There’s a well-worn meme that does the rounds, a life truth centred on the idea that the music you listened to between teens and twenties is the stuff that comes to define you in your later years. I don’t disagree with this notion at all; the same old guitar-based shit that once rattled my bedroom windows now rattles the wine glasses hanging upside down in the area at the back end of the living room that we only half-jokingly refer to as ‘the bar’ (and clogs up many of the pages in this here influential and on-point blog), but I dispute the idea that you can’t allow for a little flexibility when it comes to making way for ‘new’ old music that you’d previously have sneered at.
Which brings us to Steely Dan.
They’re there, they exist, surely, purely, to be sneered at; the sunglasses after dark, the feathered shags, the totally superior halo of recreational cocaine abuse that hovers around them like the glow in a Ready Brek advert. The flares, the platforms, the shirts unbuttoned two buttons too many, the creeping facial foliage as sculpted and considered as the tasteful sax solos they weave between the augmented chords and tickled Rhodes keys. If only for the state of the hair alone, furchrissakes! They’re a cynic’s dream they are.
Grown up on a diet of punkish three chord bluster? Do four chords in the one song make that act, in your misanthropic view, far more prog than punk? Is your favourite group’s debut album comfortably under thirty minutes long? You’ll maybe struggle somewhat with Becker and Fagen. The duo behind the ‘Dan are the very definition of the word ‘muso’. Carefully placed background vocals? Check. Subtle drum fills and percussive fancies? You betcha! Soft focus vocals, half sung, half spoken, but always in tune, and with a range that would terrify both Hall AND Oates (remind me to return to them at some point), Steely Dan records are meticulously arranged; intricate and cerebral and clever, and often, it would seem, just for the hell of it. A group that can write? And arrange? And really play? Gabba Gabba Hey, No Way!
Even on De La Soul’s say-so, I tried and failed. And tried. And failed again. They were just too clinical and clean-sounding. Later on, Super Furry Animals had me returning to Showbiz Kids on the home-made and illegally downloaded version of the ‘Dan’s Ultimate Collection that sat unloved in a folder deep in my iTunes. But ultimately, collectively, they were just (yaawwwn) too boring, baby.
But yet.
One day, some misplaced presenter on 6 Music who was clearly on the wind-up played Reelin’ In The Years. And I found myself tapping out the drums’ tasteful rhythm on the steering wheel straight from the off. As the verse (“Is this Thin Lizzy?) gave way to the super-soft vocal harmonies in the chorus (“Ah, shit, this is Steely Dan!”), I had to admit it had me. There’s a guitar break that sounds (again) like polite Thin Lizzy, another verse where Becker? Fagen? trips over his sing/talk tongue as he fits all those carefully-considered lyrics into the length of the bar before it’s too late. And – again – a Lizzy-like guitar break then (tastefully) a fade-out before the five minute mark. Steely Dan! Who knew they could be so compact and poppy and politely rockin’? Had I been driving a Mondeo, I might’ve broken out in a rash of Partridge proportions, but no. I drove on, now unsure of my stance on this old thing called Steely Dan.
And then – get this – you go home and, when you have the house to yourself, you reassess their old, familiar standard Do It Again at wine glass-rattling volume and you have to admit to yourself that it is in fact a bit of a banger, as the kids hopefully have never said.
Steely Dan – Do It Again
It’s got it all. The lazy, sun-kissed backbeat, the shimmering Fender Rhodes, some sort of sitar freakoutery, the heat haze guitars that play both fancy chords and lightning-quick solos that spark like welders’ torches in a blue collar mid-west industrial one horse town. Drop outs and build ups, a G-funk key break a good twenty years early, a gentle beast of a song snaking its way into the sunset on a bed of smug, half-paced and energy-free vocals.
Damn the ‘Dan. Are you supposed to like them? Sometimes it’s really hard not to.
Plain Or Pan 