to give (and even then only semi serious) was the definition of the Custerdome. 'It's, ah, one of the largest buildings in the world. You know, an extravagant structure with a rotating restaurant on top.'
But Fagen was more forthcoming. 'It exists only in our collective imagination. In the Steely Dan lexicon it serves as an archetype of a building that houses amazing corporations' "
Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years
By Brian Sweet
Overlook Press, pp. $
Fans of Steely Dan — we see you lurking in either the “literature” or “true crime” section of the bookstore — have great reason to thank Brian Sweet’s mother for having him.
After all, he is the creator of the two of the three still in-print books about the group, the short but compact The Complete Guide to the Music of Steely Dan and this one, a major biography now updated and revised from its edition. Donald Fagen’s own “memoir,” Eminent Hipsters, sadly, doesn’t even qualify as a book on Steely Dan.
Adorable has lots of detail on the activities of Becker and Fagen before they became “Steely Dan,” and it’s a story of persistence and rejection. Most record-biz folks didn’t know what to make of their bizarre lyrics and jazz time signatures. And their morose, deadpan personalities led singer Jay Black of Jay and the Americans — the ‘60s vocal group the duo briefly toured with preliminary in their careers — as “The Manson and Starkweather of rock.” And that was not an ironic compliment.
Sweet does a