By Curtis Schieber
Columbus Dispatch
“Agents of the law / Luckless pedestrian / I know you’re out there / With rage in your eyes and your megaphones,” Donald Fagen sang during “Don’t Take Me Alive” in Steely Dan’s second set on Saturday night in the Value City Arena.
Thousands in the audience joined in for the chorus: “I’m a bookkeeper’s son / I don’t want to shoot no one / Well I crossed my old man back in Oregon / Don’t take me alive.”
They were rather dark and poetic lines for a gleeful, mass singalong. But then, Steely Dan has never underestimated the ability of pop music to encompass the highly sophisticated as well as the cheaply base.
Since its beginning in the mid-1970s the group, essentially Fagen and co-writer and guitarist Walter Becker, has used its hit-making platform to peddle some of the most subversive music ever heard on the radio.
The group purloined its name from a sexual device in beat writer William Burroughs anarchist book “Naked Lunch.” The song “Don’t Take Me Alive” was drawn from “The Royal Scam,” a 1976 album seething in its view of a corrupted and doomed society.
From the start, Becker and Fagen’s public profile has been minimal; the current tour is one of precious few during nearly 30 years. But they delivered with a string of hits and a 13-piece band loaded with chops.
At the start, the band played it safe: “Aja,” the title track from the band’s most musically ambitious album, was reproduced nearly verbatim; its solos never strayed much past paraphrasing the originals.
Though the new song “Godwhacker” included fine showcases for the four hornmen — Cornelius Bumpus and Walt Weiskopf on tenor sax, trumpeter Michael Leonhart and especially trombonist Jim Pugh — it wasn’t until late in the first set that the ensemble really began to ply the group’s brilliant raw material.
The verse to “Haitian Divorce” became roots reggae. Becker cut loose on “Josie,” finally matching hot second guitarist Jon Herington, and the tunes took on a flexibility befitting their complex jazz structures. An extended drum solo from Keith Carlock was an absorbing mix of syncopation and flash — and crowd-pleasing to boot.
Steely Dan’s compositions, among the most perfect of pop music, contain an unmistakable undercurrent of cynicism and dark humor. It would have been obvious and easy for Becker and Fagen to exude it onstage while wheeling their exquisite musical Trojan horses past the gates of mainstream culture.
Instead, at their best on Saturday night, they let the work come alive and speak for them.
No comments yet.