Oops, my mistake. At first I thought it was Sir Osis of Liver. Then I mistook it for Sir Loin of Beef. But it’s actually the Dukes of September.
You have to call your bad something, I suppose. I don’t think they stayed up all night to come up with that one. At any rate, this one summer back in the seventies, this Isley Brothers song was played ’round the clock on the FM.
Steely Dan on the Letterman show, with a five year gap.
It’s funny, but Steely Dan is famous for featuring a string of guitar heroes on their records. Regular folks know who Skunk Baxter is. Jazz devotees know who Larry Carlton is. People familiar with LA studio musicians know who Dean Parks is. People familiar with the original Dan know who Denny Dias is. There’s a cavalcade of other heavy hitters sprinkled over their records and live shows. They’re all sorta the best guitarist in the world. Walter Becker was better than all of them.
He’s playing guitar front and center here, but that wasn’t always the case. If you watch ancient iterations of the band, he’s playing the bass of all things. He’s quite pedestrian at it. He knows the role the instrument is supposed to play, and doesn’t try to show off, ever, by playing the guitar on the bass, like most (all) bass players who wish they were guitarists. He probably played bass because no one else would do it, and it needed doing. Paul McCartney was like that. There are just too many guitar players already. Here, play this thing.
The guitar hero that Steely Dan sorta settled on after a long while, at least for live shows, Jon Herington, is about as cool a customer as the band ever had. He doesn’t play like anyone. He plays like everyone, all in one package. He’s what you’d get when every someone remembers every music lesson they ever had, and they had one every day, forever.
I don’t know what Walter Becker was, or what he knew to get that way. Junkie, I gather. A hard life, and not all self-inflicted wounds, either, unlike most rock tragedies. He looked like lots of guys did back in the seventies. Owlish. Long, greasy hair. They liked pornography and digital watches and modding calculators to do funny stuff. Not nerds, exactly. Much smarter than the nerds, just not interested in making the honor roll. Certainly not cool, either. Becker’s famous for songwriting, if he’s famous at all. Since Fagen is the voice for Steely Dan vocals, Fagen became the public face of the band, the Moe. Becker was the Larry Fine, I guess. A cipher. Curly was an amalgam of all those other guys they hired, frantically running around musically trying to stay hired.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more fluid and inventive guitar player than Walter Becker, and that includes three dozen of the most fluid and inventive guitar players in the world that they had in their band at one time or another. He never does anything whatsoever to show off. He just endlessly invents musical stuff, seemingly on the fly, and never hesitates, or sticks too long in one place, or goes ernie, ernie, ernie high up the neck because he ran out of ideas and the solo’s not supposed to be over yet.
And Fagen? There’s five years between those two performances. He seems to have spent the interregnum at Dr. Seward’s place. He was always amusingly weird, but that second performance, with his shop class eyeglasses, a keytar straitjacket, and his fangs sharpened, pushed him into the front rank at the Hall of Fame of Strange for me, god bless him.
He went full Renfield. You never go full Renfield.
I know they didn’t intend it that way, but Steely Dan lyrics are like a torture device for Japanese singers. Forget melisma. They don’t have dipthongs. Steely Dan is a dipthong factory. The song starts with while, for gosh sake. Sake, not sake, I meant.
Did Steely Dan ever dream they’d be a champion in their eyes? They said they did, obliquely, anyway. They testified under oath that angular banjos sounded good to them. But you always hurt the ones you love, don’t you? Careful what you carry is borderline cruel, dudes.
The band is uber-Japanese. No, they’re not in a cab. They apologize in the YouTube description of the video. So much face. So little time:
Sorry for a mistake in the interlude guitar solo. We will update the song soon.
It’s just another thing that Steely Dan got exactly right for the Rising Sun market. I imagine that many a session guitarist looked at Becker and Fagen and said, “Sorry for the mistake in the interlude guitar solo,” knowing full well it would be their last day on the job.
Still, here we are. Steely Dan is worshiped a bit in Japan. They’re not THE God. But they’re gods, surely.
Back towards the tail end of my stint as a working musician, my friends and I had a name for our band, strictly for internal use: Four Old Men Having Fun. I was in my early forties at the time. We understood that what we were doing was ultimately a young person’s game, even though we were still doing it. Unlike many of our contemporaries, we didn’t have any ego problem that would interfere with acknowledging the growing absurdity of it. It seemed plenty absurd to me before we got old, so for me the transition was seamless.
Music wasn’t our real profession, though. Don’t get me wrong. We performed a lot and got checks with more than one zero on them. That was the whole point of it. We had regular occupations and played music at night and on the weekends to make some extra money. When we were younger we met lots of pretty girls and when we got older we used the money we earned to buy formula for the babies we had with the girls.
I have no complaints. I simply stopped doing it. It was easy for me to stop because I was stopping being what I wasn’t. It’s not so easy for people who are musicians whether the sun’s up or not. They are what they is, as they say. They don’t want to stop being musicians because then they stop being people. A few prominent people in the arts, who don’t want to keep slugging it out in a fickle industry, open wineries or some such enterprise when they want to live my life in reverse, but most are still trying to sing Hope I Die Before I Get Old right up until they’re screwing down the lid.
I find that most of the interesting songwriters in pop music are basically scholars. Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and people like Donald Fagen are bookworms for music. They perform their own stuff, but they would probably be just as happy if they were like Jimmy Webb or Rogers and Hammerstein or a million other guys that sat in a walkup office with a piano and a pile of foolscap and wrote music all day. I’m pretty sure that Fagen and Becker actually tried their hand at being Brill Building-type drones before the music business decided that it was simply cheaper and easier to have all the bands write their own stuff. Man, the Beatles ruined everything.
I found it amusing to watch the Three Old Men Having Fun resurrecting the Isley Brothers Who’s That Lady. Pop music doesn’t cure cancer or anything, but you can always find interesting things in it if you look around. Donald Fagen isn’t about to seine the Seventies looking for material and come up with The Candy Man. He has better taste than that. Who’s That Lady was a great piece of pop when it first came out. It’s been mostly overlooked in the recycled music industry, so it was both a surprise and familiar for the audience of geezers. That’s the secret to good covers.
I found all sorts of things interesting in that video: Bog Gas is performing with the wreckage of Steely Dan now? Fascinating. After all these years, Michael McDonald still doesn’t know the difference between a cardioid and an omnidirectional microphone? He pulls his head away from the microphone too abruptly at the end of phrases. In about ten more years, are you going to be able to tell the difference between Donald Fagen and Stephen Hawking without nametags? I used to think the Gibson SG was the worst guitar ever made, but now that I’ve seen Jon Herrington play one, is it possible that it’s worse than the worst guitar ever made? It makes him play badly, at least for him.
I’m moderately surprised that was a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. It’s not that goofy an idea, I suppose. Mean Joe Greene (Giuseppe Verdi) was a pop artist, and opera was the equivalent of the top forty on AM radio back in the day. Sometimes only the passage of time gives things cultural weight. But man, if you asked me in 1974 if the Isleys would be covered in the Metropolitan Opera House by Bog Gas and Steely Dan, I would have said that’s impossible. And tried to buy tickets.
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