August 21-27, 2003

music

I have something important to say about Steely Dan.

by Mike Pelusi

Yes, I am aware of the sins of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, otherwise known as Steely Dan -- the slick jazz licks, the saxophone solos, the backing vocals of one Michael McDonald. Here’s why I don’t care.

Way back when -- well, around '67, guitarist/bassist Becker and keyboardist/vocalist Fagen met as nerdy, smart-ass undergrads at Bard College. Thirty-plus years later, there's been a lot of sonic and musical refining. But, at their best, Steely Dan never grew up. Time and again -- "Reelin' in the Years," "My Old School," "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" -- Becker and Fagen bemoan the bewitching damsels that got away. Then they lick their wounds and head back to their lonely, yet comforting, brotherhood of two, consoling themselves with chess club-like fixations on jazz giants and Beat novelists.

Musically, early albums like Countdown to Ecstasy (1973) and Pretzel Logic (1974) are more immediate affairs. The musicianship is shaggier, the songwriting looser; Becker and Fagen are more eclectic than they're given credit for, with those albums' evocations of twang, AM pop, The Beatles and Dylan. "In some ways, the early, rougher ones sound better now than the later ones," Becker admitted to Mojo magazine in 1995. "Whereas at the time it seemed like we were ever rising towards the light."

Often, when looking at a rock band's oeuvre, the journey is more important than the destination. Still, "Deacon Blues" -- the centerpiece of the mega-selling, ultra-slick Aja (1977) -- is their quintessence, an ode to teen angst and self-reinvention up there with one of Bowie's. "I'll learn to work the saxophone. I'll play just what I feel," sings Fagen, once a maladjusted Passaic teen sneaking to Manhattan to catch Monk at the Five Spot. Even when he melodramatically imagines his own grisly end -- "Drink scotch whiskey all night long, and die behind the wheel" -- you still root for him. And in the end, he triumphs, if simply by realizing his ability to reincarnate: "This brother is free. I'll be what I want to be." Where's Todd Haynes to turn this into a movie?

Steely Dan has a new album out, it's worth noting, called Everything Must Go (Reprise), and it's not essential. Its charms, its hooks even, don't really reveal themselves till around the sixth or seventh listen (and don't even bother if fewer than two of those listens are with lyric sheet in hand). The main drawback is the increasing uniformity of their arrangements. Here you really do wish for the old Pretzel Logic sound -- where sleigh bells, pedal steel and acoustic guitars are game -- to counter the seemingly endless airtight rhythm sections, syncopated keyboard riffs and laid-back guitar noodlings.

Nevertheless, the fin de siècle-spirited Everything Must Go hits its intended targets more often than not, like on the title track, a slow blues sung by a remorseless Ken Lay-esque character. And there's at least one mini-masterpiece on here. It's called "Pixeleen" and it's almost certainly inspired -- perhaps a little too, um, ardently -- by Lara Croft. Fagen sounds positively over-the-moon on the chorus ("Dream deep, my three-times perfect ultrateen"). Then, the duo hands the best one-liners to backing vocalist Carolyn Leonhart ("Penned by a hack in the Palisades/ backed by some guys from Columbia"). Somehow, it doesn't deflate the central fantasy, but rounds it out, gives it more depth. Such is the warm wink of even their blackest comedies. And if Becker and Fagen for a second trusted their songs with an outside party, Timbaland could cook up a slammin' remix.

Then and now, the ambiguities and the carefully controlled lyrical shifts in mood throw the finely polished grooves into sharp relief. That is, if you can get past, if not appreciate, the finely polished grooves. "I grew up in a faux-luxe household, and it was a very alienating world," Fagen says in the same Mojo piece. "Muzak is supposed to relax you, but it makes me very anxious. So in a way, I think I get it out of me by putting some of it in my songs." Steely Dan will always be an acquired taste. So if you can't say something nice, say it somewhere else. As they once sang, drink your big black cow and get out of here.

Steely Dan plays Sat., Aug. 23, 8 p.m., $10-$75, Tweeter Center, Mickle Blvd. and Riverside Dr., Camden, N.J., 215-336-2000.