"Bodhisattva" 316.509.604 With this, Steely Dan rocketed up high on my all-star cavalcade list of favorites and there they stayed for several years. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, still pretending to be a band at this point, were all jazz and beats (as in San Francisco beatniks) affectation somehow compressed impossibly into perfect pop music, not only radio-ready but radio-worthy and etched into the immortal canons of Billboard. An obligatory name derivation courtesy William Burroughs, lyrics that "didn't make sense" or got all eastern on you, something that sounded like hard bop played on electric guitars: At the time owning the albums could feel like a ticket to a hipster paradise where Charlie Parker never died and Duke Ellington never aged and Chet Baker always went on the nod. Some things you can't change. I guess they've got horns in there but it never would have even mattered if they didn't.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Countdown to Ecstasy (1973)
"Bodhisattva" 316.509.604 With this, Steely Dan rocketed up high on my all-star cavalcade list of favorites and there they stayed for several years. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, still pretending to be a band at this point, were all jazz and beats (as in San Francisco beatniks) affectation somehow compressed impossibly into perfect pop music, not only radio-ready but radio-worthy and etched into the immortal canons of Billboard. An obligatory name derivation courtesy William Burroughs, lyrics that "didn't make sense" or got all eastern on you, something that sounded like hard bop played on electric guitars: At the time owning the albums could feel like a ticket to a hipster paradise where Charlie Parker never died and Duke Ellington never aged and Chet Baker always went on the nod. Some things you can't change. I guess they've got horns in there but it never would have even mattered if they didn't.
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