Everything Must Go - A Review
Track One | The Last Mall.
If you only knew that a new Dan song was going to include the line “sweet treats and surprises for the little buckeroos,” it would be enough to tip you off to the fact that you weren't going to be disappointed by the latest, the newest Steely Dan album. Only four years ago, a new Becker and Fagan recording was marooned in the realms of the miraculous if you were in England and out of any industry or insider grapevine loop. But here, in your favourite listening hole, is track one of the new event, bursting into life and led by Walter's singing Chicago blues lead guitar. It's the Steely Dan twentieth century shuffle in the twenty-first and it cooks all the way to its truncated ending.
This is to speak ten or twelve listenings in. At first it sits on the ears oddly. It's light, it bounces, yet it tells a doomwatch tale of apocalypse. It could be a meteorite, it could be a bomb. It doesn't matter. A brutal, cynical attack on the shallowness of American middle class culture is what it is, lyrically, and at first you're trying to get your head around that as you're assaulted by the customary Steely Dan norms. Staccato mid-range piano chord jabs punctuating the text laid down by crisp drums, the Fagen vocal narration as distinctive and attractive as ever, horns arriving on cue just when you need them. Chink-chink rhythm guitar taken as read. But the modern Dan has its new trademarks: bass lines harder and funkier than in the old days, the guitar licks responding in the space between each line of vocal and the use of chick backup singers not only to spread out a harmony but to double a lead vocal line, a staple (used to superb effect here on the refrained line ‘the last mall' taking us to the bridge). But most importantly, a self-assurance and skill of composition way ahead of where they quit in 1980.
You could pick off all sorts of delights in The Last Mall. The lyrics are more than you need in terms of skill and classic (I presume) Fagen imagery. “You need the tools for survival and some medicine for the blues” is wonderfully colourful in its contextual understatement, seeming to show an author glorying in his ability to select choice phrases depicting the gory imminent end of time. “Roll your cart back down the aisles and kiss the checkout girls goodbye,” more of same. Fagen (?) loves to use the banal, the everyday reference to modern living we can all plug into, and it works when he‘s this good, making an abstract future possibility almost real. He also has the uncanny ability to find phrases that resonate in the head with remarkable clarity and propensity to become catch-phrases: the “big adios” (is just a few hours away) of the first verse, the “sweetheart sunset special” of the bridge, the aforementioned “little buckeroos.” And mind, this is only the first track.
There's a cheekiness to the use of irony here too which is charming. In each part of the opening gambit here doesn't so much drip with the stuff as have it pouring over the top like a quart in a pint pot. Of course, Fagen knows what he's up to; therein lays the mischief. It's not too much though. It's never too much. No, the only disjunctive thing about the track is the fact that it's far too joyful a piece for the apocalypse, when even the devout Christians aren't exactly looking forward to the event. Well you can't have it every way.
So to the writing. The Last Mall has a magnificent bridge, which arrives with a tremendously effective key change from major to minor, changing the mood of the song and bringing in its train a telling emotional punch. Thankfully we get it not once but twice as if the composer(s) realized that when you invent something this good, you milk it and enjoy it so that everybody gets generously treated. Big hearted Dansters going soft in their old age? I hope so. But here also is what age and experience does. Between the two expositions of said bridge, we get an upward key change taking us into an unlikely optimistic Becker solo. One imagines him in the booth, head waggling in inimitable fashion, fighting off a smile of pleasure at the wonders he and his partners have created (and if not, why not?). But the horns again lead the harmony back into the home key with the transmutation from happy major to melancholy minor, and it's a sufficiently unexpected move so as to cause a stomach drop or a head spin. Walter helps us over the harmonic water by bringing his solo down from a late bluesy flurry to an exquisitely articulated dancing melodic finish, then adding a two note figure with a perfect slur which rams home the drama of the change to the new (old) key. The result is akin to that meteor crashing into the brain's musical pleasure centre. Fantastic.
Talk of ‘new Steely Dan classics' is folly at this stage of the proceedings, so it's enough to think of The Last Mall with a huge sigh of relief. The boys are back in town with the new music and you should do anything but worry: everything is going to be okay.
Track Two | The Things I Miss The Most
I'm not here as a cheerleader for Steely Dan. I want you to know this (I'm banned from the Pat Metheny Group official message board for being too critical a fan; I want you to know this too). So when I tell you that the dangerous second spot is an absolute belter (as we say here in the UK), I'm not exaggerating. The first of the short stories, a la What a Shame about Me, it's the story of a loser. Or at least, a guy who's lost his fortune as well as his girl, by the looks of it. Not that we empathize much with him, any more than we wanted to be the narrator of Cousin Dupree. There is a poetry in the narrative this time though, that makes you identify. Especially, when listing the things he misses the most now he's on his own, his wistful lamenting for “the talk....
and the sex....somebody to trust.” Whether deliberate or accidental, the pauses between each part of the apparently simple eight word sentence work brilliantly. Both the first, half a 4/4 bar, and the second, a whole four beats, space into which is inserted an inimitable and memorable Katy Lied period Steely Dan instrumental melodic figure, give you the room to dream along too. Sure, the talk. And the sex. Yeah, but you're now thinking about the sex talk . The magical conversations only such intense intimacy produces. And before the thoughts get a little grubby, ‘somebody to trust' punches you and reminds you that sex is the real thing when it's about love. That music can help you reminisce like this. It's more than your money's worth right there.
But there's more: the layered harmonies here are wonderful. Thus this sub-section of the song is probably the key moment (or moments, because it's repeated) of the whole album.
Our soulful protag' guy for the most part seems to fall into the category of one of those men we don't want to associate with if we can help it. Not if you're British, anyway. Because he's rich - “the house on the Vineyard, the house on the golf coast, the Audi TT” - and he's shallow.” But possibly the lyricist - I can't help but think it Fagen again, maybe because he's the singer (what was that about shallow?) - makes a mistake of inconsistency here because the guy owns a '54 Strat. Would a guy you'd avoid eye contact with at all costs have the taste to own a vintage guitar? Or does guitar geek Becker know what we ignoramuses don't: that the '54 Strats weren't as good as other models from the same period, causing the protag to be thus gulled by a gleeful vendor?
This debate probably isn't even interesting. What is, is that we have another great song here. For a change the chord progression is very copiable on your own acoustic, but know that it doesn't make for dull music. Not when there's a key modulation in the verse to keep you surprised, a delicate though barely perceptible horn chart near the same point and the glory of the straight minor chords of “the talk, the sex,” leading to a rare resolution to the home (tonic) chord, a perfect cadence indeed. The two chord ending, played by the full band, is perfect too. Thus ends a normative Dan narrative with a twist. The sweet intimacy of love and sex lost. It doesn't take a slushy ballad to feed the need for us to seek emotional catharsis in our music. But it probably takes the maturity of two men of middle age and experience at the height of their creative powers to do it with a song in mid-tempo that ticks along so smoothly it grooves.
Track Three | Blues Beach
With such an attractive, not to say seductive title, you feel this ought to be a contender for the best thing in the show, but it's not, unless you like pretty straight ahead slick Dan workouts. This isn't fair, as Blues Beach doesn't deserve to be derided in any way; if you were stuck at a wedding, christening or bar mitzvah amid dismal showers of middle of the road mush, or moulding new pop gunk and this came up, you'd grab the first sister in law you could find, get on the dance floor and have yourself a whale of a time. You'd be in heaven for four pretty fine minutes before it all went to pieces again. You'd be poppin' to the four square backbeat and be saying to Yvonne or Tracie, hey, this is classy material isn't it? Yeah, it's the Dan, you'd say proudly. So there's nothing wrong with Blues Beach apart from the fact that it's in exalted company as I hope we'll see.
Lyrically this is a hard one to deconstruct without a lyric sheet or a magnifying glass for the ear. Some of the Fagen enunciation is slurred enough for one to need some hi-tec sonic police gear in order to clear up some of the discrepancies. How important an issue that is depends on your point of view. There isn't much of a narrative this time, just another guy who stepped in some life-crap, but who cares. You might find yourself completely captivated by the foot-tapping groove or the call and answering girlie back up duo in the coda, echoing the protag's lead telling us about his trying to forget his problems at the Manitee/Manner T./Manna-tea/Man O' Tea bar, “chillin'.” (I haven't got a lyric sheet here with my advance copy)Now, my friend Frank, one of our little Dan Freak Crew in this neck of the woods really does get off on the background interplay, one voice out of the left hand speaker, the other from the right. Me I want to scream the place down every time I heard the word “chill” or “chilling,” unless we're talking about summer drinks or a good Hitchcock movie. But that's my problem.
Musically, then, Blues Beach might be Dan-Light, with it's lead off (and recurring) 60s sitcom instrumental hook, but in the end you have to hand it to a band who can turn out a tasty little backbeat thang so effortlessly, and it should be pointed out that when presenting a pretty straight tune to the public, there is still a harmonic twist or two in the changes. Each chorus ends with a chord you'd find in the same 60s TV archive, only this time for one of those bad cop shows where the director wants a little suspense built into the end of the scene so you don't get up and do something a little worthwhile with your life like take out the trash or re-arrange your drinks cabinet. Doubtless when I get a hold of the lyrics the intended symbolism in the music will reveal itself. Nothing, I'd wager, is put there on the track without a good reason. And the fellows are always looking for depth or even just a hint of subtlety or subterfuge in the most harmless of tracks. And can it be an unremarkable fixture on the album if I want to tell you that if you want to show a budding lyricist where they should be aiming if they want to treat their work as an art form? What about this for an opening couplet “I was scraping bottom, groping in the dark/it takes a crusty punk to really beat the mean streets of Medicine Park.” Doesn't mean much to this Englishman but I still love it. Feel the texture of ‘scraping bottom' and ‘crusty punk'! Fagen has always been a supreme puncher out of a hard consonant and there's more character in his pronunciation of that one word - punk - that Noo Yawk thing coming through, than in the 30 years of The Eagles songbook.
You could be here all day just enjoying the word selection and the word play. Look at the next couplet: “So I shifted left, got out of town and I clicked my heels and I doubled down to Blues Beach....” If you were standing in the front of a classroom of students you might say there was one too many ‘ands' in there, but you also say, look at the four movements propelling you forward and the great alliteration of ‘double-down'(right on the heels of ‘the mean streets of Medicine Park').
Was I saying Blues Beach was Dan Lite? Forget that. I'm recanting already.
Track Four | Godwhacker
To the listener, music, of course, is a matter of perspective, of taste, of what sends you and what doesn't send him or her . This track, for me, is where the rubber really hits the road. Godwhacker is, with conscious irony, proof that a higher power sent us Becker and Fagen. If they're not going to play this live this summer, I might consider having the pair of them assassinated.
This thing has the Peg beat, same insistent chak-chakka-chak-chakka rhythm. However, apart from that it's not at all in Peg territory. Its minor key separates it off immediately and lyrically it's way up the other end of the subject matter universe. Like the three tracks you've heard so far, the sound is as fresh as May flowers, as a fish straight out of the sea: the groove is jumping at you immediately. There's a rhythm guitar part in your left ear if you've a pair of cans on your head and it is one masterful piece of arrangement. Again like its trio of album forerunners, the instrumental track is mercifully uncluttered, so it's right there if you want to focus in on it. This part is the crux of the track, even though, of course, it needs the drum and bass support to mean anything. If the piece of music Godwhacker itself could speak, this guitar would be the interpreter. It chatters at you like typewriters used to. With its short chunking, then elastic growling, it nips at your ankles, it wraps itself around the music like a nasty, warped little snake. If it's metaphorical, it's those nasty self-righteous Christian Godwhackers wanting to save your soul by stopping all the fun you're having. It's the fundamentalist right wanting to take you down and make your life a daily fucking misery. And it keeps going strong like the devil himself from the very first bar to the very last you can hear on the fade.
Around it, whoever has masterminded this particular segment of the project has placed a minor key blues chord structure. With typical Steely Dan twist on the three chords before home. Always avoid the obvious. This gives the song an unbelievable amount of depth and soul. Irony and Steely Dan. Inseparable aren't they. On the surface the lyrics may seem to be only harmless comedy. “Yes we are the Godwhackers, who rip and chop and slice/for crimes beyond imagining it's time to pay the price” But Fagen must be drawing the bucket from a well deep in his psyche. In the following couplet, his “you better step back son, give the man some whacking space” is invested with an almost tortured yearning. Earlier the line “there's a bounty on your face” is sung with a reflective, regretful turn of emotion. He is, you notice, in as banal a place as a supermarket car park on a Saturday afternoon, a fantastic vocalist. A truly great singer, irrespective of the fact completely that his tones aren't soft or mellow or conventionally beautiful. There is a terrible and wonderful beauty in the voice's humanity. Fagen apparently hated his voice in the old days. It only serves to tell you how perverse this life is.
Which is Godwhacker's territory. That the creator's followers are working to smash you into submission, saving you by punishing you until you submit, defeated by pain. Of course, that's just this writer's take on the song. Lyricist Becker or Fagen (and Fagen?) may want us to take atheism out of this as the only sensible intellectual position to take on the matter of metaphysics. Didn't Donald say himself in the back of the taxi in Vegas that he liked that Dan fans have the right to own an interpretation of the songs?
The music is triumphantly good throughout. You'll be repaid large for your money: it has a relentless flow, a treat of a keyboard solo from Fagen, terrific melody figures picked out with great feel and taste, and a fine guitar solo from his compadre to follow. And that singing: man alive. You can listen along ignoring the meaning of the words and just love the sound of it wailing at you with relentless passion. There's a short bridge too to enjoy, once again repeated (with brilliant Becker guitar punctuating the spaces) - “be very, very quiet, clock every thing you see, it all might matter later at the start and the end of history.” On the page this might read rather gloomily, even allowing for the extra large size portion of irony, but though the minor blues construction doesn't make you want to hold hands with Julie Andrews and sing with rapture about being alive on the planet, you do feel wonderful just being in the presence of musical greatness. And you do want to sing lines from Godwhacker whenever and wherever you're walking along for at least a week after it‘s burrowed itself in your unconscious for the first time.
Track Five | Slang of Ages
Having just drenched everyone in the vicinity with superlatives for the past page or so, it might be fair to ask at this point whether the album now takes a downturn in quality. Essentially, it does not. Slang of Ages is massive. It's a science fiction short story of boy meets thing from another dimension – protag to chick: “if you're from Amsterdam then I'm the Duke of Earl.” If dimension is the correct usage; here this writer for one is way out of his depth, sci-fi intergalactic social interaction not being his thing. So if Slang can't get my nose open lyrically or narratively, it's up to the music to deliver.
It's a big result. However, it opens with “just another r n' b groove,” eerily reminiscent of the up beat overkill of the first third of Kamakiriad (‘gimme some contrast here, Donald, pleeeze!') Five tracks in now and it's been mid-tempo all the way. By some rights it should be time for a change of pace, a ballad even, something a la Maxine, perhaps. But no. There's a funky little groove going on with no harmonic movement to freshen up the ear, and what do you know, there's Walter Becker taking the lead vocal (fine by me: I loved the Tracks Of Whack and his rendition of Monkey In Your Soul on the last tour). It's nice, the style perfectly rendered – the mind is attuned to the uber-quality of the rhythm playing by this point - but unless you're a dyed in the wool rhythm and blues dude you're beginning to register some disappointment at the music plateau-ing off. Then suddenly it's the flying doctor! The chorus has arrived.
A female singer or two is doubling the melody an octave about Becker and it's rising in big steps, echoing something Fred Astaire might have crooned in a movie in the late Thirties. Though the singers opine, “start me off in groove time” the song has dramatically departed from the groove, the chord progression quickly swooping to the minor via one of those “is it major or minor? “ mystery things where the third appears to be missing. Upon the delivery of the key word “Slang,” as in “let me hear the slang of ages” the music falls into another ‘major-minor?' chord with its suspended third heightening what is now emotional drama. Becker finishes his speech to his putative lover: “show me where I turn” on the home chord of what is for the immediate present a minor key. Six bars of western harmony have just invaded your head and the effect is devastating. You laugh. Crafty bastard, whichever one of you pulled that trick, you think. And what genius.
Meanwhile another repeat of the verse-groove has already all but finished and the chorus breaks over you again in a glorious wave. Then a bridge. Becker laments: “my life's so forlorn...” over music which isn't so much melancholy as questioning. The harmonic development is uncertain, the last chord uncomfortably repetitious of the one before. It doesn't feel right when the chorus progression is so utterly marvelous, but you suspect after a lot of listening and reflection that the lack of resolution is deliberate, designed to parallel the
discombobulated protagonist. If so, you have again to doff your cap at the composer who first five playings in was still way ahead of you.
The last verse follows, then two repeats of that chorus. You can't get enough of it. One lasting impression of it is Becker's delivery of the word “time.” Here he's sliding up just a tone, but it feels like he's swooped up three floors in one jump like Superman. It's another of those ‘crash into pleasure-centre' moments. But what intrigues is the wonderful tonal quality here as he sings the word. The admirably selected slight vibrato lends it a depth, an intensely human quality; the fact that this appears to me completely at odds with the narrative is incidental – it's a moving moment each time and a mysterious one. Is it possible that when the he sings this, Becker is actually recalling in his head a real encounter with a woman he's tried desperately to reach or find a sense of partnership with and failed.
At the start of the out section, Becker deflates the emotional content over the groove which has returned underneath him, calling, rather than singing, laconically, “that's right” before launching into a “slang me!” Apart from immediately creating a new Steely Dan fan catch phrase, what is he up to? Is he embarrassed about letting a piece of his inner core out into the proceedings?
Slang of Ages. An oddity in the Dan canon clearly, but a magnificent one, for it contains arguably the best piece of harmonic writing of the band's entire repertoire.
Track Six | Green Book
Green Book slides by the first time in its five minutes and you think, ‘huh? What was that?' Nothing seems to have happened very much, this effort falling outside the normal songwriting conventions of verse, chorus and bridge. We've got so used to the consummate dexterity of Becker/Fagen crafting and blending the conventional elements of the Tin Pan Alley white witchcraft which is still their MO here, Green Book is just a blur. At first.
The succession of merely verses - essentially two running consecutively before a short linking instrumental commentary, the second a slight modification of the first – wrong foots the ear initially, then. It is only after a half dozen re-plays that the song starts to bite.
It works as an impression left on the mind: its perpetual flow (though it has a sharply defined structure) means we experience a mood for the duration, an intense and mysterious one clearly defined by the selection of chords and the lyrics. What is the Green Book? Hanged if I know. To be honest, I don't much care. I love the pseudo-Spanish harmony which creates the rolling tension of the music from the get-go; the funk the players on this record put down with such command; the ineffable sound of Fagen and his backing singers, like cream pouring from a jug; the “Josie” chord which sits in there a couple of times prefacing the verse and the guitar/keyboard solo break. In my head I hear the voice relishing or suffering, I don't know which, that he's “so in love with this dirty city” and I know that the Green Book has me in its grasp. I think I know also that when I get a handle on the words, the appreciation of the track is going to deepen. Fagen delivers his (or Walter's) work with too much personal commitment for this not to be the case. For a truly brilliant line stands out among the dozens of jewels scattered liberally across all nine tracks, as he sings yet again of a woman lost to him or one never won, “my life, my lover, my third hand rose.” The imagery throughout is as alluring as it's abstruse. “I'm thinking Marilyn 4.0 in the Green Book.........she looks like Jill St John in that beehive.” (I think I hear ‘beehive:' what else can it be?) Lines of just phrases circle around in the head of the listener, their meaning like slippery rubber avoiding capture. It can only be a matter of time before I get there. The point is that here are songs worth deconstructing like poetry. Who else do you think is in their tree?
Green Book is a stretched out flash of most of the classic Steely Dan elements threading into your ears and out again. You either love it like an abstract painting or hear it go past while you were looking for something more figurative.
Track Seven | Pixelene
With a perfect sense of how to blend the ingredients, Pixelene arrives as the polar opposite of its predecessor. We're back in common time and the pace has picked up significantly. The intro harmony is warm and comfy on the ear. Like having your back stroked. It doesn't last, almost inevitably, with the drop of a completely unexpected chord-switch playing lead off for the verse sung by Fagen with a tangible relish. With such a brilliant lyric to sing, it's no wonder: “Our man in blue squeezes off twenty tracer rounds and that's when she leaps the turnstile/And as she clings to the roof of the speeding train, the double A down to Sheridan Square” The need to steal from PG Wodehouse is paramount: as Bertie Wodehouse would say, ‘I mean to say, what? What?'
I'm somewhat dim like Bertie. Having not aurally scrutinized the entire lyric and committed it to notepaper for analysis, I haven't more than a sketchy idea what Pixelene is about, except that it appears to be one more obliquely twisted modern love song. It's more than enough once again to revel in the sound the words make, the deeply satisfying effect of their rhythm on the ear. They don't have to add up to much, in the end, or indeed, anything. It seems to me that this isn't the purpose of words in music. The human voice works fantastically well as an instrument (which is just as well when you think of all the atrocious gunk Billie Holiday had to sing most of the time) and Donald Fagen's is a unique example. The next line of verse has him singing “…just like her stupid father ,” the latter two words in an unbelievably great melody over a deliciously contrasting minor chord. It's another of the ace set piece moments of the record (which happily return twice more in the form of “ boyfriend Randall ” and “just a girl in girlie trouble ” in subsequent verses.
Harmonically the track is a riot of bamboozling chord changes and contingencies. But the effect continues to be emotional and attractive like pancakes and syrup throughout the track. The consecutive major sevenths of the refrain may be prove a little cloying for some, but not for me. It's a luscious ride through a song interestingly not without pathos - were there songs with this failure of emotional detachment on 2vN? Does it improve the music? Certainly it draws you right inside the music this time.
The appeal of Pixelene is instantaneous, infectious, like a pop record. There's so much going on here it's almost a crying disgrace: if you've ever tried to write a song yourself, you hear Pixelene and feel good that you quit.
Track Eight | Lunch with Gina
The quality, the quality. It surges forward and upward once more with Lunch with Gina. Fast, funky and in four (again) but not overly furious, the glorious harmonies in the vocals are soon pouring over us again. You could make a list of around half a dozen recurring elements which characterize Everything Must Go. One of them clearly is this layering of vocal harmonies between Donald and the female harmony singers. The composite sound is one of the most attractive things. It may well be the contrast of the superficially harsh Fagen whine with the sugar softness of the female(s) (Carolyn Lockhart again?) that produces the effect, practically a musical crème bruleé of a sound. It may be a carefully calculated move also.
More fabulous rhyming is in evidence. And lines which shine with wit and brains:
“the waiter never comes:”
with Donald and “Carolyn” singing this over a change of two sublime chords almost making you sad, then:
“God knows the service could be better.”
(Time out: you can't help loving the way Fagen sings “be- dd er”, though to an American this may well be totally unworthy of notice) then turning sweet:
“coffee and a kiss? Maybe later, maybe never
Lunch with Gina is forever.”
Words and music in perfect sync: sublime.
Lunch with Gina is some piece: I re-examine notes made while listening:
‘Bass line punching the groove and swinging too. Why don't I notice the drummer? But he's always perfectly there…...the bridge gives way to a great keyboard solo… brilliant fast flurry of notes leading into it from the keyboard…the bridge: completely unexpected chords again… the confidence of the whole thing is outrageous.'
There is indeed an unmistakable confidence about the whole album. Lunch with Gina possibly personifies this. It's unlike any other Steely Dan track and yet you hear it and it's sculpted or tailored, choose your word, in a musical language that is always inimitably, unmistakably Steely Dan.
Track Nine | Everything Must Go
“That Coltrane opening,” said my friend Josh of the start of the finale. Well, not a bad idea to announce the ending of the opus, the magnum opus, with a classical flourish. Then we set off on the last walk, a lazy slowed down concoction of some blues, some funk, a little jazz, a little soul and don't forget, our daily dose of western European harmony, which we'll take in the form of an unorthodox ten bar bridge, if you please. Everything must go in, baby.
So. The Famous Road Not Taken. You and I might have finished off in supposedly classic style with the faster, more dramatic Lunch with Gina and we'd have fallen into line with such predecessor albums as Countdown to Ecstasy and Aja. Well I might have. Or sticking with another part of the convention, we might end with a slow, intensely emotional piece if we've got one. However, we haven't. Becker and Fagen have chosen appropriately though. The placement of the title track must make some sort of statement if we end with it, or if we start with it. But to make its mark, to give the record that gestalt thing, the whole being greater than the sum of its part and all that, the song must carry some sort of weight, be it musical or lyrically. You can argue about the issue in terms of music, but in terms of lyrical content, you've got the heaviest thing on the album. A beautiful, witty elegy for capitalism, America, or the whole Western World, or a neat little Carveresque tale of a liquidation of the firm by insurance scam fire. Torch it, baby, and if we can scrape together some start up capital from the proceeds to do it all over a second time, then as Fagen wails in perfect harmony, “wouldn't it be nice?”
A fitting end to the record? Perhaps. Two songs of imminent destruction bookend the collection, so the tying together there, the sense of balance is pleasing. But there is the sense of deflation after the intensity and action of Gina. Happily, this turned out to be an initial response. It's like anything. You get used to it after a while. You love Gina for what it is as a self-contained thing, And in the two second pause between tracks eight and nine after getting on for twenty hearings, you know that you're about to get something really special to go out on. For that's what Everything Must Go has become. In fact, it's a tour de force. The makers and the production and engineering team, knowing the music better than we do (in one sense anyway), realised this some time ago, and made a very good decision. It's the title track after all, and in a way, this is where we came in forty-two minutes ago.
*
Wouldn't it be nice if Steely Dan could follow up their impossible triumphant declaration of returning that was Two Against Nature with an even better album? Yeah, wouldn't it. My friends, if a lauded British writer could effectively rubbish 2vN upon its arrival, then the reaction to Everything Must Go could be absolutely anything. My confident guess would be this, though: the overwhelming majority of dyed in the flares of '75 Dan fans will love the new record. Being a boy who loves to play with top tens and all that, my personal shot from the gut is that this album is the best of their entire career. That is a fatuous thing to say, but I should leave it as good a reaction as any to my first three weeks with it playing in the happy home.
It is remarkable in several ways. Firstly, “rock and roll” guys in their fifties generally don't make better albums than those of their heyday. Either they're burned out, drugged out, drained of inspiration by wealth or the sheer passage of time, or they simply haven't the talent to outdo what they did when they were hungry. The history of modern music is littered with casualties it's probably too embarrassing to mention, though I will. What happened to The Band? Bob Dylan (don't even start arguing with me on this)? Rod Stewart (bear with me: once he was a promising writer and singer with an interesting musical vision)? Neil Young (let's stop kidding around: last great album, 1976)? The Eagles (never that great a band but their return has been less than alluring)? Pat Metheny? Joni Mitchell? Little Feat (okay, I know – Lowell George died so it doesn't count)? Stevie Wonder? Jackson Browne? No reformed English band has made a comparable record to those of their own peak years, though Yes have come reasonably close and are at least blisteringly good live. English singers: Gabriel? Kate Bush? The former gets high marks for imaginative use of technology and effort but few for composition if his latest record is anything to go by. The soundtrack to Almost Famous reminded us that once upon a very long time ago, when they were still scooping up the trash from Woodstock practically, Elton John wrong fine songs and made great records. His obscene decline just about sums the whole thing up. For the most part, the great artists of our youth had but a brief time on the stage before plunging headlong down the chute of artistic redundancy. But not Steely Dan.
Dylan once said of songwriting that you have a certain number of great songs in you and once you've written them, that's it. It's a tempting explanation if a little dependent on the existence of supernatural forces driving the realm of art. And way too deterministic. The search for an answer to the failure of artists from the seventies to mature and improve in their middle age for here and now have to wait. The point is that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have twice now bucked the trend with the production of first a resoundingly superb, then (now) a magisterial record. How else might it be described? An advanced record. It's advanced in terms of that most un-talked about factor in music-making these days: musical skill (this is possibly because there isn't much of it around any more. Certainly the new bands and singers of, say, the past ten years are pitifully lacking in it).
To give them their due weight and place in the world, they are miles and miles ahead of all other artists operating in their field. In fact, it is almost irresistibly tempting to declare that they play ball in a lonely field all of their own. Whatever we say about the importance of rhythm in modern music, the fact is that songs and records stand or fall on their musical content. That content has, is and will always be an amalgam of melody and harmony. Most pop and rock music has rested on the hope that about six chords and a single little key modulation will be enough to bring home the bacon. The miracle is that between 1966 and 1980, it was. It was exceedingly rare to come across writers with harmonic lore above the norm (Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell). So brilliant or satisfying music was produced through the emotional depth of the performer, the intelligence of performer or the depth or uniqueness of his or her artistic sensibility. Or the fact that fast music bursting with energy and exuberance plus a little knowledge of chords – I'm thinking Born To Run and London Calling here – could make the listener throb with febrile contentment.
The lyrical content of music kept others in work where musically there wasn't much happening. The history of Rock music after all is indefatigably about its lyrical subject matter, whether we're talking about cars, sex, drugs or “four dead in Ohio” and songs of protest at the iniquities of the Vietnam War. It's fair to say too that some artists have been able to bring a spirit to the table which gave their work that indefinable something that made a lot of us go out and buy it. Perhaps the image we have of the artist seduced us and added layers of attractiveness to their songs. Rebellion, freedom, sex, moroseness, machismo, female power have been evinced by many artists who hardly had the knowledge to string four chords together, never mind six. Many artists have been able to write great stuff musically, where chord progressions have empowered the song: where the artist clearly has had some understanding of how placing one chord against another, then a third next to these two, or developing a pattern of four or five chords working together, produces a muso-chemical reaction which makes us say, ‘I love that song.' The tantalizing and indeed, inexplicable thing is that all of these, even as talented a writer as a James Taylor and a Joni Mitchell have failed to take their craft beyond that place.
There are several missing explanations as to why almost all writers fail to make the leap to what we might call refined and sophisticated expertise. Laziness may well be one. Sheer lack of imagination and ability another. Wealth and success have been further inhibiting factors too. The failure to follow, observe and borrow from the world of jazz is yet another. Which brings us, of course to the Dan and Everything Must Go.
We all know about Don and Walt's love if not obsession with jazz. I'm not privy to the details, but their appearance in 2003 on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz radio show made it pretty clear that Donald learned the chords of his beloved jazz records at a young age and for all we know has been doing it ever since. Armed with that harmonic know how, that chordal lore, he can write a song and find his musical mind or brain producing modulations and chord sequences that none of his competitors can. I would be pretty shocked to find, if exploring the history of Walter Becker, that he hasn't trod pretty much the same path here as his compadre. But the important question is, does it make their music better?
We might look at this way. If you put up a chef with ten ingredients to chose in a cook off against one with fifty, who might make the more impressive dinner? Sure, it could be the first guy, if the second is an idiot. But the latter is at an immense advantage. You can certainly hear the results of an advanced knowledge chords and harmony on every track on Everything Must Go and on some tracks you can hear this being brought into play in six, seven, eight places.
What really makes technical and educational advantage count is the intelligent choice the pair made somewhere in the genesis of the record when they decided to cut the rhythm tracks live. Great as some of it is, not observing the fact that a quickly-made live album puts an indefinable freshness onto the tape almost killed Gaucho. It's easy to say indeed that a freshness of spirit informs each and every track this time, starting up its heartbeat, galvanizing its oxygenating system. We might go on to ask why this happened. Who knows? Did the success of 2vN propel Don and Walter forward, giving the wherewithal to write new good songs? Is this why the duo clearly sound as though they were, to put it simply, “up for it” and in a very big way?
For it certainly sounds as though they wanted to get into the studio and get the job done. And who knows whether other factors of a more personal nature produced this superlative music? Are the guys more contented these days? Were the existential facts lending themselves towards peak performance? Sounds like it. As stated earlier, the confidence in the music is breathtaking. Can unhappy people put this much verve, skill, intelligence and sheer taste into the making of music?
To a final piece of conjecture: less is more they say. This is a short album by modern standards, weighing in at less than 43 minutes. This is a punk album, baby! This serves to heighten the impact of these great songs – and they are songs, rather than pieces. Most of them seem to blow by in seconds, leaving you yearning for more: one more chorus, an instrumental coda, an extra verse and chorus. Again, whether this outcome was predicated upon a piece of sit down policy, one would surely like to know. Whatever the reason, that old adage “leave ‘em wanting more” comes into play in a very big way here. It produces a thought which, much as I admired it and still do, never occurred to me in the days when Two Against Nature was still a new album: ‘how soon is the next album going to be, guys?'
To be a little closer to accuracy, Everything Must Go is a semi-abbreviated collection of songs in modified blues form. The album opens with a 12 bar blues ritzed up with a grand slam harmonic structure. And it's hard not to notice the lyrical reference there to “some medicine for the blues” and consider the possibility that the nod here to the history of the blues is more than accidental; that to some extent at least, Everything Must Go is a themed album in this sense. The fact that a song entitled “Blues Beach” sits there third in the line up also stares at us, though musically it‘s not a blues at all. More pertinently, Godwhacker, Slang of Ages, Green Book, Lunch with Gina and the title track all take from the blues idiom in terms of structure or significant signature riff or lick. Further, many tracks are laced with Becker's delicious blues-lead punctuation, which is more confidently asserted and expertly delivered than ever before. One of the many things about the record that leave the fan in excellent heart is the strong pulse of enjoyment we hear emanating from the writers and other performers. To put an even bigger smile on our faces, this practically makes the assertion, never mind suggests that the next one, all things being equal and just, won't be too far away.
Finally, what about the ugly downside? Can an album in this cynical age, when rock and roll music is so old now really be this good? Well yes it can and yes it is. The only criticism I can offer is one of personal taste. I would like it very much if Becker and Fagan departed from precedent and wrote songs of a more overtly personal nature. It would probably be fair for members of Joe Public to complain that with the Dan we always get third person short stories even when written in the first person. This emotional remove might make for music that suffers from being a little cold and soulless, a criticism recently offered by a fellow Dan freak of 2vN. I would indeed like a soulful ballad where it's more obvious that the composers are less apparently emotionally contained. And yet, I listen to Lunch with Gina and here only passion and commitment in the singer, Fagen. Would a personal story of love lost or gained give me something that I don't find here?
In truth this is not an album of bloodless emotional detachment. There is a lot of soul as well as blues in the composing this time, and soul dripping out of the playing like good honest sweat. Dare I say it; there is also love to be found. I think of the yearning, the pathos I hear from Fagen in Godwhacker - even in as glib a line as “give the man some whacking space” and his soul being poured into his vocal in the title track and honestly, I find I am not short-changed by this record in any sense. There is a lyrical and narrative sameness across the last two albums but in truth, there has to be a loose thread somewhere. Bottom line: make a list of what this music has going for it and of what it gives you, of how it feeds your musical, emotional and intellectual needs and you need extra pages. My only complaint is that since the arrival of this CD into my house, I have conspicuously found myself lacking in the necessary enthusiasm to pull down anything from the rest of my collection. Which only goes to show that there's an ugly downside to even the most special things of the world. Perfect Album Destroys Credibility of Englishman's CD Collection. Perhaps there's another of life's little ironies Don and Walter might enjoy.
May 2003
August 2006 Endnote
It's funny how one can get completely carried away by things. Here I was in the first flush of enthusiasm clearly bowled over by the new Steely Dan record of 2003. This lasted for about three months. I haven't listened to it now for about a year and a half and I can't foresee a situation where I'm going to want to hear it all the way through again. And the thing is, I don't quite understand this. There surely must be something wrong with me.
This said, I saw the band twice on the Everything Must Go tour of that year in America, and I was immensely disappointed in Becker and Fagan's failure to get behind it. They played just a couple of tracks: Godwhacker (which they ruined by giving each member of the horn section a solo) and Things I Miss The Most. Thinking about it, I think this is what caused the fizz to go right out of the bottle. If the composers themselves didn't think it was worth getting behind on stage, I must have thought, subconsciously, how can it be a great album? I couldn't help noticing this year that Donald Fagen took the same approach to his 2006 solo release Morph The Cat: he went out on tour as a separate artist from Walter Becker/Steely Dan, and played only a fraction of the album on stage.