This twin re-release of The Dan's 1973’s masterpiece Countdown to Ecstasy and 1974’s soft rocking commercial hit Pretzel Logic is long overdue
In the seventies when the straights were drinking warm Bud and polishing their outsized belt buckles to The Eagles and The Doobie Brothers, the cool cats were dropping out to Steely Dan.
If you know, you know. Formed by the musical super brains of the late Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, their almost too perfect back catalogue has long been crying out for the kind of audiophile vinyl re-issue often granted to lesser acts.
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So, this twin release of their 1973’s masterpiece Countdown to Ecstasy and 1974’s soft rocking commercial hit Pretzel Logic is very welcome indeed. As if beamed down from rock’s hall of cool, here are two of their greatest albums, remastered so that the band’s famous high fidelity lustre sparkles truer than ever.
In ’72, Becker and Fagen, young men with a thing for Dylan, the Marx Brothers, WC fields and sci-fi, had already scored freak hits with their second single Do it Again, a deeply strange tale of a wild west hanging gone wrong, and the chrome-plated rock classic Reeling in The Years (co-opted decades later as the theme tune to the RTÉ schedule redoubt of the same name).
So, by 1973, the duo with a thing for black jazz and white pop were set on showing the West Coast how to do rock with smarts. Their timing was spot on.
Countdown to Ecstasy, released as the hippy dream vanished in a haze of Agent Orange, is relentlessly cynical, elliptical and saturnine on extraordinary tracks like Razor Boy and the stately The Boston Rag but it wasn’t short on terrific rock songs either.
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My Old School (inspired by a drug bust at Becker and Fagen's alma mater, Bard College in New York) swings and trades a stonking sax solo with an even stonkier guitar solo, and Show Biz Kids, a bitter takedown of Hollywood brats and the whole tragic Hollywood scene, still sounds stunning 50 years later. Then there is the joyously combustible guitar gallop of Bodhisattva, a boogie woogie romp that ends like an out-of-control train crashing into a nuclear power station.
Bristling with intriguing lyrical conundrums, Countdown is fast and clean but for a band long renowned for their perfectionism in the studio, it’s also that rare thing - a Steely Dan album that sounds beaten, worn and scuffed around the edges. Austere, sinister and busting with great, great songs, it is their best album.
"And less we forget, Barrytown, a supercilious takedown of racism and small-mindedness, was the inspiration for the name Roddy Doyle's fictional Dublin suburb."
A year later and now surrounded by an expanding constellation of top session heads, Walter and Donald were to switch tack again on their third album, Pretzel Logic, this time into almost soft rock and even more jazz. It yielded one of their biggest hits - Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, which artfully borrowed the bassline from Horace Silver’s Song For My Father. And gosh darn it, if they didn’t sound almost human because if Countdown was hallmarked by relentless cynicism and the kind of playful misanthropy only they could muster, Pretzel overflows with good vibes and feelings for their fellow man and woman.
Rikki itself could be a plea for a troubled kid to stay home and maybe call his shrink (or mom) or a jilted lover looking for a rematch. Either way, throughout the album, Fagan extends the hand of human empathy. Sure, the whacked-out blues of the title track is clearly about time travel (right?) but Any Major Dude, a melliferous confection of Fender Rhodes and upbeat guitar, taps into a hopeful vein, reasoning with a dejected friend that "any minor world that falls apart, falls together again". But most of all, it was Charlie Freak that proved Fagan was human after all on a sad urban vignette about a proud but desperate junkie who ODs after selling his prized possession for the price of a fix.
However, Steely Dan’s gallery of losers is back on Through With Buzz, a sour ditty about a cuckolded suitor who is hoodwinked, shortchanged and otherwise left for dust by a sprite-like dude called, well, Buzz. Monkey in My Soul, a song that swings with Staxy sax and fuzz guitar, is another smasher. And less we forget, Barrytown, a supercilious takedown of small-mindedness, was the inspiration for the name of Roddy Doyle’s fictional Dublin suburb.
Droll, cool and with just the right amount of jazz for the chin-strokers and just enough rock for the mainstream, Pretzel is arguably Steely Dan’s most accessible album.
Both of these re-releases are the very best in smarty pants sophisto Seventies rock. They may look like something you’d spy in your hip uncle’s yellowing record pile or in a record store in the US Midwest but they sound very modern all over again on these re-issues.
Becker and Fagen would go on to scale the very pinnacle of jazz rock perfection - maybe too much perfection - on Aja in 1977 and produce strange synth pop with 1980’s Gaucho, but on Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan were at the very height of their considerable powers.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
