August 25, 2010
It was all pretty simple back then.
It was 1977, and rock and roll dominated my life. My blue and white Soundesign 8-track tape player was constantly blasting Humble Pie, Deep Purple, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and anything else that gave me The Feeling. The Feeling was the thing, and the music gave it a ride straight to my soul.
Defining The Feeling won’t be easy. It’s over thirty years later, and I still don’t know what it was. Part of it, of course, was youthful exuberance. Part of it was the promise and possibility that rock and roll had offer. That music somehow made a skinny, pimply-faced kid like me feel like he could do anything. Part of it was pure fun. For me, that music meant a massive party of heroic proportions. (Never mind the fact that most of the time, that “party” was me alone drawing electric guitars in the margins of my algebra homework.) The Feeling was also about truth and honesty. There was something about the music that rang true to me (and to my other outsider buddies) back then. It was a break from all of the bold-faced bull that I felt I was being fed by most of the adults in my life.
The rock and roll was the thing. The guitars were loud and piercing. The drums were over-the-top and intrusive. The whole thing was equal parts tribal stomp, Gospel revival, and Dirty Harry cinema. I knew that this music was the Real Deal because . . . well because it was. And it wasn’t just the Real Deal. It was the Only Real Deal—at least the only one that I knew of. It was all so gloriously simple.
Then I encountered Steely Dan.
By the time I discovered Steely Dan, they had already put out five great albums (Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, Royal Scam, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Can’t Buy a Thrill). Some older kids (Seniors!) put Pretzel Logic on at a party, and I was confused. The loud, brash, bravado of Jagger, Plant, and my other favorite rock singers was gone. So were the ear-splitting guitar riffs, the lunkhead rock lyrics, and the oh-so-Holy rock beat. In short, the vehicle that had driven The Feeling right down my throat (and the collective throat of the American teenager at that time) had been replaced with complex jazz harmony, lyrics about solipsism and existential displacement, soloists working across bar lines a la Bird and Coltrane, swing rhythms, and instrumental virtuosity—all within a pop music context.
Looking back, that stuff should have had me running for the hills (or at least for a copy of Led Zeppelin IV), but it didn’t. I didn’t understand what I was listening to, but whatever it was, it had me, and I didn’t know why. It was kind of like the Grinch. He took the gifts, food, decorations, and all of the other Christmas stuff away, but Christmas came anyway. I felt the Feeling that night, but how? Everything that I thought was responsible for it was gone, yet the Feeling remained. Steely Dan delivered the Feeling, but they did so in a way so utterly contrary to the ways in which it had typically been delivered before.
And I guess that’s it. That’s why we should care about Steely Dan. Their music reminds us that contradiction, paradox, and unpredictability can sometimes be positive attributes. We need the music of Steely Dan and their illogical approach to deliverance of the Feeling more than ever. In a world where so much music, film, and television is created, not by artists, but by marketing directors, Steely Dan continue to create great art while completely ignoring marketing’s cardinal rules: Keep it simple. Give the customer what he thinks he wants. Reveal the outcome immediately. ‘No surprises. ‘No paradoxes to resolve. Keep the product (or more precisely the customer’s view of that product) pure. Clearly, Steely Dan is coming from a different place. Steely Dan creates a world where the listener is asked to submit to Steely Dan’s own special logic–a pretzel logic if you will. It’s a logic where Thelonious Monk and Motown are one, where slickness somehow can mean the opposite of crass commerciality, and where Duke Ellington and Keith Richard share a cab to the bowery in search of a score.
It’s 30+ years later, and I still listen to the music of my youth. These days, however, I listen to a rock tune, it is usually accompanied by a couple of jazz records. Steely Dan’s own brand of pretzel logic is still affecting the way that I think. When I listen to the straight up rock and roll of Deep Purple and Humble Pie and the jazz of Coltrane, Monk, and Mingus I hear the similarities of those styles, not the obvious differences. Steely Dan’s music has always taught me to look for commonality even when conventional wisdom tells me none exists. For me, that’s another way of explaining why Steely Dan matters: They created a musical world that takes knocking down walls for granted. They have created a logic without borders that still somehow makes sense. If the listener chooses to submit to (or at least temporarily accept) that logic, he will get the Feeling, but he’ll get it by way of a wonderfully devious route.
