By David Bennun
The Guardian
Originally published on Oct. 30, 2017
LONDON — If Bruce Springsteen, in his own wry summation, avoided honest labour by writing about it, then Steely Dan have made a roaring success of narrating failure. Their songs are largely concerned with what you could call Steely Dan Man: a figure out of time, place and step, who is baffled by women, overtaken by events and puts the best gloss he can on a maladroit existence.
Having the Doobie Brothers support them at this final night of BluesFest might even be seen as a cunning way to highlight everything these presumed titans of the soft-rock era are not. They are not good old boys innocuously celebrating life’s elemental joys. They are only just a rock band, taking much from jazz and R&B, and even their smoothest tunes have sharp little bones. This show is the first in the UK since the death of singer Donald Fagen’s songwriting partner Walter Becker; an empty mic stand is poignantly set up.
Play the first two and then the last two albums of the band’s initial continuous run and, as with Roxy Music, you might think you’re hearing two different bands linked by writing and sensibility. Tonight’s set leans heavily towards the later work, when they were no longer a group but a pair of perfectionist song-crafters in a studio teeming with session players. Around half is drawn from their biggest record, the frictionless Aja, and its successor, the luxuriant, bloodless Gaucho.
Frontman, fulcrum and bandleader Fagen is the only rough element beneath the surface of an immaculate band – the much-needed grit in the oyster, especially when the middle part of the show noodles into soporific virtuosity on “Time Out of Mind” and Aja’s title track. His voice skids and swerves past more notes than it hits. His manner, behind dark glasses and keyboard, is so reminiscent of Ray Charles that it almost feels like a skit (he calls the female backing singers the “Dan-ettes”).
Steely Dan’s work was highly sophisticated from their inception. Yet when the sour, rollicking glee of My Old School kicks off a concluding troika of earlier cuts, the energy is transformed; it feels as if the most primitive of garage bands has stormed the stage. Throughout, Fagen remains mischievously amused – much as he has, in his own sardonic way, through Steely Dan’s career. The brief, poignant exception is when he refers obliquely to Becker’s death: “I gotta live with it.” Now there’s a motto for Steely Dan Man.
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