I’ll have a Number Seven, with a side of miso soup.
There are numerous trite opportunities to mention raying down the raw and blaking it, but I urge you not to. We must experience the Dopamines in their native habitat, and appreciate the forces that produce a Steely Dan cover band at the Sumida Street Jazz Festival in Tokyo. We must appreciate it all the way to the the tinny goodness of that last wan cymbal hit by the drummer.
The United States of America took over the world, you know, without firing a shot, really. The wars were sideshows. A Steely Dan cover band at the Sumida Street Jazz Festival makes building a triumphal arch somewhere superfluous. When Japanese people sing, “angular banjos sound good to me,” we’ve crossed a pop culture Rubicon that can’t be forded in reverse.
The United States of America has led the world out into a wilderness. It has a responsibility to go forward. Moses didn’t take the Jews into the desert, turn around, and say, “Now what do you want to do? I’m wide open here.”
The United States must keep going. Angular banjos don’t really sound that great.
That was it. That right there. That’s it. That was me posting like five minutes of some guy fixing Donald Fagen’s Fender Rhodes. But it’s just, like, some guy. It’s Donald Fagen’s Fender Rhodes. He’s not Donald Fagen. He’s not Donald Fagen at all. Not even a little. I don’t even think he’s the guy that fixed Donald Fagen’s Fender Rhodes. You know, the 1973 Fender Suitcase 88 that Donald Fagen owns. He was just hanging around handy, ready to play it for no reason. Me? I was alive and walking the Earth in 1973, and now I hear a Fender Rhodes of that vintage needs fixing. I mean, I couldn’t drive, or drink beer, or anything, but I was alive. I couldn’t drive and drink beer, either. Either one, or both together. For those of you younger than Donald Fagen’s Fender Suitcase 88, driving and drinking hasn’t always been a crime. It used to be an activity. Now it’s worse than Hitler. And Hitler couldn’t even play the Fender Rhodes, so I’m not sure why I brought it up. He did have some 88s built for him, but they were anti-aircraft guns, not electric pianos. They were a little heavy in the bass register, as I recall. The anti-aircraft guns, not the pianos. The pianos sound just fine in the bass register. Well, they do after you fix them. If they’re old, I mean. If you fix them because they’re old, and then play them, even though you didn’t fix them, and you don’t own them, they sound good anyway.
…but I’d rather listen to them play Hey Nineteen than listen to Steely Dan play it now. It’s painful to hear Donald Fagen croak out these songs. He never could sing, but it really didn’t matter back in the day. He and Becker wrote these wonderful things, and you understood why he couldn’t entrust them to anyone else to perform properly. Sorry, but now you can’t trust yourself.
Sooner or later it’s not your turn anymore. People take your place. You may not like it, but it’s the way of the world. You could be like Ray Kurzweil, self-absorbed and dreaming of paying bemused men in lab coats to Ted Williams your noggin after you shuffle off this mortal coil, but you’re wasting your time. Believe me, Ray, no matter how much money you pay those guys to Birds Eye your head, they’ll get high after lunch and accidentally kick out the plug while they’re playing hacky sack, plug it back in when they sober up and realize what they’ve done, and when they finally defrost you and sew your head on a used Japanese sex doll with a Pentium chip where your heart used to go, you’ll be about as useful as a Kardashian. Young people take your place in the lineup eventually, and you can go with it, or just turn into an old guy telling anyone that’s willing to listen that you really used to be sumfin’. And Ray, you have no idea how to hit a curve ball, so your frozen head will be completely useless anyway.
Elderly people should command respect for what they’ve accomplished. That’s different than trying to play T Ball when you’re forty. Young people are a barrel of beer, and old people are a fine liqueur — if they’re smart enough to keep distilling their whole life. The world needs mugs of beer and vitality, the same as it needs a digestif after a moveable feast. Serving them at the wrong time ruins the effect.
In a weird sort of a way, performing Hey Nineteen is low-level work. It should be left to the young grunts. Donald Fagen should be running a record company or writing or something, instead of dragging his elderly ass all over the landscape making gargling sounds about feeling old when he was thirty years younger than he is now.
If you’re old and reading this, if it makes you feel any better, I’d be willing to get up a lynch mob of geriatrics to beat some sense into the cameraman, just so we can keep our hand in.
Joe Jackson was one of those fellows like Elvis Costello, and Sting, and a couple hundred other guys from the eighties, that wore skinny ties and snarled to make a buck, but wished they were doing dinner theater the whole time.
Now, Steely Dan — they pretended to do dinner theater right from the get-go, while the whole time they were Beelzebub’s function room house band.
So now, the square is circled. Any major dude could tell you that.
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