Didn’t realise the song was about him
http://sfist.com/2015/07/20/san_francisco_show_and_tell_steely.php
Owsley and the Dan’s Kid Charlemagne
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Wonderful lyrics.
I must revisit “The Royal Scam”. It’s been a while
I do recommend the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test – I really don’t think I would actually have liked to live through it, but fascinating times.
(I first thought you meant Owsley did think it was about him, and was going to make a Carly Simon quip)
Interesting. Other explanations of Steely Dan lyrics welcome!
Try this…Steely Dan dictionary!
http://www.steelydandictionary.com/
Chain Lightning is supposed to be about two old Nazis returning to the site of the Nuremburg rallies:
Hush brother, we cross the square
Act natural like you don’t care
Turn slowly and comb your hair
Don’t trouble the midnight air
We’re standing just where he stood
It was chain lightning
It feels so good
And The Fez is about safe sex.
Or a hat…
Dr Wu was a real person, an acupuncturist, who treated one of the Dan for drug addiction. However, the tribute seems to cast him as a drug dealer, rather than healer, if you assume that ‘Katy’ is actually heroin or cocaine.
We touched on some of these things, and many others, in the Dancast:
Isn’t Midnite Cruiser Bud Powell talking to Thelonious Monk about their 1951 drug arrest?
The sleeve of Aja claims that Home At Last is a reworking of the Oddysey.
My Old School is supposed to be biographical, about a drug bust at their college.
So the prevailing themes are sex and drugs
Whodathunkit
Rikki Ducornet is a real person, too. She was the wife of a young professor at Bard. She met Fagen at a party. She was pregnant at the time and declined to phone him as he suggested. Hence, the song of unrequited love.
http://rikkiducornet.com/bio
Rick Derringer says it’s about him – they asked him to join the road band and he declined so they gave him their number in case he had a change of heart…
There was an Enertainment Weekly article about it some years ago.
General Comment
The Wikipedia article didn’t really quote the article in Entertainment Weekly, but paraphrased it.
For those of you interested in the actual quote from the actual article:
ew.com/ew/article/…
“Tucked in the woods behind Stone Row, down a narrow path many students never notice, sits a one-room, octagonal stone structure known as the Observatory. It is there that Fagen most wants to visit. ”I used to practice here,” he explains, gazing around the room, which, it turns out, was converted into an office in the early ’70s. This isolated space was one of Fagen’s most cherished escapes. ”There was nothing in there but a grand piano,” he says. ”I had wonderful hours in here practicing scales, things that no one else should hear, you know? I’d write tunes in here, too. And if you were rejected by someone you were in love with, you could scream. I was always in love with someone [who] ignored me completely. That was my Bard experience. There was a Sorrows of Young Werther vibe about it.”
One such unrequited crush might have been a professor’s young wife named Rikki Ducornet, whose first name will be familiar to Steely Dan fans. Fagen won’t admit it – he’s always been extremely reluctant to explain his songs – but it’s easy to imagine that Ducornet was the inspiration for one of his band’s most famous tunes, ”Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” ”I remember we had a great conversation and he did suggest I call him, which never happened,” says Ducornet, now a well-regarded novelist and artist. ”But I know he thought I was cute. And I was cute,” she laughs. ”I was very tempted to call him, but I thought it might be a bit risky. I was very enchanted with him and with the music. It was so evident from the get-go that he was wildly talented. Being a young faculty wife and, I believe, pregnant at the time, I behaved myself, let’s say. Years later, I walked into a record store and heard his voice and thought, ‘That’s Fagen. And that’s my name!”’
Fagen would have better luck with a former Bard student named Libby Titus, whom he encountered on campus in 1966 and married 27 years later. And that’s hardly his only happy memory of the school. ”I was coming straight from a housing development in New Jersey, so it was great,” he says. ”I loved the teachers and the girls, you know. I had friends here. Probably the only time in my life,” he says with a laugh, ”that I actually had friends.” ”
It’s hardly decisive. I think Fagen’s nostalgia for those days is most obvious in his solo work and the last two Steely Dan albums. It’s A Shame About Me is especially poignant.
Fascinating article – thanks for the link
The track also contains potentially the greatest guitar solo of all time – melodic, restrained but technically brilliant and just the right length (of course it is – Becker and Fagen were producing).