Steely Dan Countdown to Ecstasy (1973)

From bestclassicbands.com

With the success of their 1972 debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill and single hits “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were compelled to transform Steely Dan from studio construct to working band. To record Can’t Buy a Thrill, the duo and producer Gary Katz had assembled a sextet to get the two songwriters’ original material on tape. Now they were pushed onto the concert trail to cash in on back-to-back hits while facing parallel pressure to deliver a sophomore set that could add to their career momentum.

Stage and studio thus became crucibles for the original lineup, which consisted of other East Coast musicians: guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and drummer/vocalist Jim Hodder augmented Fagen’s keyboards and vocals, with Becker moving to bass, ceding his own chops as a guitarist in favor of the Dias-Baxter front line. Fagen’s lack of self-confidence as a singer had prompted the addition of putative lead singer David Palmer, but during sessions for …Thrill it became apparent that Palmer’s light, lyrical tenor was ill-suited to the darker corners of Steely Dan’s lyrics.

“He was a good singer for us early on,” Fagen would later recall, “but he didn’t really have the attitude to put the songs over. So, I started doing it myself, much to my chagrin. It seems to have worked out.” By the time the band finished the second full-length, Countdown to Ecstasy, Palmer would be gone.

Shuttling from tour dates to sessions at the Village Recorder in Santa Monica, Becker and Fagen found themselves on a just-in-time delivery cycle, beginning tracking on some songs before lyrics were finished. If the songcraft displayed on the first album reflected their Brill Building apprenticeship with Jay and the Americans, the new material proved more open-ended—and more sophisticated. Precocious nerds from suburban New York and New Jersey, the two musicians had bonded over their shared love of jazz, blues and the Beat poets after meeting at Bard College in 1967, and their shared “East Coast beat sensibility” had winked beneath the complex chord voicings and sardonic lyrics on …Thrill. The songs that would comprise Countdown to Ecstasy, released in July 1973, brought those influences closer to the foreground while being tailored specifically to the band’s core quintet.

The crack of Hodder’s snare launches “Bodhisattva,” the opening track, into a Zen boogie that lampoons New Age mysticism while showcasing the band’s two guitarists, who veer from harmonized twin-leads to a round robin of solos, Dias reeling off pure bebop figures before handing off to Fagen’s circular keyboard riff, followed by Baxter’s darting, double-time rock solos. The song’s cynical take on chic spirituality suggests its authors’ ambivalence toward West Coast cultural pretentions they were finding in their new Southern California theater of operations.

A tension between past and present surfaces in “Razor Boy,” which downshifts to a loping, Latin-tinged ballad that balances a lovely, lonely melody against Fagen’s pessimistic, second-person warning against the wages of pleasure:

“I guess only women in cages
Can play down the things they lose
You think no tomorrow will come
When you lay down you can’t refuse”

The oblique narrative confers both intimacy and mystery, making the listener complicit as an eavesdropper with hints but few facts about the relationship at hand. Victor Feldman’s gleaming vibes and Ray Brown’s supple acoustic bass underline the track’s jazz sensibility, which continues with “The Boston Rag,” a darker reminiscence of wasted nights “back in Nineteen Sixty-Five,” dropping references not only to Beantown but also to Queens (“Lady Bayside”) and Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue as the music prowls the frontier between blues, rock and jazz.

Having ventured this far beyond mainstream rock three songs in, Steely Dan then crosses the border further into jazz through the angular guitar and keyboard phrasing, dissonant accents and key change head fakes of “Your Gold Teeth,” the album’s most adventurous track.

Latin rhythms, yet another oblique accusation hinting at sexual power plays, and a reference to avant-garde mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian locate us far from Main Street U.S.A. and the Top 40. By top loading the album with such complex music, Steely Dan sacrifices some of the commercial accessibility generated with their debut, yet those gambles further advance and define their style’s marriage of seductive musical ideas with often jarring narrative themes.

That Becker and Fagen hadn’t forgotten how to sharpen a hook is illustrated deftly with the back-to-back punch of the second side’s would-be hits and future catalog staples, “Show Biz Kids” and “My Old School,” which further deepen the East-West, past-present thematic poles.

Steely Dan in the control room at the Village Recorder in 1973. From left, Jim Hodder, Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Donald Fagen. The disembodied hand on the console, below Becker, belongs to engineer Roger “The Immortal” Nichols

On “Show Biz Kids,” guest Rick Derringer adds gritty slide guitar riffs that leer between lyrics offering a prescient indictment of entitled decadence, “show biz kids making movies of themselves” that “don’t give a fuck about anybody else.” Apart from predicting the Kardashian scourge awaiting us 30 years in the future, the song also anticipates the gilded age of merch: “They got the Steely Dan t-shirt” couldn’t have been more ironic when written, long before the Dan themselves surrendered to that revenue stream. Whether its late arrival in the sequence or the FCC-baiting f-bomb undermined its fate as the first single, stalling at #61 on the Hot 100, “Show Biz Kids” was still an album high point and a future classic rock staple, as well as another signifier to Becker and Fagen’s jaundiced view of Hollyweird and Lost Wages in particular, and celebrity culture in general.

Even less successful in its release as the album’s second single was “My Old School,” a caustic romp with autobiographical roots in a Bard drug bust that had landed its writers in jail. Like “Reelin’ in the Years,” “My Old School” deconstructs school-day memories into an ebullient anthem of liberation. The track soars through staccato guitar solos and a bravura Jimmie Haskell arrangement that marshals four saxophones to culminate in a sonic punchline: When Fagen’s vow to never return to his college town hinges on a Doomsday scenario, “California tumbles into the sea,” the sax chorus ends with a swan-diving baritone sax note funnier than the lyric itself.

A lovestruck valentine to a New Orleans hooker (“Pearl of the Quarter”) and a white-knuckle, post-nuclear distress call (“King of the World”) completed the album, maintaining the high bar already set, but Countdown to Ecstasy would see the poorest sales of any of Steely Dan’s albums from ’72 through ’80. Seen against the longer arc of their evolution, however, its musical advances only strengthened the foundations of Becker and Fagen’s wily, whip-smart music.

Steely Dan Countdown To Ecstacy (1973)

From starling.rinet.ru

Well, seems like I have no choice but to go with the popular opinion that this is Steely Dan’s best album. Ah, so long, my dreams of developing a snobby indie conscience… Then again, NO. I’ll downgrade my indie conscience even lower and award that title to Pretzel Logic, because that one has more great songs. But really, it seems that this time around everything, just about everything seems to work fine for the Dan. About the only flaw one could find is that there are few songs – only eight of them – but seeing as they turn out to be, on average, more memorable than the eleven short numbers of Pretzel Logic, that can as well be an advantage. The song lengths are growing as the boys make an even huger emphasis on the instrumental side of the business, but then again, the lyrical sophistication grows with absolutely equal speed, which means you get wittier solos, and wittier and far more obscure word images.

In fact, they almost overdo the trick; not too surprisingly, this is Steely’s least commercial album, at least in terms of chart popularity: after the hooky-hooky-hoo promise of Can’t Buy A Thrill, the public were a bit disappointed with the complexity of Ecstasy, not to mention that selecting ‘Show Biz Kids’ as the main single was an unwise decision – due to the extremely controversial and, for once, pretty obvious message of the song (“show biz kids making movies of themselves you know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”), it only got restrained airplay and therefore never got far enough sales-wise. It didn’t even help that the song itself is glorious, with a masterful slide riff supporting it (guest star Rick Derringer, not just anybody!) and Fagen’s quasi-rapped lyrics almost the equivalent of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ to some extent, easily the most aggressive and let-down-your-hair moment in the Steely catalog. The endless repeated groove might get on your nerves, of course, but some songs are made for endless repeated grooves – particularly those songs which actually build upon that groove and don’t take it as an absolute value in itself.

But there’s just too many positive factors without it as well. Palmer is out of the band, and the only song on which I somewhat miss his absence is the gentle ballad ‘Pearl Of The Quarter’, which Fagen tries to do Palmer-style (i. e. with softer notes in his voice and actually trying to draaaaaaaaw out his vowels), but even so, the song works on some level, especially when you get to the end and find out that the gal in question ‘loved the million dollar words I say, she loved the candy and flowers that I bought her, she said she loved me and was on her way’… Voulez voulez voulez vous? Bring on the beignets! Oh, well, supposedly it’s just about a French Quarter prostitute or something like that.

Steely Dan are still a band at this point, though, and their guitarists are occasionally working wonders, especially on songs where Steely Dan decide to strip some of the sections from vocals and dedicate them to masterful jamming. Like ‘Bodhisattva’, for instance. That song is mainly an excuse for jamming – I don’t think that Becker and Fagen were really that keen on the world knowing their suddenly-found Far East fetish, whether it be serious or just an object of mocking – but what jamming it is, with excellent, fast, fluent and actually emotionally captivating guitar and piano solos, or those nifty call-and-response passages between the guitar and the keyboards. Pay attention to the mighty be-boppy guitar solo around the fourth minute, if you please, that one really brings the house down.

The good news is that the jams never duplicate themselves. For instance, ‘The Boston Rag’ eventually involves into a bluesy rave-up with heavy, gruffly distorted guitar riffs alternating with Zappaesque technically perfect solos. ‘Your Gold Teeth’, on the other hand, is quiet blues with a lengthy electric piano showcase from Fagen, not unlike the one you’d hear on ‘Riders On The Storm’, while Jeff Baxter comes to the forefront with somewhat muffled, but still effective Santanaesque leads. And don’t forget that both tunes work as tunes as well – not to mention that choruses like ‘do you throw out your gold teeth, do you see how they roll’ will have you thinking for hours about what it is the Danners are trying to say. The creepy thing to realize is that the songs don’t really feel disconnected – I mean, the jams kinda naturally evolve as normal continuations of the songs themselves. The gloomy “depressed nostalgia” of ‘Boston Rag’ correlates perfectly to the heavy guitar sounds, and the somewhat more relaxed and detached sarcasm of ‘Gold Teeth’ obviously conforms to the moody piano. The perfect vibe.

It’s not like this is such a radical transition to a new style, of course, because at the core you’ll still be finding the same basic pop structures you had last time around. Is the drug-bust incident dedicated ‘My Old School’ all that different from ‘Change Of The Guard’, for instance? Hardly. Is ‘Razor Boy’ in a totally different paradigm from ‘Midnite Cruiser’? Don’t think so. On the other hand, the album closer, ‘King Of The World’, pretty much sounds like an obscure Derek & The Dominos relict crossed with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, if you can imagine something like that. So I’d just like to point out that Steely Dan are a band that requires really serious, really keen listening in order for you to capture all those little evolutionary details. Oh, and note that there are EIGHT session players on here already, even if four of them are only playing saxes on ‘My Old School’.

Steely Dan Countdown To Ecstacy (1973)

From sfloman.com

No sophomore slump here, though this album wasn’t nearly as commercially successful as its predecessor, in large part because the album lacked any hit singles, though for my money “My Old School” is the best thing that these guys ever did. It sports some perky piano, choice horns, and several jaw dropping guitar solos from “Skunk” Baxter alongside a campy chorus that chugs along for six glorious minutes.

Most of the other songs here are longer, too, as the band extends their swinging grooves on tracks such as the largely instrumental “Your Gold Teeth.” Meanwhile, “Bodhisattva” and “Show Biz Kids” each sport repetitive mantras that are more than redeemed by the dazzlingly sophisticated virtuosity of their instrumental passages.

The former song also showcases the band’s sense of humor, while the latter is a sarcastic putdown of the L.A. lifestyle. Meanwhile, “Razor Boy” and “Pearl of the Quarter” effectively show off the band’s mellower side, proving that they could convey straightforward ballads effectively if the mood so moved them.

The intense “The Boston Rag” (which, in a typical Steely Dan wink of the eye manner, takes place in New York) is another album highlight, while the jazzy but rocking “King of the World” closes things out with an unforgettable synthesizer melody. Overall, Countdown To Ecstasy contains consistently inventive songwriting and inspired performances by the 21 musicians credited, and Fagen’s soothing voice has settled in nicely as being a signature part of their sound.

The end result is an exceptional second effort that expands upon their excellent debut.