steelydan1It was years ago, I’m sure, that I got the Two Against Nature music-video DVD, and I figure that with a few glasses of white wine on board, I’m willing to tackle it.

I get it – in word, deed, and eyegravity (that thing people do when they just sort of look at you until you’re embarassed enough to recant) that Steely Dan is no longer anyone’s favorite band. I have my doubts that they ever were. I’m serious. You’d like ‘em, sure, but you’d say Brubeck, Bechet, or – hell, even Bacharach before you gave Dan the top slot.

C: Tell me your favorite band.
X: Oh, Steely Dan, definitely.
C: (eyegravity)
X: Well, I mean – okay, so I always liked what Traffic did with “Low Spark” better.

Dan fans – of which I’d count myself among, at least in the pedestrian cadre – have to put up with the reality that along with everyone else, they too have to tolerate a strategic volley of musical squickery that leaves The Grand House Steely as that uncle with enough tribal casino debt and the resultant ankle monitor that gets everyone at the Christmas party changing the subject and finding the far punch bowl instead of the near one.

Not that there’s anything wrong, right? My God, talk about your bend sinister; they’ve got the cleanest sound of any concert I’ve attended – what you hear on the DVD is literally what you get when you sit on the grass in front of them live. And they never show disrespect to the instruments – they’re muting their trumpets, wiring their saxophones just perfect, and yet – why don’t I want to take another bite of the salmon mousse?

Is it Donald Fagen’s Doolin-Cave-sized stalactite canines?
Walter Becker’s neckbeard?

Realizing it now – they helped a bit, Donald Fagen describing himself as halfway between a nerd and a schmendrick – I think these two are shop teachers. Not kidding. If it wasn’t for the fact that the sleaze of New Jersey tasted good with a seventeen-piece band they might be drooling over another slat of McLendon pine.

Victoria – a backup singer, about Donald Fagen: “He reminds me of my dad.”

I can’t make this kind of stuff up. You can’t ignore the dudes are sixty years old – that’s ten years of “over the hill” joke cards and another ten of depressing silence. I’ve been facing up to the possibility that these guys are flat-out irrelevant.

Cornelius is the saxophonist on this gig. He’s bearded, black, and the source – the guys say – of a tension, no, not a tension: a faux-tension with some of the other band members.

He rolls his eyes.

“Modern psychoanalysis says,” Becker begins to lecture, “Most of your sources of – ah, tension – come from events in your past.”
“And the unconscious always wants to say ‘yes’,” Fagen warns.
Cornelius looks once at each of them, utterly done-with-this. “Can I go now?”

It’s these stunts that makes loving Steely Dan harder than it has to be, and always under the withering tracer fire of perfectly reasonable modern culture; they’re making us all uncomfortable, and not in that Bauhaus way – these guys aren’t finding new ways of fitting glass together at right angles, here. Maybe it’s hubris; I clearly have no idea. You’ve figured that out by now, right?

All I can say is that I’ve got ten Steely Dan albums in my collection and a DVD, and am, over twenty years of listening, from my first youthful encounter with Aja, no closer to understanding whether these transplant blue-eyed soulsters are playing it straight, crooked, or backward.

Guess I’ll keep listening.