Steely Dan -Katy Lied - 1975

Steely Dan is a controversial band, people either have a list of reasons they hate them, or a list of reasons they love them.    They are best remembered for their ultra smooth tone period in the late 70's and early 80's, and this is usually the basis for those people who refuse to like the Dan.   "Too produced, too smooth, too jazzy,"  whatever, if you like to bitch about Steely Dan, read no further, because this post is in celebration of their 1975 release, "Katy Lied."  

In this period their music was as much influenced by R&B and blues, as jazz, and the recordings were thick not sparse, with a technical mishap thrown in that screwed up the fidelity of the album, so the usual anti-Dan arguments don't stick.   Instead of a wide dynamic range, the album lacks top end and it's thick middle makes it sound more aggressive from the get-go.

This album also shows the band in transition, from beginning their carrier as a flashy band that didn't feature Donald Fagen on most vocals and co-band leader Walter Becker was on bass while two hotshot guitarists Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias did the shredding, and ending with Becker and Fagen being the sole members of a band that featured only session musicians.    This album finds a core group of members who contributed to past albums: Fagen, Becker, and Dias who were charter members, and Jeff Porcaro, Rick Derringer and Michael McDonald who were involved in past albums, and Chuck Rainey who would be their go-to bass man for a funky sound for years to come.

The songwriting follows a model of blues changes with unexpected turn-arounds.   Using a recognizable blues shuffle and putting interesting changes before going back into the shuffle, the album's first track Black Friday sets the stage for that.   Not a prediction of pre-Christmas shopping mania that would come many years later, but a tale of a financial fraudster's plan to get out just in time.   Also later on the album "Daddy Don't Live in that New York City No More," and "Chain Lightning" are based in the blues as well.

There are blazing guitars everywhere, a tremendous sax solo by jazz great Phil Woods on "Doctor Wu," but what carries the album for me are the lyrics.   The subject matter ranges from dark to very dark.   Steely Dan mixed simple rhymes with unusual subject mater what was often subversive and out and out perverted and often ironic in their meaning.   This was masked behind the musicality of the melodies and harmonies so well that many people don't dig into their lyrical contact.   For Example, "Doctor Wu" - drug addiction, "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" - amateur pornography, and "Rose Darling" - infidelity.   Also they had a way of writing a set of lyrics that were so imaginative and unusual, that they would spark an eternal debate as to what they're really about, for example, "Chain Lightning," with no chorus, no bridge and a few dozen words, it's definitely about something, but just what is seems to be up to you. The important thing about Steely Dan's lyrics is your don't have to understand them in depth if you don't care to, they are there to remind you that you are in an alternate realty where something is not quite right.

The album is a time capsule of 70's hippies turning into yuppies, on a diet of alternating uppers and downers, that never seems to land back where it came from.   Taking the blues form into uncharted territory, bringing a high level of musicianship to FM radio as well as open references to a dark underbelly carefully masked behind musicianship.   Due to using an experimental form of noise reduction used while recording that backfired by stripping the high end off of the sound and thickening the mid-range, the album seem to be masked behind a haze of Vaseline which gives them an early Hollywood film texture, technically perfect beneath a mask of a technology that created an unreal recreation that made is seem hyper-real.