Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic and The Royal Scam

Steely Dan is one of those bands that people love to hate. George Carlin once listed people who should be beaten with heavy clubs as “people who sort their garbage, jog with their dogs and listen to Steely Dan.” Last year the recently departed Steve Albini, a self-proclaimed “punk that shits on Steely Dan,” wrote some tweets about how much he loathed and despised Steely Dan, saying that they sounded like a Saturday Night Live warm-up band and wondered why they would expend so much effort to sound like one. Writer Joe Goldberg referred to their music as “Hippie Muzak.” Carol absolutely hated them. So, to avoid being beaten with heavy clubs by She Who Must Be Obeyed, I stopped listening to them. Things have changed… I listen, but only in small doses. One can take only so much of Donald Fagen’s voice before wanting to hear something else.

But what’s the appeal? Dark humor and cynicism, something that’s right up my alley. Their music is a skeptical view of American culture populated with interesting characters, be they sleazy, creepy, desperate, obsessive, jealous, other various lowlifes, lots of losers and very few winners. Fagen and Becker didn’t take themselves too seriously. After all, they took the name Steely Dan from a steam-powered dildo in William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch. Their lyrics were equal measures of humor, irony, and sarcasm. They finished each other’s musical sentences on both sides of the music and lyric divide.

Whatever one thinks of Steely Dan, they’re still better than the Eagles…

In 1977, Steely Dan crafted Aja, an album that is widely recognized as their best album. It's sound quality is such that if one wanted to test a car stereo, one could pick either this one or Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. When Walter Becker died in 2017, I wrote that Aja was my favorite Steely Dan album. Things have changed in the years since then. As good as Aja sounds, I prefer a couple of their earlier releases, Pretzel Logic (1974) and The Royal Scam (1976). Their notorious studio perfectionism started here.

Steely Dan started as Denny Dias’ band. A jazz guitarist from Philadelphia who had his own band, he put an ad in The Village Voice that read "Looking for keyboardist and bassist. Must have jazz chops! Assholes need not apply!" [little did he know…] The keyboardist and bassist were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. They were Brill Building songwriters who met at Bard College in 1967. Dias, Fagen and Becker moved to California to seek fame and fortune. Guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, drummer Jim Hodder, and vocalist David Palmer joined their band and Steely Dan was born. They recorded two albums - Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972) and Countdown to Ecstasy (1973). Palmer sang lead on a few of the songs on Can’t But a Thrill but was relegated to background vocals on Countdown to Ecstasy. They recorded Countdown to Ecstasy in a hurry by their standards]. As Fagen and Becker didn’t like the sound of Countdown to Ecstasy, things would change for the next album.

Pretzel Logic is the album where Steely Dan entered its Plastic Ono Band phase. John Lennon described the Plastic Ono Band as a group where the membership varied from time to time, meaning that the group was whoever was in the room at the time. And so it was with Steely Dan. They stopped being a band and became a concept. Since Fagen and Becker were the songwriters, they took over the band, much the same way as Jagger and Richards did with the Rolling Stones. And since Steely Dan was now Fagen and Becker’s band, they decided to enlist studio musicians at the expense of Baxter, Dias and Hodder. Fagen and Becker didn’t like touring and preferred studio work. Skunk Baxter was a road dog who lived for touring. He left and joined the Doobie Brothers after touring for Pretzel Logic was done. Jim Hodder opted for session work [he later drowned in his swimming pool in 1990]. Denny Dias continued to play on Steely Dan albums, but as one of many session musicians. Pretzel Logic is the transition between Steely Dan the band and Steely Dan the concept. The core of Becker, Fagen, Dias and Baxter appear on every song. The first band casualty of Fagen & Becker using hired guns was drummer Jim Hodder. Relegated to background vocals, Hodder is replaced by Jim Gordon [Derek & the Dominoes, Traffic] and Jeff Porcaro [later of Toto fame], sometimes both on the same track. Bassist Chuck Rainey makes his first appearance on a Steely Dan record.

Countdown to Ecstasy had six songs that exceeded five minutes. The album had no hit singles. Their record company wanted shorter songs and hit singles. Out of Pretzel Logic’s eleven songs, only two of them were over four minutes and they were the singles [Rikki Don't Lose That Number (#4) and Pretzel Logic (#57)]. Both songs are still in Steely Dan setlists. I like nine of the eleven songs, to wit:

Rikki Don't Lose That Number – Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes there aren’t any hidden meanings in song. This is Donald Fagen giving his phone number to a crush in college, who was married AND pregnant at the time. Fagan is an obsessed admirer of Rikki. That percussion instrument that opens the song [cut from the single version] is a flapamba. The piano figure is “borrowed” from Horace Silver’s Song for My Father. Skunk Baxter plays the solo.

Night by Night – An ode to life on the streets with lots of horns and two guitar solos from Skunk Baxter that slay.

Any Major Dude Will Tell You – This one is a message of sympathy from one friend to another. Yawn…

Barrytown – Social satire set in a New York hamlet not far from Bard College. A commentary on racial integration perhaps? "I'm not one to look behind/I know that times must change/but over there in Barrytown/they do things very strange/and though you're not my enemy/I like things how they used to be/and though you'd like some company/I'm standing by myself/go play with someone else." Just a tad cynical…

East St. Louis Toodle-Oo – Duke Ellington! Becker uses a talk box guitar to simulate muted trumpets [very effectively]. Skunk Baxter uses a pedal steel to mimic a trombone [also very effectively].

Parker's Band – A funky tribute to Charlie Parker. Is the lyric “We will spend a dizzy weekend smacked into a trance” a reference to Parker’s heroin habit? I think so.

Through with Buzz – At 1’30”, this is Steely Dan’s shortest ever song. It’s also a throwaway. I treat it as such.

Pretzel Logic – A moody, bluesy time travel fantasy with traveling minstrels and Napoleon. Becker plays the guitar solos. A classic.

With a Gun – Biting satire with a “country” [?!?] shuffle. This is Steely Dan’s idea of a murder ballad. The humble narrator tells the story of a man obsessed with vengeance against those he perceives as doing him wrong, using a gun, of course.

Charlie Freak – How does one follow a murder ballad? This one is really dark. It’s told from the point of view of a guy who buys someone’s last remaining possession, a gold ring. The seller buys drugs with the money and dies of an overdose, all to the sound of jingle bells.

Monkey in Your Soul – Fuzz bass, great horns, and a nice solo from Becker. “I’ll pack my things and move so far from here…” Sounds like somebody’s had enough and can’t get away fast enough.

The Royal Scam is Steely Dan’s “guitar” album. Here Fagen and Becker made the full transition to their “band” being more of a collection of musicians at any given time. With the addition of R&B musicians Chuck Rainey [bass] and Bernard Purdie [drums], this is also one funky album. Becker put away his bass and switched to guitar. He thought Rainey’s presence eliminated the need to bring his own bass to the studio. Fagen and Becker employ guitarists Larry Carlton, Denny Dias, Elliot Randall [who played solo on Reelin’ in the Years], and Dean Parks. They also employ five background singers, Michael McDonald and Timothy B. Schmit among them.

As with Pretzel Logic, I like all but two of the songs [see below]…

Kid Charlemagne – Lead guitar: Larry Carlton. Based on LSD chemist Owsley Stanley. Rainey and Purdie make their presence felt immediately. That’s Becker chugging along on rhythm guitar. A classic.

The Caves of Altamira – Prehistoric cave paintings in Spain and a youngster who finds peace and solace among them. Lot of horns on this one.

Don't Take Me Alive – Lead guitar: Larry Carlton. This was inspired by crime in Los Angeles. The criminal in this story is suicidal.

Sign In Stranger – Lead guitar: Elliot Randall. Fagen and Becker do reggae [Walter loved reggae]. This one is a sci-fi place where a criminal can go to establish a new identity. "Do you have a dark spot on your past?/ Leave it to my man he'll fix it fast/Pepe has a scar from ear to ear/He will make your mug shots disappear…"

The Fez – Lead guitar: Walter Becker. A throwaway song about having sex with a condom. 

No I'm never gonna do it without the fez on/Oh no

No I'm never gonna do it without the fez on/Oh no

That's what I am/Please understand/I wanna be your holy man…

That’s all there is to this to this song. In my version of Hell, this song on repeat. I can do without this one.

Green Earrings – Guitars: Denny Dias and Elliot Randall. With clavinet all over this song and the playing by Rainey and Purdie, one can be forgiven for thinking this sounds almost like a disco song…almost. Some very tasty solos from Dias and Randall. The lyrics are about a jewel thief who shows no remorse.

Haitian Divorce – Lead guitar: Dean Parks. More reggae from Fagan and Becker. Engineer Elliot Scheiner asked for some time off during recording so he could fly to Haiti and get a quickie divorce. Fagan and Becker made a song out of it. Becker put Parks’ solo through a talk box. A good idea, but the talk box wears out its welcome. Depending on my mood, this can be a “skip” song.

Everything You Did – Lead guitar: Larry Carlton. Becker and his girlfriend fight over infidelity, and he wants to hear about everything she and her lover did before he finds him and kills him. Apparently she played the Eagles a lot [probably too much for Becker’s liking], to which he says “turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening…” This song could have been about my high school girlfriend, who also cheated and listened to the Eagles too much for my liking. If a Steely Dan song has vicious lyrics, chances are they were written by Becker.

The Royal Scam – Lead guitar: Larry Carlton. Just what is the “royal scam”? If you’re an immigrant, it’s the American Dream.

Pretzel Logic and The Royal Scam – two albums that maybe are not as immaculate sounding as Aja but definitely more interesting, and infinitely much better than the Eagles [or as my friend Alan calls them, the Egos].

I’m not the only one to rag on the Egos. I found this little bit written by someone under the pen name Streetmouse who had this take:

There's a Pretzel Logic conspiracy that suggests that the movie The Big Lebowski is a coded tribute to Steely Dan, and that much is related to this album. Most obvious is the prominence of the 'Dude' word, and the underlying attribute of the warm hearted ideal that bad times indeed don't last forever. Things get even more suspicious when you consider that The Dude's (Jeffrey Lebowski/Jeff Bridges) bowling teammates are named Walter and Donald, along with the ever-present bartender who is named Gary (Gary Katz, producer of Steely Dan's music.) There's also The Dude’s hatred of The Eagles, where The Dan and The Eagles both reference each other in verse, all with good natured ribbing.

Walter Becker - RIP

Walter Becker died on Sunday.  He was 67.  If you don’t know who he is, stop reading now.

Becker’s partner in Steely Dan [Donald Fagen] wrote this about him today:  Walter had a very rough childhood - I’ll spare you the details. Luckily, he was smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter. He was cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny. Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art. We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties), W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago blues…

Walter Becker started out as a guitar player, but when Steely Dan formed, he switched to bass.  When you have two guitarists with the caliber of Denny Dias and Skunk Baxter, your guitar services become somewhat redundant, hence the switch to bass.  Steely Dan stopped touring after Pretzel Logic and became a studio concern.  The composition of Steely Dan varied from album to album.  It even varied from song to song.  If Becker needed to play guitar, he’d play it.  If he needed to play bass, he’d play it, though that became a lesser need once Becker and Fagen met Chuck Rainey.  What was Walter Becker’s role in Steely Dan?  Did he write the music, or did he write the words?  In an interview I read from nine years ago, Walter Becker was asked about the division of labor between himself and Donald Fagen:

Can you give a nutshell breakdown of the division of labor in Steely Dan? It’s hard for an outsider to know who’s responsible for what.

Yeah, I think that with most partnerships that run for a certain amount of time—and ours has run for a pretty long time—the division of labor is very ad hoc. So whatever needs to be done, sometimes I’ve got something to start with, sometimes Donald’s got something to start with. Sometimes we really work very closely, collaboratively on every little silly millimeter on the writing of the song and certainly of the records, and sometimes less so. And so over the course of the partnership, I think we’ve done all sorts of different things different ways, and probably that still is changing in a way, because if I can speculate on Donald’s behalf, I think there is a level of perfection, polish, sophistication, and abundance of detail and structural stuff that he wants to hear in his music that I sort of ran out of patience to do. My attention span is not that good anymore, and I sort of believe—and maybe the lyrics somewhere say this—that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Steely Dan’s music was different.  While many a group from the 1970s went for high volume and was for the most part in 4/4 time, Steely Dan took the jazz route.  In 1993, Walter Becker said “we thought superimposing jazz harmonies on pop songs was subversive.”  Fagen and Becker are somewhat like Tom Waits in the themes they write about.  They look at humanity’s dark side, and sang anything but love songs.  Kid Charlemagne was based on LSD chemist Owsley Stanley, Cousin Dupree is somewhat incestuous [the dude loves his cousin], Rikki Don’t Lose the Number and Everything You Did are about infidelity, Everyone’s Gone to the Movies is an ode to pornography, Hey Nineteen addresses cradle-robbing, and so on.  It’s sex, drugs and jazz for these guys.

Why would a band name themselves after a dildo from a William Burroughs novel?  I’m not a big Steely Dan fan – I won’t pretend that I was/am.  .  She Who Must Be Obeyed especially doesn’t like them.  I can take Donald Fagen’s vocals in small doses only.  But [and there is always a ‘but’], I like Aja, a lot [The Royal Scam is a close second].  A friend from the old Ohio neighborhood, whose parents didn’t think much of public school education [and these days with mandatory testing, teaching to the test and federal funding that is dependent on test scores, can you blame them?], went to prep school in Connecticut.  When he returned for summer break, he introduced me to Steely Dan.  More specifically, he introduced me to Aja.  It’s one of those albums [like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon] that you can ‘test drive’ a stereo you might want to buy.  It sounded so good you could play it on a shitty portable eight-track player [how’s THAT for dating one’s self?] and it would sound ok.  That came in very handy, for when I moved to Colorado in July 1978, all I had to listen to was a few eight-track tapes [one of which was Aja] and that shitty portable eight-track player. 

Until we finally moved into our little house on the prairie in March 1979, that’s all I had.  I still like Aja a lot.  After Aja came the song for a film called FM.  The song – FM [No Static At All] – that I thought was very cool [I still do].  Walter Becker didn’t play much lead guitar because he chose not to.  He and Donald Fagen were perfectionists, almost to a fault.  They hired the best players of any instrument in the business, and such was Becker and Fagen’s reputation for being stern taskmasters that these seasoned studio pros craved their approval.  They didn’t always get it.  Walter Becker was the EF Hutton of guitar players.  When he played, people listened. He played lead guitar on FM – I noticed.  It wasn’t until years later that I found out that FM was an outtake from Aja.  No wonder I liked it…  I eagerly awaited their follow-up, and it came in 1980 with Gaucho.  I heard Hey Nineteen on the radio, and I absolutely hated it [and still do to this day].  Gaucho was for Steely Dan what The Long Run was for The Eagles – it was boring, it took too long to make, and it was the album that killed the group [Third World Man is ok].  And like The Long Run, Gaucho killed my interest in Steely Dan.  It also killed Donald Fagen’s and Walter Becker’s interest in each other, so it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one who felt that way about that album.

Awhile back a Facebook friend of mine asked me what I thought about Steely Dan.  My answer was dismissive – “I liked them when I was a kid, then I grew up.”  But I’ve been doing a re-assessment over the last year.  Over time I grew to realize these guys were as crabby as I am.  And in this age where all music sounds the same, and everything is Unicorns and rainbows [cue the “millennial whoops” now], “different” from two old crabby, grouchy guys who write their own stuff, and who play real instruments with real musicians is just fine with me.

There isn’t much to add here.  In announcing his death, Walter Becker’s website simply read the following:

w a l t e r   b e c k e r              f e b .   2 0   1 9 5 0   —  s e p t .   0 3   2 0 1 7. 

I’ll keep it equally as simple – RIP Walter Becker.

Songs for the iPod:

Do It Again [Can't Buy a Thrill, 1972]

Showbiz Kids [Countdown to Ecstasy, 1973]

Rikki Don't Lose That Number [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

Pretzel Logic [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

With a Gun [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

Charlie Freak [Pretzel Logic, 1974]
Black Friday [Katy Lied, 1975]

Doctor Wu [Katy Lied, 1975]

Kid Charlemagne [The Royal Scam, 1976]

The Caves of Altamira [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Don't Take Me Alive [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Sign in Stranger [The Royal Scam, 1976]
Haitian Divorce [The Royal Scam, 1976]

The Royal Scam [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Deacon Blues [Aja, 1977]

Aja [Aja, 1977]

Peg [Aja, 1977]

Josie [Aja, 1977]

Black Cow [Aja, 1977]

Home at Last [Aja, 1977]

FM [No Static At All] [FM original soundtrack, 1978]

Down in the Bottom [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]

Junkie Girl [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]

Cousin Dupree [Two Against Nature, 2000]

Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore [Walter Becker - Circus Money, 2008]

Circus Money [Walter Becker - Circus Money, 2008]
Lucky Henry [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]
Janie Runaway [Two Against Nature, 2000]
Third World Man [Gaucho, 1980]