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The Dan were no good after the first album.

by 93 Comments

Of course I don’t mean that but, hey, got your attention, right?
I love every Dan album. They all have surprises, quirks and tweaks. Yes, they all have the odd duffer but, shit, who doesn’t?
But the Dan I fell head over heels in love with is the one on Can’t Buy A Thrill. The warm, multi-harmonied rock band. The band I thought would save the world. The band that wasn’t so aware of just how feckin’ good they were. The band that weren’t so knowing.
CBAT is packed with warmth, in the sound, the recording, the guitar tones and the drum sound. Everything afterwards, though brilliant, sounds a tiny bit colder. A tiny bit cleverer (is that even a word?) A tiny bit more knowing.
There is no duffer on CBAT. I adore all of the references, the nods, the winks. They don’t feel ‘placed’. They feel completely natural, completely real.
Can’t Buy A Thrill is the sound of a band at the height of their powers. After it, Steely Dan sound amazing, clever, heroic. But they no longer sound like a band.

You may have your own opinion, so hit me with it.

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Comments

  1. Reeling In The Years actually got quite a lot of airplay on the radio back in the day. People like Johnnie Walker and the more hip Radio One DJs would give it a spin and that is my first memory of hearing Steely Dan.
    I do love that first album, especially side one, which is as perfect a sequence of songs as they ever put together. Elliot Randall’s solo on Kings is, I think, even better than the one he is more famous for. I corresponded with him on that, and he agreed.
    Your last statement about them not being a band afterwards? Well I think the first track on the follow up album disproves that theory fairly easily. Obviously, once Fagen and Becker dispensed with Skunk, Denny and Jim Hodder (so from Pretzel Logic onwards) it was just them and the sessions guys, but nonetheless right up to the Royal Scam there was still a consistency to their sound that made it feel like a band.

    • @nickduvet Good points, well made. Don’t forget that, if my T was any further into my C, we’d have a major medical situation that even Jeremy Rhyming Slang couldn’t fix.
      Countdown and The Royal Scam are my next two fave Dan albums. I think it’s the change of production sound on CTE that I’m talking about. Back in the day, the vinly sounded slightly tinnier (wow, THERE’S a great ’70’s phrase) than CBAT.

    • The title says it. They tried to sell you thrills aplenty after the first album but failed. They came both gratis and aplenty therewith. It is, I think, the very nature of the original band (rather than the seasoned session men that came in later) that gives CBaT its wings. And PL at least one wing. Afterwards it was prayers only. Not trolling, honest, as I admire the idea of the Dan but find them a little dull in their earnestness after the exquisiteness of that first album. The piano solo and the steel are two of the finest expressions of either instrument ever in Fire in the Hole. Just played it again and I am not wrong.

  3. I tend to agree with the sentiment in the OP. The first album is my favourite and (along with Pretzel Logic), is the one I return to most often. They seemed to become smoother and less rocky after CBAT.

  4. At the risk of sounding contrarian, I much prefer Aja & the albums that came after.
    The early stuff to my ears, sounds ‘crude’ in comparison – though it’s far from shabby.
    My fave is Gaucho, but I tend to put Everything Must Go on before anything else these days.
    I think my take stems from the fact that their albums weren’t contemporary to me & I worked my way through the whole catalogue after having bought the Showbiz Kids comp.
    It must obviously be very different from the perspective of fans who saw them emerge, then ‘evolve’ & then mutate into the super smooth studio incarnation.
    Above all, I love the contrast between the polished surface & the dark, daek subject matter.

  5. One know it’s strange but I find myself agreeing with @Tiggerlion on this one. Countdown is my favourite but the first 3 albums are unmatched. Re Cant buy a thrill – Brooklyn owes the charmer is my top pick.

  8. I’d written the Dan off for years as just another AOR rock band until a mate loaned me a copy of Aja and Katy Lied in late 90s. I promptly got the box set so I took it all in at once and I have to say there is barely a duff track across the whole lot (the box set goes up to Gaucho).

    I get what you mean about the later stuff being more produced and less of a band performance but for me, a record like Aja has an amazing, otherworldly atmosphere about it – I know it’s not a band jamming away it’s the product of loads of obsessive production work – editing and flying in endless retakes of solos, parts and retakes of vocals etc but it doesn’t feel cold and sterile to me – I love the melody, groove and feel of the record and I’m not really thinking it about how it was recorded when I listen to it.

    • Yes, I’ve got that “Citizen” box set, too.

      1. Yes, the standard of songwriting and playing is consistently outstanding. The only track I can do without, really, is that live version of “Bodhisattva” with the unnecessarily long spoken introduction.

      2. The sound quality of the CD set does not match the quality of the music. I suppose quite a few early CD boxes suffered from inferior sound quality.

  10. Katy Lied is my most-ever played album (not necessarily my favourite album ever but the one I return to most ie yesterday). Always been surprised by the love for Aja – back in the day us real fans (ie me and Billy Mathers) thought it was over-produced gloss. Me and Billy were wrong of course but like some many groups The Dan never surpassed the glory (see the glory) of those first 5 albums.

  11. Nah, not ‘aving it mate. They evolved, which is what good bands should do. The only time they misfired IMHO (OOAA) is on Gaucho which has a couple of good tracks, one standout (which, unsurprisingly, was actually recoded years earlier and features Larry Carlton) and is the sound of a band out of ideas. But otherwise they were always brilliant, if different.

    Worthy of note is that their work method was to record the full band even when it was comprised of session guys, saving the overdubbing madness for the solos and vocals. Even the last album was recorded like this, where most producers were recording each instrument at a time, rigorously edited to the grid and quantised. For “Everything must go” they recorded to tape, bounced a mix to digital for the overdubbing (which famously wears tape out) then flew the final takes back to tape for the final mix. What a wonderful band.

    See here….

    http://www.mixonline.com/news/news-articles/steely-dan-everything-must-go/425194

    • Trivia fact – Keith Jarrett sued over authorship of the track ‘Gaucho’, eventually having his name added to the writing credits, due to its resemblance to his ‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours’.

    • Agree ‘re Gaucho falling slightly short of their previous high standards yet Hey Nineteen is one of their best songs so the album still has a lot going for it.

  12. Every SD album is brilliant in it’s own way’ Don and Walt are themselves not such fans of “Can’t Buy A Thrill”, reckoning some of the songs are cheesy. I think it’s the David Palmer vocals, which are quite generic for the time, really. But the album is a spectacular work of confidence for a first album. Though “Reeling In the Years” would be genius for anyone, and a great song, for me it’s just a little too obvious for the Dan – “sophomoric”, if you will. Ordering the albums is, to me, a futile task, though you might call some albums first division, and others Premier League. Hell, I like Walter Becker solo albums.

  13. My 16 year old daughter thinks Morph… is the finest of all the SD/DF/WB releases, and she is well acquainted with the lot. it’s a lonely life being a 16 year old girl into Steely Dan.

    • God! When I was 16, I would have fallen head over heels for any girl who even knew who Steely Dan were. The otherwise wonderful girlfriend I had at the time mistook them for Barclay James Harvest.

      • As a Dan nut of the highest order I have previously described their music as the soundtrack of my life. It therefore follows that it was also the inescapable soundtrack of my daughters life – from birth.

        Whilst it is not her favourite music (why should it be), now, as a young adult, she regularly attests to it’s ‘quality’.

        Unlike Mrs Attackdog!

      • To be fair, in my south coast comp there were at least 3 other girls in my year who liked Steely Dan, but that was the mid-70s. They preferred the 6th formers to those still tryin’ to grow a chin, like me. My youngest also likes the beatles, PreFab Sprout and Stephen Wilson: it’s a lonely life for the children of the AWers.

    • Respect to her for going her own way. I think being a 16 year old can be pretty lonely in many ways. Perhaps less so in this cyber-age? My 13 year old son has just made friends with a girl from Atlanta Georgia while playing Overwatch!

      • If I had the means to convert it, I would show you a video taped clip of my 8 year-old daughter dancing round our living room to Haitian Divorce, a track she adored as a youngster. Go figure.

  14. I got a “Best Of” on the back of Patrick Crowthers (where is he these days?) love of them at the old place and its something I return to often but I have no sense of what period they are from and would be hard pushed to tell. There’s a copy of Pretzel Logic in Ivy’s box I will definitely give a listen to

  16. Out of nerderie interest @tiggerlion here is the chorus from “Movies” analysed by my audio software. First from Citizen….

    http://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i449/charlieboy14/Movies%20Citizen_zpsqvavqzab.png

    Then from the remaster….

    http://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i449/charlieboy14/Movies%20remaster_zpso7hegxrj.png

    The axis on the left is time and on the right is frequency, so the orange, red and yellow is low end and the green to blue to purple is the high end. You can see the better definition and detail in the remaster…the analysis itself is 3D so you can rotate it and admire the remaster high end….audio PORN.

  17. Purely as an academic exercise I just took a look at the prices on the dodgers site.
    I have no idea where they are retailing for the prices stated above because the prices I’ve seen are staggeringly expensive. Even £37 is too much for me but when it starts stacking up into three figures…
    I love the Dan but not that much!

  20. *waves from deepest, darkest Berkshire* Well, didn’t you all do well? I’m so glad that my cheeky, attention grabbing headline provoked such discussion AND some serious wallet-emptying!
    Because I too am quite the fan, I have also indulged in the post 1999 remasters and snaffled the lot from Les Dodgers De Tax. Mighty fine they sound too.

    So glad I could be of service.

  21. OK, here’s the chorus from “Deacon Blues”…..from Citizen….

    http://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i449/charlieboy14/Deacon%20Citizen_zpsnk89tuqu.png

    And the remaster…..

    http://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i449/charlieboy14/Deacon%20Remaster_zpsfhnwwrz1.png

    Your ears will tell you the Citizen version is a bit brittle sounding and lacking in body….you can see it clearly in the graphs, with the mids more pronounced (the yellows and greens) and the highs tamed a bit (the blues).!

  22. Confession time – Aja is my least favourite of the original run of Dan albums, despite having my favourite track on it (Deacon Blue). If you could swap that track for the (song) Royal Scam then RS would probably be my favourite album. RS always sounded to me like it belonged on the next album, not the one it was on.

    So my favourite will be Pretzel Logic. Or Katy Lied. Probably. Today. Maybe the Nightfly?

  23. Lunch time CD playing here……the old one. I’ve got the LP, the CD and the Citizen set, so I’m not buying it again £5.99 or not.

    Of course, the answer as always is….Bob Dylan. ie ‘I ride on a mail train baby, can’t buy a thrill’.

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