Steely Dan : the complete guide to their music - WorldCat Things To Know Before You Buy

" [I] t's more like desperately attempting to have it sound more or less okay," Fagen when stated. Whatever their motivations, their techniques reached a rational extreme three years later in the type of Aja's follow-up, Gaucho. The nature of Gaucho's production, which cost more than a million dollars, is finest encapsulated by Robert Palmer's report for Rolling Stone on the agonizing spectacle of Fagen, Katz, and Nichols working, as Sweet summarizes it, on "50 seconds of music for 4 hours.

"That album is nearly a document of misery," he stated in a 1993 interview. "We were running out of steam as far as our youthful energy was worried and we hadn't matured enough to deal with it. We were still adolescents." Yet aging constitutes one of Gaucho's chief preoccupations. "Way back when, in sixty 7/ I was the dandy of Gamma Chi," sings a 32-year-old Fagen on the album's most significant hit, "Hey Nineteen," a lament about the difficulties of dating a female of that age.

Some Ideas on Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years by Brian Sweet - Google Play You Need To Know

But then, so did the same album's "Time Out of Mind," an ode to the reality-bending enjoyments of smoking heroin. A chill originates from Gaucho, intolerable even to some listeners otherwise favorably gotten rid of towards Steely Dan. But for  Chord Melody Guitar Music.com  of us, its clockwork detachment places it amongst the greater works of mankind at least amongst the albums most completely evocative of Los Angeles.

"Gaucho shows the first world as a decadent drive-in peopled by stud-eyed users, outrageous losers and those for whom cocaine is God's way of informing them their wallets are too plump." Steely Dan's funniest album, it's "likewise their most urbane. A gem in the trashcan of Californian entropy, a ray of meaningful light amidst LA's louche neon, a chuckling oxygen-nozzle dropped through the smog of contemporary nothingness, Gaucho sort of likes us provide or take a sin or ten." Ironically paradox being Steely Dan's foundation stone Gaucho was recorded in New york city, to which Becker and Fagen had actually just returned after nearly 6 years in Los Angeles.

Steely Dan: The Albums Companion: Facts, figures and personnel listings for  all ten Steely Dan albums by Greg Glasgow

Steely Dan songbooks and sheet music - information and reviews on published Steely  Dan scores and transcriptions

3 Easy Facts About Steely Dan: Reelin' In The Years by Brian Sweet, Paperback Shown

"We vacated to the west coast in '71 or '72, and we got a job there staff-writing for ABC-Dunhill Records," Fagen remembers in the Aja documentary. Their Southern California layover permitted them to make their names in the record organization, in addition to giving them access to the ultra-professional session musicians important to realizing their musical visions.