Lou Reed (who would know) once offered the following aphorism on rock music: “One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords, and you’re into jazz”.
One wonders what he would have made of such Steely Dan offerings as “Gaucho” (26 chords) or “Deacon Blues” (35 chords). This is a band whose fussy arrangements and absurdly smooth studio sheen—what literary critic James Wood called in another context a slickness unto death—has admittedly prompted not a few negative reactions over the years. Not long before his recent death, fellow musical curmudgeon Steve Albini gave voice to all who despise them in a lengthy Twitter rant (“Christ, the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up”).
“Christ, the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up” (Steve Albini on Steely Dan).
Because, after all, this stuff isn’t Bach. We typically listen to rock music for its direct, primary color pleasures. Steely Dan’s smug emphasis on technique over intensity has long gotten them pegged as dad-rock. Indeed, the jokes pretty much write themselves—after you cut the umbilical cord, the obstetrician hands you a used vinyl copy of Aja, etc.
And yet it’s by now also recognized that their conventional, radio-friendly surface concealed a cynical core—that they smuggled acidic and occasionally filthy commentary into their airless yacht AOR. When I was a teenager, I worked the back of a neighborhood deli, whose proprietors—despite my agonized pleas—tuned the store music to the most appallingly bland corporate soft-rock, barely a step above muzak. And yet, “Hey Nineteen”, Steely Dan’s paean to unsatisfying trysts with barely legal supermodels, inevitably found its way in between the David Grays and Marc Cohns.
I suspect that it is ultimately this combination of surface smoothness and bone-deep cynicism that alienates so many. Such listeners are advised to try Steely Dan’s third LP and masterpiece, Pretzel Logic, now hitting its 50th year—a record that finds the Aristotelian mean between their surprisingly strong pop sensibilities and their elevated technique. This is also where their contemptuous lyrics get tempered by their sincere (perhaps the only thing they’re sincere about) love of American jazz.
It is ultimately this combination of surface smoothness and bone-deep cynicism that alienates so many.
Of course, the introduction of jazz into a rock context was not itself unique. In the UK, it was strongly linked to the emerging genre of progressive rock, but in the US it often doubled with jazz fusion, in which legitimate jazz musicians either borrowed from rock stylings or went slumming (depending on one’s viewpoint). And for years, drug-addled hippie guitarists had taken John Coltrane’s cosmic excursions as an incentive to solo for thirty minutes over two chords.
In a more sophisticated vein, guitar god Duane Allman named Kind of Blue as his greatest influence, and Joni Mitchell would incorporate increasingly complex jazz idioms into her unique take on folk and pop, culminating in a collaboration with the great Charles Mingus.
But no band making radio hits took this fusion quite as far as Steely Dan. And though Aja is widely viewed as the album in which their jazz leanings came to the fore, between the outrageously complex chord charts and the list of top-flight ringers like Steve Gadd and Wayne Shorter (playing what likely remains the greatest ever sax solo on a rock record), I submit that Pretzel Logic is the purest evocation of their abiding love of jazz. From the Horace Silver-quoting opening hit “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” to the note-perfect cover of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” (with talk boxes and pedal steels imitating plunger-muted trumpets and trombones), to the blast of joy that is “Parker’s Band”, the players unabashedly reveal their jazz roots without ever abandoning their status as a rock band.
In Pretzel Logic, the players unabashedly reveal their jazz roots without ever abandoning their status as a rock band.
On this point, Pretzel Logic is also the last Steely Dan record in which they could legitimately be called a band at all. While in a sense it was always the Donald Fagen/Walter Becker show, from that point on, it would become more or less explicit that “Steely Dan” was simply a vehicle for realizing Fagen and Becker’s musical and lyrical vision with the assistance of a cast of evermore technically proficient studio cats.
And the truth is, those primary colors of rock (not to mention the I-IV-V chord changes) do get old after a while. “I’m in love with a girl” and “feel a whole lot better when you’re gone” are perennial themes, of course, but sometimes you want a changeup.
So why not a song about a guy who sells you his ring so he can go buy a fatal dose of heroin? Why not a song about how the people who live in Barrytown are just the worst? Why not a song celebrating the fact that it is just really enjoyable to listen to Charlie Parker?
And for those who still find this all too esoteric (where it’s not just misanthropic), try “Any Major Dude Will Tell You”—as heartfelt a song as this bitter band ever wrote, capped off by that lovely circular guitar figure. In characteristic Steely Dan fashion, they wanted one guitarist (who didn’t employ vibrato) to play the main solo before handing it off for that flourish to the other (who did). This is somehow both needlessly perverse and appropriately fraternal for a song that expresses compassion for a friend in distress.
You can almost picture it. For that moment at least, there are no yachts in sight nor trace of Michael McDonald’s falsetto, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter is still handling pedal steel duties instead of consulting for the Department of Defense (really). Before they fell into L.A.’s cocaine vortex and never really came back. Just a band coming together, composing and performing with ruthless economy, to make a perfectly skewed pop album. It almost sounds like they mean it—of course, with these guys, who really knows?
