As The Facts Unravel I’ve Found This To Be True

Steely Dan “Peg”

As a direct result of reading Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, I’ve been thinking a lot about methods of recording, the way things sound, and the way people respond to various technological advances and the resulting aesthetic decisions. One of the aesthetics I find most interesting at the moment is the very “dry” sound that was very popular in the 70s, most especially the stuff that was recorded in California. Steely Dan is an extreme example of this style — clean to the point of being sterile; jazz/rock fusion performed with surgical precision. I get why a lot of people hate this sound. If you want guts and grit in your music, this is the radical opposite. It’s not physical, it’s not soulful. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made ruthlessly cerebral music, and everything that made it to their records was a fully formed idea rendered as perfectly as possible. Every sound in the recordings is discrete, nothing bleeds together. It’s not meant to simulate the sound of people playing together, it’s just a pure representation of a musical arrangement.

Solos, traditionally an aspect of music that at least offers the front of being a moment of inspired expression, were auditioned. Fagen and Becker ran through seven session players before finding the ideal solo for “Peg,” a song that would become one of their most memorable and zippy productions. If you watch this video, the duo play a few of the rejected solos, and it becomes clear why they were so picky. Those solos were awful, just really tacky and lifeless. The keeper, performed by Jay Graydon, is among my favorite guitar solos ever, in part for its fantastic contrast with the rest of the composition. The center of the piece is the interplay between this exceptionally sleek keyboard part and the subtle syncopation of the drums — tightly written and performed, but it comes out sounding fluid and intuitive. When the solo comes in, this already mellow tune seems to relax and slide into this even more stylish and smooth zone. The guitar tone is astonishing — rich, but with a touch of distortion — and the notes glide along the track with an unreal grace. You could record “Peg” in other ways and the song and that solo would still be great, but think the nuances in the arrangement and performance are flattered by the understated, dry approach. Nothing is oversold, nothing is obscured.

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Steely Dan “Show Biz Kids”

The dry sound suited Steely Dan in part because the music itself was so cool and aloof. The lyrics have a bitter, deadpan wit; they lean hard on irony and unreliable narration. It’s cynical music about cynical people, so there’s no room for warmth. “Show Biz Kids,” from their second album, is a prime example of their fixation on shallowness and sleaze. As the title suggests, the singer is talking about hedonistic young LA creeps — it’s basically a Bret Easton Ellis novel before such a thing existed. It’s perhaps uncharacteristically judgmental, but I think we’re meant to think the narrator is an asshole too. The arrangement is brilliant. The guitar part is relatively loose and dirty for them, it’s the most dynamic presence in this piece that mostly sticks to this dead-eyed repetitive groove. The backing vocalists sound like they’re in a trance, the chorus runs even colder. It’s a grim sound — Los Angeles rendered as hell with palm trees and swimming pools.

The best part is a temporary shift out of the main groove at 3:48, as the beat is enhanced by a metallic jangle and Fagan delivers a sharp indictment: “Show business kids / making movies of themselves / you know they don’t give a fuck / about anybody else.” In context, it’s catharsis, but it’s an extremely fleeting moment that disrupts the listener’s desire to linger longer on that part. Super Furry Animals looped the last line into something more crowd pleasing; Elvis Costello’s cover version hits that part with a sputtering rage. Those interpretations have their appeal, but I prefer Becker and Fagan’s intentions — you only get to feel that muted indignation for a few seconds before you slip back into that creepy complacency.

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Steely Dan “Parker’s Band”

“Parker’s Band” is basically Steely Dan’s equivalent to Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” a song expressing appreciation and admiration for a jazz great. (For Stevie, it’s Duke Ellington; for the Dan, it’s Charlie Parker.) This is as earnest and effervescent as Steely Dan gets. Though they made a lot of music that errs closer to jazz than rock, this is certainly a rock song about jazz music. That’s a lot of the appeal — the rock aspect of this conveys enthusiasm and echoes wonder in the lyrics, though the jazzy touches in the syncopation of the drums lends the piece an usually breezy grace. I love the way the percussion and horns have a weightless quality in the mix, and seem to casually orbit the guitar at the center of the arrangement. It’s not as extraordinarily ecstatic as Stevie’s tune, but there’s certainly a lot of joy in this track.

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