As I’m sure you all know by now, the ToffeeBoy music collection, both digital and vinyl, is home to a large amount of what we might broadly term ‘pop music’. What may not be so apparent is that said collection is also heavily Anglo-centric – or at least Brito-centric. I suspect that at least 75% of the music I own originated on these shores. Much of the remainder of the music that I listen to on a regular basis hails from one of two areas: either Scandinavialand (The Wannadies, The Cardigans, Kings Of Convenience, Gangway, The Concretes, The Hives, Sondre Lerch to name but a few) or the former colonies of Australia and New Zealand (The Go-Betweens and Crowded House spring instantly to mind). What is perhaps surprising (well, it was to me when I started to think about it) is that, apart from a fair amount of Jazz, I listen to comparatively little music from the birthplace of rock’n’roll, across the big pond.
There are of course exceptions to this rule* and one of those exceptions is (are?) the subject of this month’s ToffeeTask (OK, last month’s – I haven’t quite caught up).
Musically, I think we can place Steely Dan at the centre of an imaginary compass whose four cardinal points are: Pop, Rock, Jazz, and Prog. Perhaps we need to include Funk and R&B in there somewhere but that would make for an odd-looking and unconventional compass – so let’s not.
Their first album (Can’t Buy A Thrill) was released in 1972, and by the end of the decade the Dan had produced a further six (Countdown To Ecstacy, Pretzel Logic, Katy Lied, The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho) – any one of which I would gladly listen to right now. After disbanding in 1981, they reunited in 1993 and have been touring ever since, recording two further albums to date, including the Grammy-winning Two Against Nature which was released to huge critical acclaim in 2003.
There has been some discussion in previous Tasks about whether pop has to be musically ‘simple’ – I would argue that the crucial point is that it should at least have the initial appearance of simplicity, and this is a point that I want to use Steely Dan to illustrate. On the surface, much of their music has a foot-tapping, sing-along feel to it – it would pass the granny test with flying colours and not a single horse would be frightened, should it chance upon the music of Steely Dan while ambling down the street.
But listen more closely to their music and you’ll see that it is, in fact, genuinely complex. The melodies sit on top of chord sequences which shift in countless unexpected and un-pop-conventional patterns, taking you to places where simple music simply doesn’t venture. Rikki Don't Lose That Number (see the YouTube link above) is a great example of this - it sounds like a throwaway pop song - but try singing along to it, or better still, try playing along, and you'll see what a truly complex song it really is.
Steely Dan have always been essentially an album band: only Haitian Divorce troubled the UK top 20, reaching number 17 in 1976. They had slightly more single success stateside with six entries in the US top 30 but it’s the seven platinum-selling albums (including the double platinum Aja) which tell the real story. 30 million album sales worldwide is an impressive statistic by any standards.
The song-writing duo at the heart of Steely Dan, Walter Becker & Donald Fagen, are the only ever-present members of the band – essentially they are Steely Dan – but over the years they have been supported by some of the very best jazz and rock session musicians around: Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter were an integral part of Steely Dan in the early years but over the course of the first few albums the band became a duo, stopped touring and an increasing number of session musicians were called in. This peaked on the 1978 album Aja when the talents of Steve Gadd, Lee Ritenour, Larry Carlton, Victor Feldman and Wayne Shorter, among others, were used to stunning effect.
If you were to buy one Steely Dan album I would go for Katy Lied - but Aja would be a good alternative, particularly for the more jazz-minded among youI’m not arguing for a minute that everything you’ll hear from Steely Dan is pop – the track Aja, for a start, quite clearly isn’t – but ask your self this: if you were the owner of a record shop and had to file your Steely Dan albums, where would you put them?
One more Dan-related issue I need to deal with before letting you loose on the music: Becker & Fagen some times get accused of committing A.O.R. – I won’t have it d’y’hear? I won’t have it!Links:
Official website
Wikipedia
Last.fm
MySpace
* Some other notable American acts wot I like – a LOT: James Taylor, Dean Friedman, Little Feat, REM, 10,000 Maniacs
