By Steve Hochman
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — “Here’s a tune from one of those albums in the mid-’70s,” said Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, introducing the song “Night by Night” on Tuesday at the Universal Amphitheatre.
In recent Steely Dan tours, there would have been unmistakable irony to that remark, since there had been no new Steely Dan albums since the ’70s. Once an act that made records but didn’t tour, Steely Dan reconvened in the mid-’90s as a group that toured but didn’t make records. Now, though, the twain has finally met again, and SD is on the road with a new album, Two Against Nature.
Not that it really changes anything. The new songs pick up where the old ones left off, maintaining the essential formula of intricate, immaculate, jazz-informed music and barbed, unflattering character studies.
But Tuesday, at the first of two nights at Universal, it was evident that there’s a lot in common between the ’70s and year 2000. Once again Steely Dan is right for the times — or maybe the times are right for Steely Dan.
The key moment may have been “Black Friday,” a song from 1975’s Katy Lied. Played with solid punch by the ace ensemble, the warning of a crash was accompanied by projections of stock tickers. We may have economic prosperity now that was missing in the ’70s, but we still suffer from the same moral and spiritual bankruptcy chronicled in the Dan’s classic songs.
Fagen, partner Walter Becker and their 11-member crew focused on those classics. “Do It Again,” with original member Denny Dias sitting in on guitar, was one of several receiving new arrangements that expanded on their harmonic colorings, while “Deacon Blue,” with its patently strange lyrics and idiosyncratic musical complexities, remains one of the most unlikely songs ever to have been embraced by a mass audience.
If anything, Becker and Fagen under-represented the new album. They didn’t even play its “What a Shame About Me,” the most explicit statement of the ’70s-’00s link. But maybe that would have been too obvious.
But it didn’t matter. With Fagen, rocking behind his keyboard like Ray Charles, as the viper-like narrator of these short stories, songs both new and old seemed as much akin to “American Beauty” and “Magnolia” as they did 25 years ago to “Shampoo” and “Nashville.” And the new, uncomfortably leering “Cousin Dupree” reminded us that in the Dan world, it’s not just hollow suburbanites under the microscope, but colorful lowlifes as well.
Ultimately, guitarist Becker (who took over lead vocals on a couple of older songs) and Fagen seemed somewhat amused to have new songs. Becker stumbled over the phrase “our most recent album” as something he’s unaccustomed to saying. But odds seem to be that there will be more new ones — whenever the time is right.
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