Steely Dan: "Steely Dan's name has been popping up as a hip musical crush. Remember, this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock's stone-throwing in the late 70's. People fought

No. It was the Platonic ILM hip-hop thread where that contention took place. Sorry. Not rawk gawd, hip-hop hop head.

I love Joe Jackson, and he loves Steely Dan! i saw him live in 2003, and he commented on some fan who was in front writing down the set list, "i've only written down the set list for one band ever, and that was steely dan in 1994". then he did 'any major dude'. great.

Your mother was an accomplished singer. Did you ever see her perform?

She stopped performing when she got married. From when she was five, she performed at a hotel in the Catskills -- she was like the Jewish Shirley Temple. But she'd sing around the house all the time, like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night."

As a child you'd take a bus to New York, and sometimes miss the bus home, to see jazz gigs.

When I was thirteen, I'd come into the city, and Max Gordon, who owned the Village Vanguard, would put me in the banquette near the drums and give me Cokes. Sometimes I'd stay for two shows -- I'd get to Port Authority and miss the last bus and have to sleep in the station.

Did one of those shows at the Vanguard change your life?

Charlie Mingus. Not only was he musical, he was cultural and political. And he was crazy -- manic-depressive, really. One night in '62 or '63, Coleman Hawkins opened for him, so Charlie comes onstage in a terrible mood and went on a rant about record companies cheating musicians. Hawkins had retired to the bar in the back and proceeded to get drunk, and Mingus started letting into him: "Yeah! That's it, Coleman Hawkins. You Uncle Tom motherfucker! You been workin' for whitey your whole life, makin' that money, and you don't say a word. . . ." I'd just come in from the suburbs, so that was quite an education in the real world [laughs]. In Mingus' reality, at least.

Without Armstrong's innovation, unquenchable optimism, fearlessness and outright virtuosic brilliance, no Sidney Poitier, no Coltrane, no Bird, and no Martin Luther King. Research the rise of black cultural and political consciousness in America. The legitimacy, and the support of black culture all starts with him.

Jazz is not just Bop. Becker and Fagen were far more influenced by Ellington and Armstrong in terms of composition and knew that the reason bop and progressive Jazz had primarily died by 1970 was because Bop compositions could not ever reach a manistream audience. They deeply appreciated the innovation and virtuosity of people like Mingus, but knew that following that path meant you were playing in small clubs for ten other musicians in the East Village. Romantically tragic sacrifice for music, no doubt. But why not try and reach the masses while retaining some level of musical excellence?

Anyone who wants knock Armstrong, or Ellington's band in favour of Bop shoots themselves in the foot because all of the first Bop musicians learned how to play in highly regimented, big bands in the 30's and 40's. Those that came later like Mingus and Taylor reacted against the big band psychology of playing to white tastes, possibly a valid point socially, but utterly ridiculous musically. All the language they tried to re-work was based big band Jazz! They didn't invent a new language until they had completely exhausted twisting and morphing classic jazz tunes.

Getting back to Steely, they are not JAZZ or POP. They are Rock' n' Roll. What the hell was "pop" on the charts in 1973? David Cassidy,
Neil Sedaka and Bread! How is "Do It Again" remotely similar to "Crocodile Rock"? If someone out there understands harmonic theory, please chart the Steely Dan chords, syncopated rhythms and then conversely chart any top 10 song from 1973 and show me how Steely Dan isn't quite innovative. Also please note that the lyrics in "Do it Again" are probably one of the best and most subtle descriptions of obsessive addiction. The criticsim that their job was easy because they flew in all the best musicians in the country to make albums is absolutey retarded. Does anyone understand that this was the first time it ever happened? It is also the ultimate sublimation of Becker and Fagen's egoes. As a professional musician who today (or then) has the balls to say that any composition of theirs warrants a dozen killer studio musicians play on it? The only way to convince a record company to cover this expense is a guarantee of chart success. My previous band recorded an album with Greg Leskiw, who was also a huge Jazz fan. Greg replaced Randy Bachman in the Guess Who only weeks after "American Woman" hit #1. After he left the Guess Who in 1973, he formed his own very progressive project called Mood Jga Jga. While they were recording their first album, he got to know Jeff Porcaro who was doing some of the drums on "Countdown to Ecstasy" by Steely. The stories Porcaro told Leskiw about Becker and Fagen's relentless pursuit of perfection in terms of meter, groove and sound, intimidated everyone and put Porcaro at his wits end. Not because of their tyranny (which is a myth), but because of the level of perfection expected in every aspect of the production. It was completely unheard of.

This is the genius of Becker and Fagen. They are one of the only bands ever to take on sophisticated (for Rock) harmonic and lyrical ideas and make them chart toppers. Why these studio musicians played some of their best performances on these albums is because they respected the music as well as Becker and Fagen. The studio smoothness is unparalleled (and had to be to communicate the multi-instrumentation) until the digital recording revolution. Becker and Fagen were first and foremost STUDENTS of music - not of celebrity. Most Rock and Pop Stars are "perfomers" (entertainers/celebrities) first and musicians second. B & F were in love with music to the extent that they devoted all energy to creating the perfect sound. To do this they had to maneuver a way to remove limitations created by the industry. If someone finds this music too smooth, then spend ten bucks and get the CD reissue of "Gold" which features a live version of "Bodhisattva". How is that song not capturing very similar energy to what Punk has so dearly hung its existence on?

As for the punks in the late-70's reacting to Steely or Led Zeppelin so radically, the explanations is quite simple. The majority of them were moronic, untrained reactionaries - not musicians. They would had to spend years learning how to compose and play like Steely. It was much easier to spike your hair, spit on the Queen, and swear on the BBC, than it was to learn how to play. Punk rock did nothing that added to music vocabulary, Gen-X, Sex Pistols, Siouxsie, Black Flag, were all pale rip offs of the original "garage" sound created by The Stooges, MC-5 and the Seeds. Until Bad Religion, the whole movement was a teenage masturbation fest against authority.

The proof of this is when you listen to PiL or Idol's "Whiplash Smile". Funny, both projects feature virtuosic guitarsits and compositions that veered very far from their fundamentalist punk roots... I'll let someone else dissect the hypocrisy of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones....

moronic - some, imagine that in pop/rock music
untrained - yeah, but so??
reactionaries - highly debatable
not musicians - subjective overstatement at best, virtuosity not necessary to create music, see several thousand years of folk music.

Moronic: Have you seen the Sex Pistols when they were on BBC for the first time? If that isn't mornic than I don't know what is. Rock and Pop maybe be bastions of moronicism in general, but Steely as well as many Motown artists are not.

How is reactionary debatable?! When you react against something - ie. 70's rock complexities and indulgences by taking something and mocking it or attacking it, then you have a reactionary. Creating something new for the sake of innovation and love is very different.

And I didn't say they weren't musicians, I said they were celebrity-driven first, musicians second. If you can argue that Malcolm Mclaren didn't create the Sex Pistols as a fashion statement designed to attract media attention - then I don't know what 70's you grew up in.

O RLY? THEN WHAT?

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In almost all cultures, music is sacred. It is a great responsibility to play it and communicate the ideas and feelings from a deep inner source that cannot be translated in any other way.

Think of it like this, many christians around the world were horrified when Bush said he walked around the White House lawn and thought about whether he should invade Iraq. He said that his answer came when God told him this was the right thing to do. Okay, not even the pope claims to speak for God. He is merely an emissary who has the final say on interpreting scripture. The outrage that musicians feel when music is paraded as "art" by fools in make-up who rehash the rehashed and who are merely marketing tools of "The Man", is similar (in a less serious sense of course - people don't die from music) to the way a christian would take Bush's blasphemous and delusional comments. One of the main foundations of over three-thousand years of Jadeo-Christian culture is the Ten Commandments. #1 was - Thou Shalt Not Kill. Okay, so taking Bush's comments into context you can come to one of three conclusions if we are to believe that the Commandments have any integrity.

1. God told Moses "Thou Shalt Not Kill". 3600 years later he has changed is mind.

2. Moses was deluded, Bush is actually the greatest prophet of all time.

3. Bush is a deluded moron who is utterly faithless and ignorant.

Now because of this ignorance, 10's of thousands of civilians get their houses blown up and their children killed by rockets. It's an extreme example, I know, but as mentioned above, if we all treated music as sacred, then a few people might actually begin to treat human life as sacred...

I thought this thread was full of Jeff Beck fans! Ooops. Stumbled into the Punk Rock firing lines again!

I am sorry if I offended anyone. I thought that what punk rock stood for was dialogue. Freedome of speech. If the thread has to be closed because I crossed the line, then I think that that's censorship. The guy from Bad Religion was willing to keep it open, and I don't think that there is a better speokesman for punk rock than him.

More like, a couple chapters in the Bible later.

It sounds like you need a hug and a drum circle.

I think they (Steely Dan) are another victim of classic rock radio's tendency to over-play certain songs.

This is exactly it for me, at least with the radio station I listened to growing up. They played the same "hits" over and over and over again and I just learned to cringe every time I heard them, no matter how cool I thought it was that they were named after a sex toy. Although: I did love "Hey Nineteen" when it came out, but I'm still not sure if that was the song itself or my adolescent whatnot reacting to the fabulousness of the Solid Gold dancers uh "interpreting" it every week while it was still on the charts.

Maybe I'll come around to the band some day, but it's going to take a lot of time and possibly some therapy.

-- Sean Carruthers (oneiro...) (webmail), February 13th, 2004 5:08 PM. (SeanC) (link)

Anyhow, OTM