Made Alive a Worldly Wonder

I can assure you that in 1976 or so, The Royal Scam album by Steely Dan was a thing, man. It was not a happy time, and the zeitgeist called for Don’t Take Me Alive, Kid Charlemagne, and the titular Royal Scam. It was certainly a heavy-duty yin to the soon to be released Saturday Night Fever soundtrack’s yang. It’s easy to assume that SNF would be a happy movie, what with the disco thang happenin’, but it was pretty dark, all in all, when it was coherent enough to make any kind of point. The Royal Scam cohered, bigtime, and it had a point: A toboggan ride into the smoking volcanic crater of the preceding decade.

Disco is only superficially happy anyway. It was sort of the Dancing Plague of 1518 with a Giorgio Moroder beat this time around. A year later, the most popular disco song began with the singers simply yelling AWW, FREAK OUT! to open the number. I didn’t need the advice.

But it’s one of the (more) offbeat numbers on The Royal Scam record that stuck with me. Kid Charlemagne and Don’t Take Me Alive haven’t completely worn out their welcome with me or anything, but they’re like Freebird or Stairway to Heaven in Steely Dan’s catalog. I’ve heard them enough already, thanks. But The Caves of Altamira still rattles around in my head from time to time. It’s a little flash fiction story set to music. I recall when I was small, how I spent my days alone…

Jaysus, only Steely Dan would think of writing a jazzrock song about something like the Caves of Altamira. If you’re not familiar with the topic, there’s a series of caves in northern Spain where prehistoric men painted stuff on the walls. How old are they? They figure the oldest of them are from 36,000 (!) years ago.

They’re colorful and interesting in their own right, and instantly recognizable for the things they depict, unlike modern art.:

But those aren’t the ones that really grab a fellow. These do:

There could be a lot of reasons for painting pictures of the local bison on the walls. I can really only think of one reason to lay your palm on the rock and blow pigment around it. A man understands that the world is a harsh place, and his time on earth is limited, and wants to leave some evidence of himself that lasts longer than he does. I was here! It was the best you could do, you know, when there wasn’t even any Hollywood.

Well, we all mostly try to outlast our fresh sale date in one way or another. We make mini-mes and write sonnets and put up obelisks and whatnot. Steely Dan wrote songs, and recorded them, which makes them artifacts. Not many people outside of talentless performance artists with NEA grants expect to destroy the artifacts they produce. You want to make something that sticks, at least a little bit.

So there’s a Steely Dan Ensemble at UMass Lowell in Massachusetts. That in itself cracks me up. I’ve been drunk at UMass Lowell, so I’m sorta familiar with it, but I never would have figured this would be a thing. But it is:

That trombone opening. Yeah, seventies doom, all over again.

It’s an oddball song, but it’s as close to a happy tune as Steely Dan is capable of, at least if you’re a bit of an outcast. The poor kids are forced to wear masks on their chins, so they probably connect with the sentiments of a song about spending their days alone, and making a world of their own to dream away in.

They heard the call and they wrote it on the wall for you and me we understood.