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

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

I mean apart from East St. Louis Toodle-oo and more subliminal stuff like chord voicings and having tight horn arrangements, their music bears zero resemblance to hard bop or ray charles or whatever

I think of their version of East St. L T. as a "nice gesture" - Duke was dying that year. Musically it's a travesty, a Disneyfication. Both the 20s and 30s versions by Duke are weird, spooky records that still sound alive. I've said this before, but the enshrinement of Duke Ellington as Cultural Institution means a lot of people miss a lot of wild sonic kicks thinking they are visiting a monument or something.

I think what worked for Steely Dan was that they did rock and pop with extra confidence, out of a sense they were in on something harder that they were not worthy of, but could compensate with pop music that was comparatively complicated.

This attitude has also produced some of the most awful crap from nearly anybody else who has it ---- all those classically trained idiots who think pop music is easy until they embarrass themselves. (name your own examples).

pplains is going to be my co-poll runner for Talking Heads. Bumping this tread to look again at what he did for us before. I also think he did Sonic Youth?

Aw, too much of a bourgeois ILXor for SY.

Along with this one, I've done Gotta Make Polls for the Polls I Make - ILM HUSKER DU POLL RESULTS and Deez POLLABLE Heroes - THE ILM //METALLICA\ POLL RESULTS

This one, by far - and so far, has been my favorite. Gotta say, there is something to running these polls by EITHER crunching the numbers OR doing the art. Looking forward to another side gig!

it was Husker Du that i was looking for, thought it was SY. i should have also remembered Metallica as that was more recent.

i agree, Steely Dan might actually be ILM's best poll.

again, thanks.

Those Metallica Bible pictures really went a lot flatter on me than I would've predicted.

never heard this (written by fagen)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJMelsJukC0

Snazzy suit.

walkin the dog and watching soul train

The new Fagen/Rundgren collar is great

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GknsBhsYiL0

omg lol

ha wow!

it's surreal hearing their voices together

So I take it this is about Trump.

and not too elegant

Great that this thread got bumped. I listen to this Spotify playlist about once every quarter or four times a year.

"Here Comes those San Ana Winds again"

happening to be listening to this Spotify right now. living in Southern California. oh yeah, add a bit of red wine.

probably the reason for my activity tonight.

lucky you :-)

I have been listening to ILM's Top 60 Spotify playlist these last couple of days for obvious reasons.

RIP Walter Becker.

A poster named some dude made this playlist:

http://open.spotify.com/user/1219464571/playlist/3WxVfruSRGjCsxQsrtZNuG