Steely Dan Top 25: The Final 5

My absolute, all-time, top five favorite songs courtesy of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.

Apologies for the delays in finishing this up (natural disasters and other issues made writing something of an afterthought for a stretch) but I’d like to wrap up my countdown of my all-time Top 25 favorite songs by Steely Dan. And, to wrap it up, we’re going to cover my five favorite songs by the group. The best of the best from any era and iteration of the group.

“Kid Charlemagne”

When I think about the evolution of my Steely Dan fandom, when I started to love “Kid Charlemagne” is when I went from a casual fan to proper aficionado. It has the slick sonic quality of the stuff you’d hear on Gaucho with lyrics about Owsley Stanley, famed sound man for the Grateful Dead and creator of the best acid in the 1960s.

It’s as catchy of any of the most straightforward tracks on Can’t Buy a Thrill, but it has some of that jazz/funk bounce and tells a story about the kind of outlaws and marginal characters Fagen was generally obsessed with. It also features some famously stellar lead guitar work from Larry Carlton.

“Kid Charlemagne” is perhaps the track that distills everything that makes Steely Dan so great into one song (technical precision, strong production, lyrics about an outsider-type). It’s not going to be my “favorite” but it’s the most representative Steely Dan song and thus might be the best according to a more objective metric.

I enjoy this live performance of the song from the Two Against Nature era—it keeps that bounce but it feels more subdued and even cooler.

“Everything You Did”

Another cut off of The Royal Scam, perhaps most famous for its “dig” at a certain Southern California rock band: “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening.” But you get that funny line within a strange narrative of infidelity. Perhaps a narrative where the man wants to know more about what happened, like that’s his thing… “now you’re going to tell me everything you did.”

Fagen writes lyrics that seem like a late 70s John Cheever story underneath a more straight-forward “rock” sound (the guitar licks featured on “Everything You Did” are real hot). I spend a lot of time heaping praise on Donald Fagen in this series, but I want to be sure and give Walter Becker and his great guitar work the flowers it deserves.

The guitar sounds like something you might here on an Eagles track (or rock with a dash of country) but then the lyrics that use the Eagles as some kind of symbol of banal, acceptable music to drown out a conversation about some kind of cuckolding situation… absolutely the norm for Steely Dan.

“My Rival”

Another song featuring a romantic triangle with something more sinister or dark underneath the surface. When we have our main character saying “I've got detectives on his case, they filmed the whole charade” and “Sure, he's a jolly roger until he answers for his crimes,” you get the feeling that main character is a little unhinged.

The instrumentation, which is very smooth and laid back (of a piece with everything else on Gaucho) serves as a counterpoint to the narrative of the song. The backing vocals give the song a kind of… plastic soul quality to it. It would sound like something out of a revue palatable for widespread listening until you dig into those lyrics just a bit. It’s a song that gets in your head even though it’s strange and somewhat deranged.

“Everyone’s Gone to the Movies”

This track was one I came to a lot later in my Steely Dan fandom. A track off Katy Lied that has a lovely calypso beat and sound that masks a pretty disturbing tale. You have Mr LaPage who is “showing films in his den” and that “Soon you will be eighteen, I think you know what I mean.” A story about someone who shows illicit movies in this home but then, in the chorus, we get the parents of the home thinking “Everyone's gone to the movies, now we're alone at last.”

Fagen writes songs about all manner of people who are beyond the pale. He writes those about people who live on the margins of “polite” society (here I’m thinking of what I’ll be talking about with my favorite Steely Dan song, for example) but he also writes about truly awful figures and scenarios (“Cousin Dupree,” “Janie Runaway” and this song). Then he takes those awful things and melds it with music that is so catchy and technically great. Fagen truly is one of the great lyricists in popular music, particularly when it comes to these kinds of dark, sarcastic tales.

“Deacon Blues”

While other songs can jockey for the other slots on the list, “Deacon Blues” is and will always by the greatest Steely Dan song in my estimation and was an obvious choice for my favorite.

I’m a big fan of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, which is very much the touchstone for “Deacon Blues.” Fagen and Becker were influenced by the Beats (the band name was taken from William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch… look it up) and that’s something you hear in this song. Fagen himself wrote of this song, “it toyed with the cliché of the jazz musician as antihero . . . the alienated white suburban kid thinks that if he learns how to play bebop, he'll throw off the chains of repression and live the authentic life, unleash the wild seeds of art and passion and so on.” There’s so much of that tortured, soulful artist in the narrative of this song, which is such a part of the Beat Generation mythology.

Learn to work the saxophone

I'll play just what I feel

Drink Scotch whisky all night long

And die behind the wheel

They got a name for the winners in the world

I want a name when I lose

I also always loved and think about the line: “I cried when I wrote this song, sue me if I play too long.” But it reads like On The Road or The Subterraneans in pop song form. The music matches the lyrics, with a kind of late-night jazz tempo and feel. The guitar and saxophone (Pete Christlieb) work certainly contributes to that along with the electric piano sprinkled throughout.

Also, speaking of lines I love, the hook that gives the song its title:

They call Alabama the Crimson Tide

Call me Deacon Blues

As someone who received one of his degrees from Wake Forest University, who are the Demon Deacons and have claimed the song as their own, I feel connected to it in that way too.

That brings to an end the countdown of my Top 25 favorite Steely Dan songs! I need to be thinking of where to go next with one of these series, so be on the lookout for me soliciting your collective thoughts and suggestions.