John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Tomorrow's Girls

From 1993 and his Kamakiriad solo album comes this Donald Fagen tune, which puts New Frontier-era sci-fi into a blender with gender roles, suburbia, cheesy monster thrillers and other things the Steely Dan mainstay grew up with. It's one of my favourite songs he's ever written; how can you not love lines like, "They're mixing with the population/ A virus wearing pumps and pearls" or 

Pretzel Logic

The title song of the 1974 Steely Dan album, with some of Donald Fagen's bluesiest chords. This version is Fagen and a pre-reunion lineup from the early 1990s, including longtime collaborator Michael McDonald chipping in on vocals and keyboards. All that's missing, really, is Walter Becker.

Click on the tag below for more 'Song of the Day' entries.

Two takes on My Old School

I had an earworm this morning of this Steely Dan chestnut, from the earlier days when they were trying to score hits on the pop charts. My Old School is about Bard College, where Donald Fagen and Walter Becker figured out they were going to be musicians.

This scratchy performance is from a TV show; I love how laconic Becker is on bass.

The second clip is from one of the reunion tours, and the song feels different (and, yep, Donald Fagen sure looks different) in late middle age. 

Reconstructing Peg

When I was young, Steely Dan were in their prime, and were pretty cool, to boot - melodic enough to appeal to the Frampton Comes Alive crowd, adventurous enough for the prog-rock leftovers, and stylized and lyrically off-beat enough for the new-wave kids. And, of course, the jazz fans took comfort in seeing their favourite players show up in the credits.

Steely Dan's records were produced to the hilt (I've been reading a book that shows how, time and again, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen would spend day after day trying to get a single drum track to their liking), but they hold up really, really well.

Peg is one of the few Steely Dan songs that was an outright hit single. It's an odd match: instantly hummable, and yet pretty complicated. This video, with Donald Fagen showing just how tricky it is to play those chords, explains why:

Naturally, you'd want to hear the tune itself. Here's Fagen a few years back with Becker and the reunited Steely Dan.

What decade is it, anyway?

Seen this week on Rolling Stone's site:

Tour Tracker: Journey, Steely Dan and Crosby, Stills & Nash

Look, bully for all that they can make money on the road. But one of my colleagues, after Neil Young's two shows in St. John's this week, had a valid point: the big concerts in St. John's recently were Young, Bob Dylan, Elton John and Leonard Cohen. A concert of any of them in their prime would have been impossible. At least the market has changed to accommodate this kind of tour. But as my younger friend put it, "Can we get something non-geriatric?" (To be fair, the Tragically Hip - who are merely middle aged - announced a date a few days later.)

Do It Again, via Midnight Special

My recollections of Midnight Special veer to the cheesy, but it couldn't have been all bad, as this clip of Steely Dan doing Do It Again verifies: