By Eric Fine
Atlantic City Press
A Steely Dan concert sounds almost exactly like the recorded version of the “group.” But that’s OK — anything close to a live performance is welcome after a nearly 20-year hiatus from the stage. The band’s recent gig at the Tweeter Center in Camden featured an 11-piece ensemble that spent the night “reelin’ in the years.”
The group will perform a sold-out show at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa on Saturday, Aug. 30.
Still, such a retrospective answered the question that crossed many a skeptic’s mind in the 1970s: How effectively would the fastidiously recorded albums of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker translate to a concert hall?
Quite well, thank you.
Fagen’s slightly off-kilter voice remains intact, the perfect instrument to deliver sneering numbers such as “Don’t Take Me Alive” and also a love song like “Aja.” The four-piece horn section fleshed out the jazzy arrangements, and the three backup singers provided the harmonies so essential to Steely Dan’s late-period albums “The Royal Scam” (1976), “Aja” (1977) and “Gaucho” (1980).
It was for good reason that critics dubbed Steely Dan “the thinking man’s Top 40 band.” Fagen and Becker had a knack for writing songs that performed well on the pop charts, with arrangements that almost always had the precise, even flow of a commercial jazz album. Yet as songwriters, they rarely missed a chance to indulge their penchant for the dark end-of-the-world and end-of-an-affair themes that lurked beneath the catchy verses. It was an odd combination that worked.
Steely Dan released seven albums from 1972 to 1980 that incorporated blues, jazz and rock, but that never lost sight of the songwriters’ vision of radio-friendly pop music. The group had an omnipresent place on the pop charts with hits such as “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Deacon Blues” and “Hey Nineteen.”
The group’s achievements are all the more impressive in the light of the fact that it stopped touring in 1974. That’s right folks, Steely Dan was a studio project led by a pair of eccentrics who fussed over every track. The two ended their partnership in 1981, but reunited in the early ’90s for a pair of solo albums — Fagan’s “Kamakiriad” (1993) and Becker’s “11 Tracks of Whack” (1994) — and also began touring.
As Steely Dan, Fagen and Becker won four Grammys for “Two Against Nature” (2000). “Everything Must Go” came out in June, and the duo is once again out on the road.
Fagen, a keyboard player, assumed his customary role of lead singer and front man on Aug. 23 at the Tweeter. He spent a good part of the concert alternating between a portable keyboard that he strapped on like a guitar and an electronic wind instrument that resembled a soprano saxophone but sounded like a synthesizer.
Becker, who appeared to the right of his longtime accomplice, shared the guitar solos with Jon Herington, whose diverse credits run from folkies Lucy Kaplansky and the Bacon Brothers to jazzers Randy and Michael Brecker.
The rest of the band also possessed credits similar to the highly regarded session players who performed on Steely Dan’s albums in the 1970s. Walt Weiskopf, another jazzman, and former Doobie Brother Cornelius Bumpus handled the all-important tenor sax solos — a hallmark of the “Aja” album. And bassist Tom Barney, whose resume includes Miles Davis’ early ’80s bands and television’s “Saturday Night Live,” laid down the funky bottom on “Babylon Sisters” and “Time Out of Mind.”
True to the iconoclastic nature of Fagen and Becker, the band played only a couple of songs from the newly minted “Everything Must Go”: “The Things I Miss The Most” and “Godwhacker,” which featured Becker’s limited vocals. Even “The Last Mall,” the album’s single, turned up missing-in-action.
Most of the material came from the aforementioned trio of late 1970s recordings. The highlights of the concert, which lasted just under two hours, included “Home At Last,” “Josie,” “Kid Charlemagne” and the apocalyptic “Don’t Take Me Alive.” The encore included “My Old School” and, surprisingly enough, the ultra-slick “FM (No Static at All).”
As for the crowd, the band could do no wrong. In spite of their apparent (middle) age, these folks screamed and hollered the entire night and even cheered the backup singers as they chanted “You got to shake it baby” on “Babylon Sisters.”
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