Polled At Last: STEELY DAN - ILM Artist poll #50

old people who like to watch young people dance

http://capegazette.villagesoup.com/media/Common/11/EA/780855/t600-cupcake.jpg
happy ONE year anniversary poll.

Put the lock upon the door.

i have a very good memory of an aimless saturday evening last april where i had no plans and was trying to save $$ due to an upcoming vacation, and so i ended up going on a 7 or 8 mile solo beer crawl in a snowstorm, stopping for one cheap beer at every dive i passed, listening to this poll's spotify playlist on my headphones the whole time

Finished a two-hour long (!) podcast with sw00ds and Vic Perry on Gaucho last night. We hope to link soon.

awesome! can't wait!

sweet

Don't ever change, Index of /files/mp3 directory search:

http://i.imgur.com/xTTor3f.png

we're still havin' fun, and you're still reelin' in the years,
won't you let me help you find the door?

man the most awesomely cynical thing the dan could have done would have been to open their coachella set with "takin it to the streets" or something.

like if the replacements began a festival gig with "hey jealousy"

That would be so awesome. Back in the free-for-all file sharing days I recall regularly coming across "Play That Funky Music White Boy" by, wait for it...... Funkadelic. Uh huh.

i almost feel like there's a thread where we listed some examples of artists covering songs many already assumed they sang - big examples are rod stewart's "ooh la la" and billy idol's "don't you forget about me"

Was wondering as I posted whether P-Funk ever did a version of "Play that funky music" -- my sense was that it was as unlikely as say Ishmael Reed writing an episode of Mork & Mindy, but maybe not quite as unlikely as that.

I recall regularly coming across "Play That Funky Music White Boy" by, wait for it...... Funkadelic

who says a funk band can't play funky white boy music?

Sly & The Family Stone "Don't Play It Funky, White Boy (Don't Play It White Boy, Funky)"

misattributed songs in Napster, AudioGalaxy, etc.

and lol @ SD kicking off with Takin' It to the Streets

There were many more on that list, but nothing worth a revival:

Air Supply - All By Myself.MP3
Blood Sweat & Tears - Does Anybody Really Know What Time It.mp3
Bob Dylan - Stuck In The Middle With You.mp3
Bob Segar - Your Momma Don't Dance & Your Daddy Don't R & R.mp3
Donna Summer - I Will Survive.mp3
Donna Summer - I'm So Excited.MP3

etc

Each time I post one of those though, I worry I'm falling into that trap of "Well yeah, but you see, the Beach Boys did cover California Dreamin' on one of their greatest hits collections…"

Paul McCartney - Hey Jude

Hall & Oats - Baby Come Back.mp3
Hall & Oats - Every Time You Go Away.mp3

Kinda weird - several album openers missing from Spotify:

"Bodhisattva", Countdown to Ecstasy.
"Black Friday", "Bad Sneakers", Katy Lied.
"Kid Charlemagne", The Royal Scam.

Everything else looks in place - "Babylon Sisters", "Black Cow", "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" - just not those four?

are those songs available on a greatest hits comp? I've noticed on Spotify that sometimes singles are missing from albums but available on comps

Going to the show tomorrow! Elvis C opening, alas.

are those songs available on a greatest hits comp?

Omitted there too -- and "FM".

I saw them 2 weeks ago in NJ. I hope you like band introductions.

did walter do the long monologue in the middle of hey nineteen

several album openers missing from Spotify

strange. all fully available in both apple music and rhapsody.

They've kinda sucked the last 2 times I've seen em

how was it different from earlier shows

I'm seeing a few missing songs too, and it's weird because it's not like it's *the hits* and it's not every album that has songs missing.

Weaker set lists. Less enthusiasm. Less stage banter.

xpost are those tracks present in the Citizen Steely Dan box?

Xpost: Walter did the Hey nineteen speech. There was a ton of banter and they introduced the 14 piece band multiple times. Musicians were excellent but somehow the whole did not equal the sum of its parts. With that said, Reelin I'm Th Years was fantastic. The extra long Aja was rough.

Hey Nineteen speech will be delivered by an animatronic Becker at the end of Steely Dan: The Ride

but maybe he also says your name like E.T.

they were excellent last Wednesday night.

http://i.imgur.com/KcFRDMV.jpg

awes

wsj article on the making of deacon blues: http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-steely-dan-created-deacon-blues-1441727645

hah, Oliver Nelson! I had "DB" come up on shuffle right next to "Stolen Moments" the other day....

That Wall St Journal article is so good. I could listen to Walter Becker all day. What I wouldn't give to have that kind of treatment of the whole corpus!

Apropos of nothing, I just found this quote on the Wikipedia page for Bitches Brew and feel like it reinforces the side of Dan I like the least:

Donald Fagen, co-founder of Steely Dan, called the album "essentially just a big trash-out for Miles" in 2007: "To me it was just silly, and out of tune, and bad. I couldn't listen to it. It sounded like Davis was trying for a funk record, and just picked the wrong guys. They didn't understand how to play funk. They weren't steady enough."

he's wrong, but i guess i can appreciate the iconoclasm

i have to say that love steely dan, but for all their vaunted love of jazz, their music strikes me as antithetical to a major component of postwar jazz, in that every lick feels locked in place. it's very dense and accomplished pop music, but the jazz influence is present largely in instrumental color IMO.

maybe fagen would agree tho

Good points. It's crazy how Fagen kind of sounds almost identical to the sanctimonious "insult to the intellect of the people"-type criticisms Miles received from 1969-73 from critics and biographers like Ian Carr and Jack Chambers – people with this rigidly romanticized, oh-so-precious view of what jazz was supposed to be.

I think this may be why I've never liked "Deacon Blues" at all.

It's not too surprising to me that Fagen is not the type of jazz fan who would appreciate fusion-period Miles. There were plenty of jazz fans who didn't, mostly of a more trad bent. In that quote Fagen kind of echoes Stanley Crouch, who called Bitches Brew "static beats and clutter".

Cool jazz / hard bop era is the last jazz period Becker & Fagen like. Super cranky interview with them in Musician in 1980 where they go on about how Ornette Coleman is retrograde.
And R&B peaks with Ray Charles, according to Fagen in Eminent Hipsters ..... where Fagen also admits his tastes did not develop in pretty much anything beyond his youthful obsessions.

Steely Dan a prime example of great artist with narrow - positively reactionary - tastes.

what's jarring is how their avowed tastes are largely not reflected in their music