I use Apple Music and iTunes, mainly because I prefer, nay insist, to change the meta data on the tracks to how I would sort them. So I correct album titles, remove unneeded parenthesees, switch up the years (though that’s a chore) and also change genres to what makes sense in my head, instead of what Apple Music or whoever said when they were uploading the song.
For Steely Dan, I chose jazz rock. I mean, I don’t know what else to call them. They’re rock, in a sense, but not like 70’s rockers we know. They’re not fusion, nor pop. So, fuck, I just chose jazz rock even though they really don’t have any improvisation in their songs. They were a group, but just two guys, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan, but not really a duo either in any sense of the word. They are their own genre.
And they are their own animal. Discounting their two comeback albums (which were OK but didn’t have the same cache as their 70’s stuff and Donald Fagan’s lascivious sexual songs are way more creepier in his 60’s than they were in 1975), their output was noted from the jump for pristine production and perfectionism without sacrificing the hooks and melodies of the songs they grew up with in the 60’s.
Their background also influences their craft as well. Erudite college boys from Bard who fell in with Jay & the Americans (of all people) and wound up with a songwriting contract that blossomed into the opportunity to form a band, they took all that they learned from early rock-and-roll, soul, and jazz and threw it all together in their songs.
Listening to the first cut on their debut record (“Do It Again”), and then to the last cut on Gaucho, there’s no doubt that they had the vision from the beginning, and that every song was going to be crafted and shaped to near perfection. (Becker and Fagan never thought they released a perfect album no matter how hard they tried).
So with the release of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, a look at the characters that inhabit Steely Dan songs from the well-known to the obscure (including references to Mr. Steely Dan), I wanted to highlight their second album, the album that was their lowest charting album, the album that had their two lowest charting singles of the original albums, and the album that only went Gold from their original albums. Still, it’s their best album and I’ll fight you to the death - or whatever Donald Fagan deems appropriate.
It’s time to look at Countdown to Ecstacy.
While the hits collections have peeled off a few cuts from their second album, and “My Old School” is now a ‘classic’, this album didn’t do well in the charts (#35) and the singles (the aforemented “My Old School” and “Show Bix Kids” topped out in the high sixties) didn’t hit the radio, the eight cuts on this album are a definitivie statement of Steely Dan. The characters are all studies from the life of Becker and Fagan, and the band is solid and on point, with only Rick Derringer as a hired gun on one song. This is my favorite album of theirs, with my two favorite Steely Dan songs - “The Boston Rag” and “Your Gold Teeth”. There are live cuts of them playing those songs at a radio station in 1973 and 1974 and it shows that the band could replicate these complex songs into something special live. It was the only album Becker and Fagan constructed for their band, and it shows. The guitar sounds of Baxter and Dias are clean and dirty, smooth and jagged, especially in “The Boston Rag”. Play this back to front to back to front and you hear new things everytime you play it.
One track that sticks in your head is “Bodhisattva”. (Don’t ask me how many times I tried to spell that). It’s got a swing, which is suprising until you realize that they loved jazz (and you haven’t heard their third album yet). It’s got great guitar work from Skunk Baxter and Denny Dias, including a guitar solo that sounds like it’s going to end, and then goes for another 16 bars.
“Pearl of the Quarter” is about as sentimental as Fagan and Becker get. Baxter plays a evocative pedal steel, Fagan sings as tenderly as he can, and during the song he goes from “saying hello” to professing his love for her. It’s miles away from the characters that inhabit some of his later songs, (or earlier as in “Do It Again”).
Of all the tracks on the album, the one song that lacks a little is the closer, “King of the World”, and what it’s lacking is a bigger Steely Dan production. They did bring in back up vocalists, but what it’s missing to my ears is a big ol’ dose of Michael McDonald singing backups there. He’d join the band on their final tour and then you can hear him all over Katy Lied.
I think this album works on all levels, and a reason for that is that Fagan and Becker claimed they wrote it for the band they had at the time. They took advantage of Dias and Baxter, and kept the rhythms in Jim Hodder’s wheelhouse on drums. They may have felt limited, as with Pretzel Logic they really expanded themselves and started their version of an all-star session band. But this is the record that I reach for more often than not for a Steely Dan fix.