Steely Dan Top 25: Aja and Gaucho
Five of my picks from, arguably, Steely Dan's two greatest albums.
We’ve made it through the first ten songs of my twenty-five favorite Steely Dan songs. Moving into the next batch of five, these songs are all from the Aja-Gaucho run of albums.1 I, along with many others, would argue that this is Steely Dan’s creative peak and thus these songs are going to be amongst the best. Let’s get into it then…
“Black Cow“
When my appreciation of Steely Dan evolved from enjoying just the Can’t Buy a Thrill tracks to more of what Steely Dan actually is, it was when I listened to Aja for the first time. “Black Cow,” the first song on that album (which is one of my favorite albums of all-time), got me hooked. The song moves languidly yet with tremendous bounce, a decidedly funky sound with the backing vocals straight out of Tin Pan Alley or doo-wop.
While the Gaucho songs move us so clearly into the modern world (in that case, the late 70s and early 80s), “Black Cow” is a song that (like a lot of Steely Dan songs) belongs to a by-gone era. An earlier version of New York life that will contrast with the world they depict on their next album. Titling a song after another name for a root beer float really seems like something out of the pre-rock era of popular music.
It’s interesting to think of it as an album opener and how it doesn’t really grab your attention in a loud way, the way you expect an album opener to do. But it seductively brings you in and entices you into the album, to keep going and explore this world Fagen and Becker are depicting.
“Josie”
While Aja is my favorite Steely Dan album, it’s one that’s whole is greater than the sum of its parts (save for one enormous exception we’ll be talking about later in this series) and thus I don’t have more songs off the album here. But “Josie,” which closes out the record, is a standout. It’s a song with a meaning that isn’t terribly clear (at first it sounds like a continuation of “Home at Last” but then you read a little deeper and it seems a bit darker), but it’s catchy as hell.
The backing vocals (by Fagen and Timothy B. Schmit) in particular are real stars on this track, as is the drumming by Jim Keltner (who played drums on some of Bob Dylan’s 80s and 90s albums). It’s an example of where Steely Dan was able to distill their unique sound and lyrics into something that was, potentially, radio ready. That it appears on the few Steely Dan live releases is a testament to that, something that was in keeping with what Fagen and Becker wanted to do but was accessible and replicable in the live setting.
“Hey Nineteen”
The transition between Aja and Gaucho is an interesting one. In some respects, there are these really noticeable changes. The music gets slicker, losing some of that beatnik-jazz infused edge. But there are other things that they keep going just the same, which you hear on a track like “Hey Nineteen.”
It’s Steely Dan at their most yacht rock-y (which is not a bad thing at all, just a statement describing their sound), but you have this song that’s about an older man trying to seduce a nineteen year old. Yet another instance where there is a dissonance between the pleasant quality of the music and the… less-than-pleasant story being told in the lyrics
Throughout the song, you have allusions to how the protagonist/narrator is older and finding the common ground with the titular nineteen year old to be difficult.
That's 'Retha Franklin
She don't remember the Queen of Soul
It’s hard times befallen
The sole survivors
She thinks I'm crazy
But I'm just growing old
It’s also a song I enjoy because during my one trip to Las Vegas I would always say “hey nineteen” when someone at the blackjack table had one and the dealer picked up on it and started calling me Steely Dan.
“Glamour Profession”
I mean, a slick song that’s about a 1970s cocaine dealer in Los Angeles that sounds great playing on the radio in the summer? It doesn’t get more Steely Dan than that. Unlike “Hey Nineteen” and the next song I’ll be writing about here, this track was not released as a single but it’s as slick and well-produced as those songs.
A song replete with references to Los Angeles life (“Hoops McCann” making one think of the Lakers, Mr. Chow’s) that tells the story of a cocaine dealer moving his way through this glamorous-yet-seedy world
It's a glamour profession
The L.A. concession
Local boys will spend a quarter
Just to shine the silver bowl
Living hard will take its toll
You see in this song how Fagen feels about Los Angeles and the way in which he’s clearly someone who’s of the East, which previously came up on “Bad Sneakers”. But now it’s shifted from an almost autobiographical narrative to this story of an (ostensibly) fictional Los Angeles denizen. The synthesizers, played by Fagen, are really pronounced but with the narrative that he’s created it all seems of a piece.
“Time Out of Mind”
In keeping with the drug-centric concerns of the other Gaucho tracks, we have this ultra slick song that’s about smoking heroin. Something that would sound perfect in your supermarket or doctor’s office and it’s about drug use. I’d been listening to this song for many years and only after a close reading of the lyrics did I grasp what Donald Fagen was actually singing about… And boy, was I shocked.
Appropriate for a band that takes its name from something in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, this seedy realm is a natural one for the band to write about, and yet it has a chorus that will get stuck in your head.
Well that wraps up this latest batch of my favorite Steely Dan songs. The next entry in this series will focus on Fagen and Becker’s later-day work and some of my favorite tracks off of those albums.
Please note: there still might be songs from these albums that make it onto my final top five, which is made up of my five favorite Steely Dan songs full stop.