Well this is real sad news. Out comes Citizen Steely Dan for a few days. What an amazing team of song writers and musicians. You are fortunate Troutman to have seen them as they stayed off the road for long stretches of their career.
Here they all are on the Midnight Special playing a flawless version of Reeling in the Years. Check out the blitzed, latter-day ballistics consultant to the US government, Skunk Baxter.
Awful news. Fagen and Becker's work is underappreciated. Phenomenal writers and musicians. So many great songs that never got played on the radio.
67 seems so young now.
__________________ I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love." - John Steinbeck
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"An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think." Georg Hegel
“To generalize is to be an idiot.” William Blake
"They brought an education and precision to a conversation taking place in the late Sixties of mostly long drum solos and jams. They brought jazz solos to rock, they made being funny in lyrics cool, and they made being cool more important than being handsome. They were the first college band. That's for sure . . .
I am Rickie Lee Jones. And I was one of the women Walter Becker took such good care of in his short life. I would want you to know that. He was so funny. And no, I didn't like the soprano sax on "Satellites," but that sound ended up... well, listen to Dave Mathews, for one. Walter knew what he was doing. He planted music. It grows all around us now".
I think I will play Time Out Of Mind as a tribute, Saturday at 7 pm on CJSW.
Not as nasty as it sounds - Fagen would pay out Becker's widow, and keep artistic control of Steely Dan in the future.
You might be surprised to know Steely Dan sold 40 million albums.
At the center of the lawsuit is a 1972 Buy/Sell Agreement signed by the original bandmembers when Steely Dan was incorporated. According to the complaint, which was filed Tuesday in LA. County Superior Court, the contract provides that whenever a member of the group quits or dies Steely Dan purchases all of that members shares in the group.
A couple of years ago, I caught a few passing references to Steely Dan that seemed to lump the group into what was called “yacht rock” by the too-cool-for-school set that had been too young to know anything about the 1970s or its music. I guess that’s understandable enough. I mean, the face of yacht rock is probably Michael McDonald, the smooth-piped crooner on a lot of ’70s hits, most notably the Doobie Brothers’ classics. McDonald sang on the first couple of Steely Dan records, so Steely Dan literally employed the King Of Yacht Rock.
Still, to define Steely Dan by its association with McDonald (and by extension, the ####ing Doobie Brothers) is to miss the point by a wide margin. It showed a fundamental ignorance of ’70s music that I couldn’t begin to correct when I heard it. Let’s put it this way: There was punk and there was the music that punk was meant as a middle finger thrown up against. The Doobie Brothers and, I don’t know, Toto and Journey were bands that were getting the middle finger from the punks.
Steely Dan? I don’t think so. Look, Steely Dan was as musically competent as any band of the era. They could play. But their attitude was another story. It was more in line with the Replacements than with anyone else I can think of. They were cynical and identified with losers in a profound way.
Walter Becker, Steely Dan, RIP
