Steely Dan Katy Lied (1975)

From steelydanreader.com

The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He sounded sort of like Bob Dylan, if Bob had just been defrosted out of a block of carbonite. (I was intensely devoted to The Empire Strikes Back, so carbonite was almost always on my mind.) Other Steely Dan records like Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam and Aja opened onto a strange and ominous world: double helixes in the sky, Haitian divorcées, the rise and fall of an LSD chef named Charlemagne, someone who drinks Scotch and then “dies behind the wheel.” The photo on the inside gatefold of the Greatest Hits showed two nasty-looking guys standing in what appeared to be a hotel dining room.

A few years later I found out “Steely Dan” was actually Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, and that their name was lifted from a William S. Burroughs novel (it’s a dildo), a discovery made while ditching seventh-grade social studies to read back issues of Rolling Stone in the public library. (I also learned that that the insect on the cover of Katy Lied was a katydid, not a praying mantis.) As an only child growing up in an unincorporated townlet in Wisconsin, there were many nights when it was just me in the chair and the Dan on the turntable and a few owls hooting in the woods. The sound of Dan music became as natural and enveloping to me to as the countryside itself. It led me to champion the songs of Becker and Fagen among the self-styled punks I later started hanging out with, provoking j’accuse-like denunciations: I was the enemy within, the guy who liked easy listening. I found disses among learned rock pedants in the magazines, too, which I began to catalog: Steely Dan was “hippie Muzak” and “Valium jazz”; their music “sounded like it was recorded in a hospital ward” and was “exemplarily well-crafted schlock”; they were a “brain without a body.” How could these people say such things about songs that were so deviant and bizarre and yet so warm and often staggeringly musical? The fact that the Dan had hits—really huge hits, actually, like “Do It Again,” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” and “Peg”—only made the whiff of some lurid, freaky luxury in the music seem more pronounced. You could be lyrically weird and musically oblique and still have lots of people like it. A mystery lurked at the center of it all. And the uncut essence of that mystery—the distillation of Dan music, the point beyond which the aesthetic cannot be pushed any further—is their airless, lacquered Masterwerk, Gaucho. Alternately held up as the apex of bloodless studio cerebration and fiercely defended among elite musos as multitrack record making at its finest, the sound of Gaucho is unmistakable. It shows up as recently as Usher’s just released Hard II Love record, the second track of which, “Missin U,” is built entirely around a four-bar sample taken from the last song on Gaucho, “Third World Man.”2.

Gaucho took two years to record, is only thirty-seven minutes long, and was the most expensive record ever made when it came out in 1980. The cover art shows a mustachioed man in a black hat doing a tango with a woman whose back is to us, the two of them frozen mid-caress in a yellow frame against a backdrop of speckled blue. The pair are cast in some kind of stucco, giving a tableau-like relief to the image that prepares the ear for the sculpted music within. Drop the needle on the opening bars: three tuned toms slink down to a sumptuously recorded Fender Rhodes electric piano breathing out the first eerie licks of “Babylon Sisters.” There are chords on Gaucho so cold and queasy they make you feel seasick. Reeds, guitars, pianos, horns, synths and human voices form mixtures achievable only in the controlled laboratory of the studio. (Like the Beatles, the Dan had stopped touring to focus exclusively on recording.)

As for the words, here is the second verse of the “Glamour Profession,” the last song on side A:

All aboard
the Carib Cannibal
Off to Barbados
Just for the ride
Jack with his radar
Stalking the dread moray eel
At the wheel
With his Eurasian bride

This is what I mean about lurid luxury: a high-tech yacht equipped with radar for stalking eels. Gaucho is packed with these sorts of perverse details, all with the glazed clarity of an opium trance. Take the title track’s “Custerdome,” which I imagine as a kind of dystopic Civil War memorial/penthouse, the residence of a gay couple whose domestic serenity is upset by a man in a “spangled leather poncho.” The jaded LA scenester in “Babylon Sisters” “jogs with show-folk on the sand” and “drinks kirschwasser from a shell”; on “Time Out of Mind” the narrator “chases the dragon” leading him to junk visions of a “mystical sphere straight from Lhasa, where people are rolling in the snow.” There are also “celluloid bikers,” “Szechuan dumplings” and a detective who wears a hearing aid. Nothing could be further from the tepid clichés of the era’s reigning soft rock.3.

During the recording sessions for Gaucho, audio engineer, computer wizard, and Dan right-hand man Roger Nichols heeded Fagen’s wishes for superhuman perfection in drum performance and custom built a percussion sequencer he named Wendel. Designing and making dedicated hardware to meet the demands of a musician or composer is the sort of thing you might find going on at Pierre Boulez’s acoustic research facility under the Pompidou Centre, but rarely does this happen in the pop world. Yes, Michael Jackson had MIDI percussion triggers sewn into his pants and shirtsleeves so he could build drum patterns while he danced (genius); and yes, Prince actually invented a drum-machine sound, that wonderful clooshk you hear all over 1999 and Purple Rain and Around the World in a Day, which he discovered while experimenting with the tuning parameters on a Linn drum machine; but Wendel was built from scratch. It allowed for superfine inflections—there were sixteen different hi-hat samples instead of the single pulse of white noise typical of the drum boxes of the time—thus avoiding the ear fatigue that results from hearing an identical pattern looped over and over. “Wendel can play exactly what a drummer plays,” Nichols evangelized. And that was important to the Dan, who were known for ruthlessly plowing through ten or twelve drummers at a crack in search of the perfect take (more than forty musicians played on the recording sessions for Gaucho and only seventeen made it onto the record). Wendel was insanely expensive—one crash cymbal cost twelve thousand dollars worth of RAM—and getting the machine to “play” anything was a laborious, coding-intensive process undertaken in the 8085 assembly language, a now obsolete protocol for translating symbolic code into object code. Fagen remembered Nichols typing for twenty minutes and then pressing return for only a single snare hit to come out. It’s crude by today’s standards, but in the spring of 1979 it was, well, the radar equipped eel-stalking yacht of programmable percussion. WENDEL was awarded a platinum record after Gaucho sold a million copies.4.

A few years ago I went to see the Dan play through all of Gaucho at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan (they started touring again some time in the midnineties). I found a single seat online, right in the middle of the first row of the balcony. We happened at the time to need a new toilet seat in our apartment and my wife, who was staying home to care for our infant son, said, If you’re going out to the Beacon tonight can you get a new toilet seat while you’re at it? I figured this would need to happen before the show, which would start at about nine. So I left early and found one meeting my wife’s specifications at a place just up the block from the theater and then headed over. I’d timed it perfectly: the opening band had just finished and people were getting amped to see the Dan. I did that side-step move you do at a baseball game or a movie theater to reach the middle of a row—actually pretty perilous since I was holding a toilet seat over my head and to my right was a sheer drop off the balcony. I smelled weed and got scared because I thought the contact high would cause me to lose my balance and fall over the edge. When I got to my seat there was almost no room to move because I was squeezed between two Upper West Side Danheads with wispy gray ponytails (one of whom was the source of the weed) so I clutched the toilet seat to my chest and watched as a scarily well-rehearsed nine-piece band played through Gaucho from start to finish. Hearing a couple thousand people collectively singing lines like “bodacious cowboys such as your friend will never be welcome here / high in the Custerdome” and (of course) “the Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian / make tonight a wonderful thing” was fun, even moving. But I also resented the experience because I wanted Gaucho all to myself, and finally cursed my decision to go to the concert when it would have been better to stay home and listen to the twenty-four-bit remastered version on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Gaucho burned brighter as a recording, I decided, and I craved the guaranteed exactitude of repeated listens heard again and again, always the same way. The toilet seat, still clutched to my chest on the subway ride home, seemed a fitting (or at least conveniently available) emblem for the way the resentment partially eclipsed the excitement of hearing Gaucho played live.5.

Just about the time a compact disc of Gaucho arrived at the house in Wisconsin (my audiophile father had resolved to replace all of his LPs with copies in the new CD format) I was in the middle of my first slack-jawed read through a mass-market paperback of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Gleaming silver wafers with laser-encoded music on them seemed to leap right out of Gibson’s technodelic near-future, and what I’m tempted to treat as the mere historical accident of the fully digital Gaucho appearing in tandem with my belated read through the novel has since been dispelled for two reasons: (1) Donald Fagen’s second solo record, Kamakiriad (1993), is a cyberpunk concept album about a hydroponic car with a bionic R & B sound even more frigid and airtight than Gaucho, and (2) Gibson himself has since written a fan essay (“Any ’Mount of World,” 2000) in which he notes his affection for the “paraliterary” songs of Becker and Fagen, referring to the imaginary third entity that results from their collaboration—“Steely Dan”—as appearing in “toe cleavage ostrich loafers flaking red Maui clay on the studio broadloom.”6.

Gibson’s great line neatly captures how far the Dan’s sensibility was from the rest of the lyrics found in standard FM gruel. Fagen and Becker actually allude to the agon with their peers on “Everything You Did” (The Royal Scam, 1976), when a dreary domestic dispute leads someone in the song to say “turn up the Eagles the neighbors are listening.” Less than a year later Don Henley wrote his epic “Hotel California” (which I also listened to and parsed for secret meanings in the leather chair) at the denouement of which the staff of the eponymous hotel try to “stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast.” “It” was the hangover of sixties free love idealism and the subsequent trappings of seventies rock stardom: drug and alcohol dependency and various other hazardous enticements from which you may “check out any time you like” but “can never leave.” Some have heard in Henley’s weird adjective “steely” a rejoinder to the Dan. An online video series called Yacht Rock goes so far as to dramatize the backstory of the feud as a playground scene in which adenoidal Becker and Fagen are held in a double headlock by Henley and his fellow Eagle Glenn Frey—jock bullies beating up the eggheads.7.

I’ve since found myself inhabiting a world that seems more and more to have been extracted from some Gaucho–inspired mise-en-scene. My mom (not herself especially fond of the Dan) recently purchased an Amazon Echo, the cylindrical AI that answers questions put to it in real time and which responds to the name “Alexa.” Alexa, what is Steely Dan? I asked on a recent visit to Wisconsin. “Steely Dan is a Grammy Award-winning American jazz-rock band featuring core members Donald Fagen and Walter Becker,” says Alexa. Wow, okay, not bad. Alexa, what is Gaucho? “Gaucho Sport Club is a Soccer Club in Passo Fundo, Brazil.” Nothing about South American cowboys? Alexa, what is Gaucho the Steely Dan album? “Sorry, I can’t find the answer to the question I heard.” Alexa, what is Katy Lied. Alexa: “Hmmm, I can’t find the answer to the question I heard.” Alexa, what is a katydid? My mom: “Paul, leave Alexa alone.” Leave Alexa Alone. It could be the title of a Steely Dan album.

Steely Dan Katy Lied (1975)

From somethingelsereviews.com

Released in March 1975, the often-overlooked Katy Lied marked the first album after the breakup of Steely Dan’s original lineup. From now on, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would choose from among music’s most talented and sought-after sessions players. As the following five deep cuts show, Katy Lied was better for it.

Fagen continued to emerge as a nuanced vocalist whose eccentric inflections tip off the sinister meaning behind seemingly innocent phrases like “You must know it’s right / The spore is on the wind tonight / You won’t feel it till it grows.” He wanted Michael McDonald, who makes his initial appearance as a background singer here, to take over as lead vocalist – but thankfully got voted down. McDonald’s contributions gave these sessions some fantastic lift, but he couldn’t match Donald Fagen’s feel for the songs’ complex lyrics and moods.

Of course, you can’t have a discussion about Katy Lied without also touching on the infamous dbx debacle. Obliquely referred to in Becker and Fagen’s 1999 liner notes, this mixing issue was explained in gory detail by guitarist Denny Dias, who has a standout moment on “Your Gold Teeth II.”

“Mixing was an absolute nightmare. Every song was mixed at least twice, and not because we were being fussy,” Dias later recalled. “In fact, we had mixed the entire record before we realized that there was a problem. We were using the new dbx noise reduction system, which was supposed to give us a better signal-to-noise ratio than Dolby, and for some reason the dbx units could no longer decode the mixes on tape. They sounded dull and lifeless, and no one could explain why.”

Even legendary engineer Roger Nichols was reduced to a mere, dumbfounded mortal. Ultimately, the task of remixing and mastering fell to Dias by default, because no one else wanted to do it. To the great credit of Dias and Walter Becker (who stepped in late into the process), Katy Lied was salvaged sufficiently enough for release. The 1999 remaster further improved the audio fidelity, even if marginally so.

Still, that shortcoming – real or perceived – doesn’t rise to the level of distraction. Maybe it would have, if the music itself had been mediocre, but there are way too many accomplished traits found in every song as Katy Lied skillfully reconciles rock, jazz and blues into a radio-friendly format.

You hear it in radio favorites like “Black Friday” and “Bad Sneakers,” of course, but also in the album’s lesser-known moments. Let’s return to five of them here:

‘ROSE DARLING’

“Rose Darling” is one of the band’s fairly rare love songs, but in true Steely Dan fashion, it’s really more of a lust song. The narrator seems to be pleading so hard with the object of his attempted affair that he even begins to drop the pretense that this is about romance: (“All my empty word of love / can never screen the flash I feel”) and even gets nasty (“you won’t feel it ’til it grows”).

While Walter Becker and Donald Fagan are cracking themselves up over the lyrics, the music behind them is, as usual, seriously good. “Rose Darling” benefits from tasteful piano comping, crisp drumming and the newly added Michael McDonald lifting up the chorus. There’s also a clean, bluesy guitar courtesy of Dean Parks. Parks was a long-time favorite sessionist of Steely Dan, having appeared on records ranging from Pretzel Logic to Two Against Nature. Before he got his first call into a Steely Dan recording session, Parks had already done dates for Stevie Wonder, Helen Reddy, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Marvin Gaye and Billy Joel.

For “Rose Darling,” Parks’ liquid, string-bending lines found a perfect place alongside that piano. This was also one of the rare times where he soloed on a Steely Dan record, since Parks was typically brought in only for rhythm work. Sounding a bit like Larry Carlton (another legendary L.A. session guitarist who appeared on the next track from Katy Lied), Parks is never about flash but is all about taste. Dean Parks’ understated performance ensures that “Rose Darling” still holds up, decades after it was taped.

‘DOCTOR WU’

Supposedly a tale of a breach of trust between a physician and patient, “Doctor Wu” represents one of the finest examples of Steely Dan’s signature mastery of an intricate yet soulful harmonic progression.

Though it didn’t catch fire with me at first, this artful combination of prose, melody and execution has to rank up there as one of the group’s best-ever moments on record. The cherry on top of this Steely Dan sundae is Phil Woods’ guest appearance. Already an alto-sax legend well before he taped this date, Woods’ advanced but smooth execution is here in full glory.

It took someone of that stature to hold his own inside a perfectly crafted tune such as “Doctor Wu.” The bop legend, whose lavish phraseology also graced Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” offers a passionate swing you rarely hear from saxophonists of later generations.

‘YOUR GOLD TEETH II’

Steely Dan is famously known for performing rock with a heaping dose of jazz elements, but those songs would rarely swing, as jazz does. Here’s a notable exception.

“Your Gold Teeth II,” the obvious followup to “Your Gold Teeth,” is only connected to the earlier version lyrics-wise. There’s some reference to a William S. Burroughs novel, I believe, but musically it’s much different.

“II” was, up to this point, the most sophisticated song Steely Dan had attempted, and a harbinger of the style they perfected later on with Aja. The best performances are provided by Jeff Porcaro and Denny Dias.

Porcaro had to not only pilot through shifting rhythms but also give “Your Gold Teeth II” the right feel. Donald Fagen suggested Porcaro listen to a Charles Mingus record featuring drummer Dannie Richmond in order to understand the particular drumming style Fagen wanted. As a teen, Fagen used to take a bus into New York City to watch Mingus’ band perform, and he was looking for the drum performance he remembered seeing from Richmond back then. Porcaro returned a couple of days later and nailed it, shuffling with the mastery of Elvin Jones – never mind Richmond.

Dias was incredible on this song, too. Though he often played in the shadow of Jeff Baxter, Denny was the guy Walter Becker and Fagen called when looking for liquid jazz phrasings and dense note patterns over intricate chord and rhythmic changes. It was one area Denny Dias excelled in, even over Skunk. That ability is on display here, as he offers one of the best (and unheralded) of all the great Steely Dan guitar solos.

Steely Dan is a rock band that was capable of doing things most rock bands can’t even comprehend, much less carry out. “Your Gold Teeth II,” one of my top two favorite Steely Dan songs overall, is one of those moments that clearly sets them apart from the pack.

‘CHAIN LIGHTNING’

Early on, Steely Dan liked to occasionally break from cerebral arty jazz-rock and just jam out on a simpler, blues-based ditty. “Chain Lightning,” with its standard 12-bar approach, is a fine example of the form.

Featuring another appearance by guitar great Rick Derringer, “Chain Lightning” can also be construed as a follow-up to the earlier “Show Biz Kids” – a one-chord song where Derringer was allowed to play his vicious slide from beginning to end. “Chain Lightning” has far more chords and Derringer doesn’t slide, but he once again owns the song.

His raw, biting licks alone put an edge to the song that more than canceled out Fagen’s airy and harmonized vocals. In the intervening time between the songs, Derringer had attained a measure of stardom from this first solo album and the evergreen boogie-rock hit “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo.” But Rick Derringer is first and foremost a blues guitarist and, as with his first time out in a Steely Dan session, he fit the bill for “Chain Lightning” perfectly.

‘ANY WORLD (THAT I’M WELCOME TO)’

On occasion, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen would bring one of their heroes into the studio for a guest appearance. Ray Brown contributed acoustic bass to “Razor Boy,” and Wayne Shorter later played sax on “Aja.” “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” boasts the drumming of the great Hal Blaine.

In terms of chart success, there’s been no one even remotely close to him: Forty, that’s right, 40 of the songs Blaine drummed on topped the charts – and a total of 150 made it into the Top 10. The Grammy award for Record of the Year went to songs featuring Blaine for six consecutive years between 1966-71.

“Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” is one of many Steely Dan songs where the drumming sounds easy, but that’s only because Hal Blaine is making it sound easy. The verses are low key, but the transition to the chorus is more uptempo, and the chorus itself shifts to a fills-laden crescendo and then back again to the gentle gait of the verses. Blaine was able to handle all the discreet modulating of cadence and timekeeping the song demanded with aplomb.

Jeff Porcaro, who handled drums on the rest of Katy Lied, could have tackled this, too. But sometimes you gotta make room for the champ – or, as been reported, Porcaro slept in that day. Either way, Hal Blaine’s appearance on a Steely Dan song is something that just had to happen. For whatever reason, it did – and I’m glad.

Steely Dan Katy Lied (1975)

From pitchfork.com

Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records.

The notes on the back cover of Katy Lied begin: “This is a high fidelity recording. Steely Dan uses a specially constructed 24-channel tape recorder, a ‘State-of-the-Art’ 36-input computerized mixdown console, and some very expensive German microphones.” The note continues with a laundry list of gear and settings, which are probably real but delivered with a smirk, and then concludes with, “For best results observe the R.I.A.A. curve.”

I shudder to think how many people have listened to Katy Lied without observing the R.I.A.A. curve. But this is the kind of thing dudes in the 1970s did—list the gear used to create an album and then give suggestions to the listener about the equipment and settings they might use to realize it. The recording summary reminds me of those on another LP by an audio obsessive that came out in 1975—Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which he may have written while on speed and which definitely makes very little sense. But when audiophile musicians put their music out into the world, they hate losing control of it. What if someone listens to their perfectly sculpted sonic creation on a crappy all-in-one portable turntable with a battered needle? And let’s not even get into what it sounds like on earbuds.

The irony of the note on the back of Katy Lied, and possibly the inspiration for its inclusion, is that the album’s sound was, according to the band, deeply flawed. While Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were recording it with producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols, they employed a then-new technology called dbx, which expanded the dynamic range beyond the conventional limit of analog tape. The system worked by compressing the incoming signal and then expanding it on playback, with some filtering in there to reduce noise. It was more complicated than Dolby, boosting and then lowering a wider array of frequencies, and also, potentially, more effective.

But something went very wrong. “It was better sounding than anything you’ve ever heard to this date,” Katz told Cameron Crowe a couple of years later in Rolling Stone. “Even Aja. Unbelievable. We went to mix it, and the tape sounded funny. We found out the dbx noise reduction system we were using was not functioning properly.” Panic set in and some steps had to be done over with the release date approaching rapidly but they salvaged the record, at least as far as the label and the audience were concerned. But Becker and Fagen could never listen to Katy Lied again. The well had been poisoned, and they heard flaws in what to almost everyone else sounded pristine.

That’s too bad for them because Katy Lied is a very good album. It captures Steely Dan in the thick of it all, still hungry and energized by their early burst of creativity but not taking anything for granted. Before Katy Lied, Steely Dan were a rock band, but this is the record where they became something else.

In 1974, following the shows to support their third album Pretzel Logic, Fagen and Becker decided that they didn’t enjoy touring, didn’t make much money from it, and would prefer to focus on making records. It was like the Beatles after Revolver, except that Steely Dan weren’t especially huge and their lives weren’t especially crazy. More than anything, the shift was an outgrowth of their studio obsession. With no upcoming gigs, they no longer needed a steady band, and Steely Dan became officially what it already kinda was—Becker and Fagen and whatever musicians they deemed good enough to complete their vision.

Katy Lied lives at the midpoint of Steely Dan’s first act. Behind them were three records that were incrementally more sophisticated and less rock-centered. After this one were three increasingly finicky and obsessive albums that would find them reaching for a kind of perfection, albums that found them chronicling the decadence around them from the inside. Where they once wrote about the delightfully sleazy underbelly of life in America from a remove, they started to write more about what they saw around them. Katy Lied is the fulcrum in this progression—it’s messier, less sure of itself, besotted neither with youthful confidence nor veteran polish.

After the departure of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter following the dissolution of their touring unit, guitars moved a half-step into the background. These are songs for piano, jazzier and lighter, and the keyboards are higher in the mix. Listening to it brings to mind nearly-empty cocktail bars after the people with something to live for have all gone home and cabaret shows in seedy theaters. Fagen sings with gusto but if it’s possible for sweat to make a sound, then you could say he sounds a little sweaty. Almost all the drums were played precocious by a 20-year-old genius named Jeff Porcaro, who would become one of the world’s most in-demand session players, and there are many distinctive background vocals from Michael McDonald, who would become one of yacht rock’s most in-demand session singers.

The songs Becker and Fagen came up with are the usual mix of the funny, cynical, and cryptic, but here and there are moments of what seems to be actual sweetness. The brilliance of their songwriting is that they always aimed for complexity and never allowed themselves to be pinned down. Everything was up for negotiation, even when the lyrics were studded with clear meaning. “Black Friday” is a brilliant depiction of chaos, describing what it would be like to make your way out of town and cash your checks when the apocalypse hits. Fagen makes evil sound appealing, suggesting that it might be the only sane response to living in an insane world, but listen with the other ear and you hear the satire and even a kind of yearning from someone who might actually wish for a better world. Meanwhile, Becker plays the best guitar solo on the album, capturing the ragged edge of the moment.

Steely Dan made songs about the destructive force of male vanity that came from two people you knew were speaking from personal experience. They never hold themselves above their characters, but they don’t let them off the hook, either. On “Bad Sneakers,” we see a man bopping around the street near Radio City Music Hall like he owns the place. We feel what he feels but also see how ridiculous he looks, while McDonald’s background vocals suggest grace in his awkwardness, celebrating the energy that powers him even though his actions are laughable. “Rose Darling” is the third track in a row to mention money specifically, but on a more casual listen it sounds something like a pure love song. And then two cuts later, the A-side closes with “Dr. Wu.”

Lodged in the middle of the album that came in the middle of the decade and in the middle of Steely Dan’s decade-long, seven-album run is one of their very best songs, a weary and funny and specific and mysterious ode to longing and loss. “Dr. Wu” gave the album its title (“Katie lies/You can see it in her eyes”) and crystalizes its essential mood. One moment it’s about drugs, the next it’s about a love triangle, and then you’re not sure what’s next or even what’s real, and weaving through it all is the saxophone solo from Phil Woods, connecting dots between musical worlds both corny and elegant, from Billy Joel to Billy Strayhorn.

The characters flailing clumsily throughout Katy Lied are paralyzed by desires they aren’t introspective enough to understand, so all they can do is keep stumbling forward. “I got this thing inside me,” Fagen sings in a bridge on the late album highlight “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”, “I only know I must obey/This feeling I can’t explain away.” Sometimes obeying those desires lead people to something ugly and inexcusable, as on “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a song about a guy who is almost certainly grooming kids for abuse. It’s a Todd Solondz film rendered in sound, and Fagen only shows us the lead-up, forcing us to assemble the pieces in our heads as he hides the crime behind the album’s cheeriest arrangement.

This collision between word and sound—in which the precise moral takeaway and is obscured even as the music makes it go down easy—made the band hard to trust. “The words, while frequently not easy to get the definite drift of, are almost always intriguing and often witty,” John Mendelsohn wrote in a review of Katy Lied in Rolling Stone. But a few paragraphs later he concluded: “Steely Dan’s music continues to strike me essentially as exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock.”

It sounds harsh but Mendelsohn captured how a lot of people think about Steely Dan, then and now. This band was always about asking questions instead of giving answers, and Katy Lied came out in a particular moment of uncertainty and confusion. The fact that Becker and Fagen themselves couldn’t bear to hear their own creation only deepens the mystery. They wanted desperately to render their tragically amusing scenes just so, and the sonic purity they’d been chasing would soon be theirs. But here they give failure a kind of twisted majesty.

Steely Dan Katy Lied (1975)

From musicandvideoreview.com

If there is such a thing as a consensus amongst hard core Steely Dan fans as to the Dan’s best effort, almost everyone – including the general population that made it their biggest selling platter – would concede the crown to Aja. Seven tracks of perfection, each brilliantly orchestrated and executed by a cast of musician’s musicians. The lyrics were “languid and bittersweet” and if you didn’t like ‘em then “drink your big black cow and get out of here.”

Much to admire here. – Purdie’s shuffle, Graydon’s Peg solo, McDonald’s one word background vocals, and Steve Gadd’s greatest moment ever as a studio drummer. If you can get past the stock footage, Classic Albums gives the full story on this great collection of songs in rich detail with snarky comments by Becker and Fagen themselves.

Then there is Katy Lied. That sweet beauty of an album with the insect on the cover. Cameron Crowe writing in Rolling Stone said it best describing Dan’s fourth album as “Anonymous, absolutely impeccable swing-pop. No cheap displays of human emotion.”

Amongst the Dan illuminati, well-documented DBX problems aside, Lied may be their finest effort. Katy was the harbinger of what was to come with Royal Scam, Aja, and Gaucho. Great songs in a variety of tempos and feels, strategic placement of the perfect session people, and the emergence of Walter Becker on Black Friday and Bad Sneakers, as a lead guitarist of peer with the greats that came before him (Randall, Dias, and Baxter).

There is just so much to this album.

Nineteen year old not-yet-legendary drummer Jeff Porcaro provides a clinic in setting a rhythmic foundation though a number of styles. Jeff swings through odd time signatures in Gold Teeth, unveils his soon-to-be-signature shuffle on Black Friday, does his best Jim Gordon on Chain Lightning, and adds John Guerin flourishes on the fade out of Dr. Wu. Anyone wondering why Mr. Groove is remembered with such awe can see why on Katy Lied. It wasn’t until the new millennium that Becker and Fagin would again rely so much on just one drummer.

There is also the restrained and always-perfect melodic flourish supplied by future Grammy winner Michael Omartian on piano. He is all over that record, always complimenting the song, never drawing attention to himself or his instrument – just like he did on Rikki Don’t loose that number. His contribution to the overall tone of Katy cannot be overstated. His playing is beautiful.

Nor can contributions of guitarist Dean Parks be overlooked. Listen to Rose Darling, and pay attention to his passing tones. He swings, keeps the song harmonically centered, and manages to provide a tasty solo as well. It’s understated, and brilliant at the same time. This is why Park’s resume has literally thousands of gigs. His support is all over that record – yet Parks is often overlooked by fans in favor or the flashier axemen on Lied. Scream “Injustice!” as you go back and listen to the guitar in the background throughout the album.

Hang on Sloopy’s Rick Derringer provides a jaw dropping blues solo on Chain Lighting begging the question, “Rock and Roll and Hochie Koo? Same Guy?” Elliot Randall saves the weakest song, Throw Back the Little Ones, with his solo. Denny Dias bebops his way through an impressive bridge of changes, all with swing and melody, on Gold Teeth part 2. Walter Becker simply astonishes us all with the range showed on the Blues based shredding on Black Friday (what a tone!), and the lyrical every-note-counts break on Bad Sneakers. We also see the first appearance of soon-to-be critical (think 5th Beatle) Larry Carlton who lays down some Crusaders scratch and funk on Daddy Don’t Live in that New York City No More. People like to call Royal Scam “the guitar album.” Not so sure about that, this album is full of great guitar.

I wish I were done. But like an ad from the late Billy Mays, “wait, there’s still more!”

Unknown-at-the-time Michael McDonald makes his first appearance on vinyl, providing his distinctive backup vocals that would become ubiquitous 10 years hence. His remarkable multi-tracked in-tune-with-himself work on Bad Sneakers, Black Friday, and Any World that I’m Welcome is still amazing. This was a very talented find for the Dan, and “Rick Jarred Productions” whoever the heck they were. I suppose someone profiled in the book Hit Men. Still wonder why that had to be included in the credits.

The worlds most recorded drummer, Hal Blaine, sits in on Any World that I’m Welcome to and shows how rim taps are done and concludes with a tour of his toms on the fade out. Chuck Rainey is also on board, although I suppose the bass mix might be a frustration from the DBX, it is hard to hear. Check out the bass on Black Friday, if you can, it’s amazing.

Fagen sounds great in all his double tracked glory. He proves once again to be perhaps the only person who can deliver the Dan’s very peculiar lyrics (are you crazy, are you high, or just an ordinary guy?) which are everywhere on the record. So is the humor (I’ll bet she’s in Detroit with lots of money in the bank, although I could be wrong) and so is that most frustrating of Dan adjectives, irony (everyone’s gone to the movies, now we’re alone at last). It’s all there, in very tight, mostly under four minute packages.

So are the weirdest liner notes I have ever read. An inside joke to which no one but Becker, Fagen, producer Gary Katz, and engineer Roger Nichols understand and get. Payback for the DBX problems I guess. When you make a record as good as this one, you are entitled.

While this 1975 release went Gold, it had no singles that charted higher than #37 and was destined to become what it is today: the hidden gem of Steely Dan.

Steely Dan Katy Lied (1975)

From

This is my favorite Steely Dan album. This is a collection of immaculately-written, immaculately-performed, stinging, satirical, sarcastic compositions. There really aren’t enough stars in the world to describe how I PERSONALLY feel about this record, a mainstay in my Top 5.

“Black Friday” is a blistering bit of almost-social commentary, featuring great guitar workouts from Walter Becker; “Bad Sneakers” is a tasty pop tune with a mourning and pensive solo by, I believe, Larry Carlton, “Rose Darling” is about hiding an affair and it rules, “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More” is a nasty number whose intentions are as impure as any the Dan ever concocted, “Dr. Wu” is one of those songs to journey off on a country road to and is, to me, the funnest song in their entire catalog to interpret.

My own judgment tells me the protagonist has gone to a psychologist, Dr. Wu, to examine his relationship with Katy. Rather than helping the patient, Wu absconds off somewhere with Katy and leaves the protagonist to contemplate his relationship with both parties.

The second side of the album is just a bit weaker. “Your Gold Teeth II” and the Caribbean-tinged jangly “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” are by no means bad songs, but they don’t hold up to the quality of the rest of the album. “Chain Lightning” is a groovy blues number, but the album thankfully closes as strong as it began with the album’s strongest and most personally-identifiable hook in “Any World That I’m Welcome To” and the brilliant “Throw Back the Little Ones”, one of those songs whose lyrics are fun for their own sake. You’d probably be disappointed if you found out what they’re actually supposed to mean, if they’re actually supposed to mean anything.

A great, great album. George Starostin described it as “A dangerous, yet strangely peaceful record – then again, be warned, as ‘peaceful’ often alternates with ‘boring’.” I don’t much agree with him after the hyphen, but the first part of it hits the nail right about on the head. The album is dangerous, perhaps their most dangerous, in fact, and Steely Dan have always been a slightly dangerous band.

This aspect of them is lost on many people, but they can really say some unnerving things if you’re bothering to listen closely, and nowhere is that side of Dan more prominent than on Katy Lied.

Steely Dan Katy Lied (1975)

From starling.rinet.ru

Katy Lied is often hailed as a turning point in Steely Dan’s career, a moment when the band decided it finally had enough with ‘rock’ (not that the band was very much ‘rock’ in the first place) and veered off in the direction of a more jazz-poppy audience-friendly sound. It’s also the first record where ‘Steely Dan’ as such finally became an undisputable duo: just Donald Fagen and Walter Becker working together in the studio with tons of other session musicians, some of them past full-fledged band members, some not. They also weren’t touring at all at this point, and it’s easy to see why: this sort of music is really unfit for live playing, much more so than Can’t Buy A Thrill at least.

I’m not such a great fan of the notorious ‘trademark Dan arrangements’ of their second, session-musician dominated period, as many people seem to be: I consider all of these songs very tastefully arranged, but there’s hardly anything truly phenomenal here. If anything, one should emphasize exactly this fact: Katy Lied is a very ‘non-outstanding’ record (though certainly more ‘outstanding’ than, say, Aja, which runs along so smoothly I feel like skating on polished ice), yet it is also not pretentious and totally adequate.

Despite all the taste and smoothness, though, I didn’t feel like loving all of this record at first. The funny thing is, out of ten songs on here, I quite enjoyed the first five.. and used to quite despise the last five. Well, not ‘despise’. To a certain extent, they’re simply unmemorable. A few of these make the fatal mistake of getting on by lyrics alone, and that’s never the sign of true Dan genius. Yeah, whatever, I’m quite shocked (in the artistically-correct sense of the word) by the subject matter of ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Movies’, where a pervert waits for a child’s parents to go away and then proceeds to feed him with porno flicks; but as far as my limited musical competence is concerned, the song has no melody at all, and the stupid, vibes-driven refrain sounds like some demented dated doo-wop chanting.

Likewise, I suppose that many a broken-hearted intelligent person will happily identify himself with the protagonist in ‘Any World (I’m Welcome To)’, a song that has what might be passed for the most pessimistic refrain of all time; but the melody is routine, undistinguished lounge jazz – unmemorable, diluted piano chords with hardly any structure or serious rhythmic pattern. Now this is the kind of stuff you’ll never meet on a Bob Dylan record…

Mind you – none of these songs are nasty. After a couple hundred listens, one even starts to appreciate cute little snatches like the gentle-but-perverse refrain of ‘Throw Back The Little Ones’ or the relaxed organ of ‘Chain Lightning’ (possibly the best number on the second side, but still too soapy for me because the melody is way too primitive and the harmonies are way too unimpressive… and unexpressive, too). In a certain sense, the second side can even be extremely rewarding, as it’s the more “musically-oriented” side, with Steely trying their hand at funk and fusion and, well, all the stuff that places them in the category that I chose for them out of near-random principle. (So sue me!).

And yet don’t go away, because now I’m gonna blabber a bit about the first five songs. The best composition on here is the one that opens the album, and it’s a good thing, because this was my first Steely Dan record and you know how much depends on your first impression… ‘Black Friday’ is the hardest song on the album: a ferocious (well, ‘ferocious’ in the SD sense – no Jimi Hendrix poking around, that’s understood) blues workout, where the usually hard-hitting lyrics are ideally complemented by a brilliant guitar part and a wonderful vocal arrangement – the echoey effect on Mr Fagen’s voice was a brilliant idea, and it makes the song all the more spooky-spooky. Not that I really understand what the hell the dude is singing about; in any case, lines like “When Black Friday comes/I’ll stand down by the door/And catch the grey men when they/Dive from the fourteenth floor” sound much better when they’re echoed around the room, don’t they?

Then there’s the humbly gorgeous ‘Bad Sneakers’, a steady, solid piano ballad with… hey, you will not believe it – with a real hook. Yeah, I mean that little tricky time signature change when they sing ‘bad sneakers and a Pina Colada my friend’ – it drew my attention immediately and made me realize what a great song this is in its entirety. Good work. The guitar solos are nice, too, and Donald sounds uncannily like Dylan. Quite catchy. He also sounds very Dylanish on ‘Rose Darling’, a weird, but charming ballad where the protagonist invites his… err…. partner to… err… well.

Apparently, his wife which he lovingly calls ‘snake Mary’ is in another town and moreover she’s gone to bed, so there’s really nothing to worry about. But again, it’s not the lyrics that attract me, it might be those fully convincing vocals and the fluent guitar lines and the powerful piano chords in the refrain and… mmm, it’s very hard to discuss Steely Dan songs, they’re all so alike and yet all so different you have to choose your words very carefully.

Although it’s not too difficult to discuss the stunning blues ‘Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More’. The song’s built on an addictive guitar riff, and, again, the vocals sound so powerful and desperate you can’t help singing along. And then, of course, there’s ‘Doctor Wu’. This works as the magnum opus of the album, almost like a mini-conceptual-rock-opera in its own rights, and while I don’t find the melody as powerful as on the previous four songs, I simply won’t say anything bad about it. For trivia, there’s a very nice sax solo by Phil Woods on it which is well worth hearing.

In all, I fully agree with those who rate Katy Lied as a ‘transitional’ album: it’s almost as if they started out as a ‘rock band’ (‘Black Friday’), metamorphosed into a jazz band halfway through the album (‘Doctor Wu’) and fuzzed out into a mellow jazz-pop combo towards the end. The process is not a very pleasant one, at least, in my humble opinion; then again, the mellowed-out dudes might wanna reverse my judgements in exactly the opposite order. All the world is made of freaks, after all: it’s just that there are quite a few ways of freaking out.