Vindicated!
Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh heh heh.
So back over summer (August 4–5), I got into some good-natured mud wrestling with some of fcrp’s good readers about Steely Dan. To wit: All the predictors would suggest that I should like them, but I don’t. Boy, don’t I. Meanwhile readers and friends like Len and Mary mounted a smart and passionate defense.
But how does that saying go? “Revenge is a dish best served cold?” No, wait, that’s not the one. It’s “You shall know them by the company they keep.”
Just heard this heading home from work last night, way too late for a Friday night: straight from heaven, saving me the trouble of really thinking, really writing. It’s as if the good lord said: “Take it easy, Kev. I’ve got this one.”
This gift came in the form of a radio commercial for the fall schedule at L.A.’s Greek Theater. We’ve got some good shows coming soon: Willie Nelson; Band of Horses; Van Morrison. And—and an ensemble group called the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue. Who, by any other name(s), are Michael McDonald, Boz Skaggs—and Donald Fagen.
For any of you under 50 years of age—and I do desperately hope there are at least a couple of you—these names might not be familiar. Michael McDonald, to begin there, committed multiple acts of blue-eyed soul in the 70s; he’s probably best known for his soft-rock hits with the Doobie Brothers—the marijuana allusion was certainly the only “edgy” think about the Doobies—and as a backup singer in later lineups of Steely Dan. When you hear that high-pitched, soaring, somewhat whiny backing on “Peg,” for instance—that’s Mickey McD.
Boz Skaggs, I expect, has absolutely no resonance for anyone born after about 1970. But in the mid-70s, you couldn’t freaking avoid his album, Silk Degrees, no matter how hard you tried. Even if you don’t know the name, young ‘uns, you may know a song or two: “Lowdown” is probably his biggest hit, with its vapidly perky orchestration and embarrassing faux soul crooning.
And the third musketeer: Donald Fagen, of course, half of Steely Dan. (I was never clear which one was “Steely,” which “Dan.”) It’s like the Revenge of 70s M.O.R. Tour; U2 had its Elevation Tour—this is the Elevator Music Tour. All the crummy albums the girls in my dorm played nonstop in 1976, packed into one spectacular night.
The closest analog I can think of: it’s as if Neil Young had swallowed his pride and banded together with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash. Yes: it’s just that bad.
Not so fast, dude. (Did I really just call you “dude”?)
It’s already been established, I believe, that our musical coming-of-age was right about the same time, so I know that you were awake and listening back the days of yore of which you speak. Yet you’re replacing memories with latter-day reputations.
I turn my nose up at the Doobie Brothers and Boz Scaggs now, and Michael McDonald keeps company with Kenny G in my personal abyss of distaste. But I have not forgotten the past, either. The Doobie Brothers were really teh shiznitt in the early 70s; not until *What Once Were Vices Are Now Habits* did they start their decline into Nutrasweet territory. Hell, they started life as a bad-boy band, I well recall.
As for Boz Scaggs, his *Boz Scaggs & Band* album was adored by all the critics, up to and including Lester Bangs, and even *Silk Degrees* won all kinds of accolades from the snob periodicals (*Creem*, *Trouser Press*, etc.), and he toured and played with critical darlings Little Feat.
Feel free to turn your nose up at the 70s, but do it with your 21st-century nose. Condemning the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue for their past work is like dismissing John Bunyan for being trite and uncool.
I’ll let you get back to your little grudge match over Steely Dan. That’s one fight in which I have no dog.
Oh, snap! I take your general point, but in some of the particulars, we were probably circling in different orbits. I have no idea what the critical consensus on the Doobie Brothers was, or is: you’re no doubt right that in my imagination, they’re stereotyped in a particularly awkward phase of their development. But it’s truly all that I know. The only album cover I can summons is the Greatest Hits, with that jukebox: for me, that’s all the Doobie Brothers I’ve got. And I think it’s because, as with the Boz Skaggs, that’s all that I encountered in the dorms when I went off to college. I believe you that there’s better, more challenging Doobies & Boz: I’ve never heard it. And as you rightly point out, that’s my limitation, not theirs.
For me, this is very much gendered: those two albums (Doobie Brothers Greatest Hits, Silk Degrees) were the albums young women in our dorm played, along with Dan Fogelberg and an assortment of James Taylor. My reactions, and memories, are I know wrapped up in romantic experiences that I’m not at all interested in revisiting — not even for myself, never mind for y’all!
Thanks, Meg.
My take on Neil Young’s reunions with the lesser lights of CS&N was that it was a favour to them aimed at helping them maintain a certain lifestyle in their dotage – CS&N’s, that is. Regarding his original affiliation, let me – with apologies to Art Linkletter – say that, “drugs do the darndest things.”
Meg had me worried with her scurrilous suggestion that Trouser Press had endorsed Silk Degrees, but I was relieved to find that their index of all reviews and feature articles from ’74-’84 had no listings for Boz Scaggs or Silk Degrees – I have Trouser Press bookmarked, as it happens. At least no suggestion was made that Steve Simels (Stereo Review) praised Boz and Silk Degrees . . .
Re. the Doobie Brothers’(early) “bad boy” credentials, I have read that they had a SoCal following among the Hell’s Angels – rather different than Big Brother and the Dead up north, even though the DB’s were a Bay Area band. I’m not sure whether Meg actually harbours a fondness for early DB’s, but I’ve already endured a prolonged Facebook battle with friends on that very subject and don’t care to go through that again. Let me simply say that I initially cared little for them, but McDonald made them intolerable.
I thought of you, Kevin, while I was in the local downscale grocery store. Steely Dan was providing the Muzak–”Peg.” (I have such a mental block about most of 70s music that I couldn’t remember the title until I got home and looked up “done up in blueprint blue” on Google.)
I sympathize with your perspective. I understood it when I read your previous Steely Dan essay, and I wanted to analyze why I feel more or less the same, but that would have required listening to some SD tracks–and so I shied away from the task. I haven’t actually listened to a Steely Dan recording since . . . the 70s(?), but the grocery store experience brought it back to me. Why do I, too, dislike them? I think I understand it better after having lived in New York for a decade.
There’s a certain type of male individual–he’s everywhere but the subspecies exists in a higher concentration in the greater New York area than anywhere else. Braggadocio describes him in one word. The guy who thinks he’s the hottest shit in the universe and fails to comprehend that women might not be all that into him or the reasons why. His surface sophistication is a pretense, and he’s something of a bully, especially towards women or anyone he thinks uncool, even though he’s something of a wimp himself. That’s the attitude that Steely Dan shouts at me.
Evidence? Steely Dan came along in the early 70s. There was already a group with a similar name, Steeleye Span, a British outfit fronted by Maddy Prior that rocked traditional English folksongs and wrote new ones, rather like Fairport Convention. They predated Steely Dan by several years. Apparently, Steely Dan never heard of them–I can’t imagine them listening to anyone doing folk-rock or, for that matter, anyone British–and challenged them to a gunfight when they did. Attitude, attitude, attitude.
I seem to recall critics back in the day praising Steely Dan’s “intellectuality.” Really? Does going to Bard College and using a lot of allusions make one an intellectual? At the risk of citing Wikipedia, their “lyrics, often filled with sharp sarcasm, touch upon such themes as drugs, love affairs, crime, and their true-to-life ‘contempt of west coast hippies.’” (I might add a truckload of self-pity to the list.) But sarcasm and satire are not the same thing. To me, it’s all overblown macho and white guys acting out their fantasies of what it means to be black, even though it has nothing to do with the actual experience of any African American living or dead. In other words, it’s undergraduate sophistry disguising itself as Beat sophistication (or is the latter a contradiction in terms?)
Addenda:
1. I remember that I actually did learn something because of Steely Dan when I was much younger. I was curious enough to look up the meaning of “bodhisattva.” And if I’d bothered to listen to the song since the 70s, I might have realized before now that it was nothing but a smarmy diss of Buddhism in America.
2. I actually like the Pointer Sisters’ cover of “Dirty Work.” But then again, the song takes on a rather meaning when sung by a black woman instead of a self-pitying white guy.
3. Yaz[oo]‘s song “Goodbye Seventies” sums up my feelings about the decade quite well. What can you say about a decade in which, aside from some old school soul tracks, Abba, and ELO were the most energetic and creative forces out there.
Let the bricks fly where they may!
Holy smokes, Pat! Only one question: why aren’t you writing for me? This should have been a blog post, not a comment. (And in all seriousness: if you ever want a place to bloviate, I’m your man. I get tired of hearing my own voice here, and can’t imagine that others don’t, too.)
Steve, I didn’t even know that *TP* had its reviews indexed and online — thanks for the pointer! My claim was based on memory; I subscribed to *TP* with my hard-earned babysitting money, and I remember finding it hard to believe that they (I don’t remember the reviewer) liked *Silk Degrees*.
Because the fact is, I hated Boz Scaggs then, along with most of the other 70s R&B bands, the classy and the smarmy alike. Never was much for the Doobie Brothers, although I saw them when they came to the nearest town (because I went to every concert, there being so few).
Pat, I didn’t know Steely Dan had challenged Steeleye Span to a duel — that cracks me up. Tim Hart (who, I would argue was just as much a leader as Maddy Prior) was an early crush of mine. I think it was the hair.
Fake Chinese Rubber Plant: bringing bright inquiring minds, and handsome folks, together since 2010.
The Concert Poster should be titled “The cure for Insomnia”,
After this show: PTSD.
I didn’t know they’d added a Los Angeles date. Maybe I’ll go; if so, I’ll let you know how it is (even though everyone here seems to think they know exactly how it will be).
So, what in particular is wrong with Michael McDonald? I think he’s a pretty talented singer. I remember seeing some Steely Dan documentary where they were talking about how McDonald laid down individual tracks for all the different parts of the harmonies on “Peg” and how few singers would have been able to do them all in tune because they are such close chords. Of course nowadays singers seem to make liberal use of Auto-Tune, so such mastery of the vocal instrument may be a skill of declining value except to those of us who think that pitch correction is cheating.
I don’t really have an opinion of Boz Scaggs, but I do think it is kind of interesting that a large part of the criticisms of him and these other artists seems to be based on disdain for the kinds of people who listen to their music (not just here but in general — e.g., George Carlin, god rest his soul, had a special hatred for Steely Dan fans for some reason). That strikes me as snobbery, and furthermore I think that, as I think you argued in the Kings of Leon post, artists should be not held responsible for what kinds of people (or how many) listen to their music.
We’re probably wallowing in an area with no solid markers, when it comes to someone like Michael McDonald. Like The Dan, I’d never question his chops, technically: it’s just that (to my ears) his “soul” is entirely soulless. But as you suggest, that may well say more about him than about me.
Let me put it this way: if I were going to quickly pick my #1 pop music genius idol, it’s Brian Eno. If I heard that Eno were coming to the Hollywood Bowl as part of the Three Other Tenors — himself, Bobby McFerrin, and Michael Bolton — well, I’d have to reconsider my considered opinion. And given my prejudices, and what I’m increasingly coming to see as a rather traumatic college-based musical coming-of-age, for me McDonald & Scaggs are McFerrin & Bolton.
Sorry, I forgot that “interesting” is a pet peeve. I wasn’t using it deliberately to annoy; let’s substitute “telling” for “interesting” in this case.
Oh, I’m so over that! Sometime, many times, “interesting” is exactly the right word. We just need to be vigilant!
Here’s a link to an “interesting” blog post from The AV Club that uses Steely Dan as a lens for a meditation about coming to grips with the idea of criticism. (Or something like that.)
http://www.avclub.com/articles/popless-week-39-the-shifting-tides,2479/
Kev – is there a way to put an FB-style “like” button on everyone’s posts?
Ken’s interesting link had me wanting that very option.
By the way, I’m glad that you’re over your thing about “interesting.” I hope your students didn’t use clickers every time you said the word during a lecture/class, or that any snide references on this blog influenced your change of mind.
A “like” button: interesting idea. I’ll investigate.