FEATURE:
Turn That Heartbeat Over Again
Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill at Fifty, and Putting the Legendary Band’s Music Back on Vinyl
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IT was only a matter of…
IN THIS PHOTO: Steely Dan circa 1972 (Donald Fagen can be seen at the top right, Walter Becker at the bottom far right)
a couple of weeks ago that I was bemoaning the lack of Steely Dan on vinyl. The group, led by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, demand their music be played on that format. They haven’t literally said that but, as the musicianship is so extraordinary and precise and there is so much attention paid to the sound and production, this is the way their albums need to be heard. Until recently, you could get 1977’s Aja and one or two others new on vinyl. You could dig around Discogs or get a second-hand copy of their other albums, but it is a bit baffling the other studio albums have not been reissued. Whist there are not new editions with demos, outtakes, and extras on them, finally there is light at the end of the tunnel for those hoping for Steely Dan vinyl reissues. Starting with their phenomenal debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. I was never sure when this album was released in November 1972. In terms of the release date, I would assume the 4th, as this is when the fiftieth anniversary edition is out. You can pre-order is from Resident or Amazon.co.uk. It seems that, as I had hoped for all this time, the studio albums not freely available on vinyl (pretty much Aja and maybe their last two studio albums, Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go) are going to be reissued through this and next year. This article explains more:
“Steely Dan’s acclaimed debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill is set to be reissued on vinyl through Geffen/UMe on November 4. The album has been remastered from the original tapes and will be available on 180-gram black vinyl.
Led by the songwriting and virtuoso musical duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Steely Dan released an extraordinary run of seven albums on ABC Records and MCA Records from 1972 through 1980. Filled with topline musicianship, clever and subversive wordplay, ironic humor, genius arrangements, and pop hits that outshone the Top 40 of its day, their records, which were as sophisticated and cerebral as they were inscrutable, were stylistically diverse, melding their love of jazz with rock, blues, and impeccable pop songcraft.
Steely Dan’s classic ABC and MCA Records catalog is now set to return to vinyl with an extensive yearlong reissue program of the band’s first seven records, which is being personally overseen by founding member Donald Fagen. The LPs, most of which haven’t been widely available since their original release, will be available on 33 1/3 RPM 180-gram black vinyl via Geffen/UMe, and as a limited-edition premium 45 RPM version on Ultra High-Quality Vinyl (UHQR) from Analogue Productions, the audiophile in-house reissue label of Acoustic Sounds. Analogue Productions will also release this series of titles on Super Audio CD (SACD).
The series will kick off on November 4 with the album that started it all, the band’s legendary 1972 debut LP, Can’t Buy A Thrill, now in its 50th anniversary year, featuring the band’s breakthrough hits, “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” and the recently viral “Dirty Work,” with original lead vocalist David Palmer.
Additional albums will roll out periodically throughout 2022 and 2023 and will include the band’s sprawling 1973 sophomore LP, Countdown to Ecstasy, with such standouts as “Bodhisattva,” “Show Biz Kids” and “My Old School,” sung by Donald Fagen who took over as lead vocalist; 1974’s jazzy Pretzel Logic, their first Top 10 album with the massive hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number;” 1975’s swing-pop perfection Katy Lied, with highlights “Black Friday,” “Bad Sneakers” and “Doctor Wu,” and the addition of Michael McDonald on vocals; 1976’s guitar-driven The Royal Scam, featuring “Kid Charlemagne” and “The Fez;” 1977’s platinum-selling jazz-rock masterwork Aja, which includes the three hit singles – “Deacon Blues,” Peg” and “Josie” – and the elegant title cut; and their final album for MCA, and last for 20 years, 1980’s brilliant Gaucho, with “Hey Nineteen,” and “Time Out Of Mind,” featuring Mark Knopfler on guitar.
All albums are being meticulously remastered by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes except for Aja, which will be mastered from an analog, non-EQ’d, tape copy, and Gaucho, which will be sourced from a 1980 analog tape copy originally EQ’d by Bob Ludwig. (There’s no evidence the original tapes containing the flat mixes of Aja and Gaucho were delivered to the record label and it’s presumed the tapes no longer exist.) Lacquers for UMe’s standard 33 1/3 RPM 180-gram version will be cut by Alex Abrash at his renowned AA Mastering studio from high-resolution digital files of Grundman’s new masters and pressed at Precision. They will be housed in reproductions of the original artwork.
The 45 RPM UHQR version will be pressed at Analogue Productions’ Quality Record Pressings on 200-gram Clarity Vinyl, packaged in a deluxe box, and will include a booklet detailing the entire process of making a UHQR along with a certificate of inspection. Each UHQR is pressed, using hand-selected vinyl, with attention paid to every single detail of every single record. All of the innovations introduced by QRP that have been generating such incredible critical acclaim are applied to each UHQR. The 200-gram records feature the same flat profile that helped to make the original UHQR so desirable.
The Steely Dan vinyl reissue program follows last year’s release of Steely Dan’s Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live! and a live version of Donald Fagen’s acclaimed solo album, The Nightfly Live, which were both released via UMe on 180-gram vinyl, CD, and digital. The first live Steely Dan album in more than 25 years, Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live! was recorded across tour dates at New York City’s Beacon Theatre, The Met Philadelphia, and more, and showcases selections from Steely Dan’s extraordinary catalog of slinky grooves, sleek subversive lyrics, and infectious hits. Fagen’s The Nightfly Live was performed live by The Steely Dan Band”.
I will talk more about their other albums but, when it comes to important debuts, I think that Can’t Buy a Thrill is underrated. Of course, Aja is the classic Steely Dan album. Their third, Pretzel Logic, was released in 1974. This is when the group sounded like they were really in their stride. Although there are some flaws on their 1972 debut – too little of Donald Fagen singing (David Palmer led several songs as Fagen did not like the sound of his voice or felt it was a frontman) and the fact the album is a bit top-heavy -, Can’t Buy a Thrill is a classic. Dirty Work, Midnite Cruiser, Reelin’ in the Years, Do It Again and Turn That Heartbeat Over Again are songs I grew up with. Genuinely one of the greatest albums ever, this is what Pitchfork wrote in their 2019 review:
“After graduating, Fagen and Becker shopped their demos around various record labels, most of which laughed them out of their offices. Producer Gary Katz landed them a job as staff songwriters at the L.A. label ABC Dunhill, known for putting out records by North American rock bands like Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night. The work was steady but boring, and Katz soon encouraged the two musicians to form their own band. Fueled more by a distaste for the early ’70s rock milieu than anything, Becker and Fagen ganged up as Steely Dan, a band named for a rubber strap-on in William S. Burroughs’ surrealist novel Naked Lunch.
They must have had some idea of what they were about to become. “The newly formed amalgam [of Steely Dan] threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite,” Fagen wrote under the pseudonym Tristan Fabriani in the liner notes to the band’s 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill (they got the title from Bob Dylan, one of the few contemporaneous American musicians they could stand). “Amalgam” is right; rather than adhere to a standard rock formula, Steely Dan overloaded their sessions with players who could do Latin jazz or hot electric solos. They were a band who wanted more of everything: more guitarists, more drummers, more singers, spiraling out in a fever dream of excess. Fagen and Becker were the only writers in the room, but the credits for Thrill number a dozen musicians on instruments as far-flung as electric sitar and flugelhorn. Having escaped the sterile confines of commercial pop songwriting, Steely Dan were hell-bent on making a mess.
On paper, Thrill sounds as thorny as Italian prog, the product of a bunch of noodlers fiercely guarding their niche. But the record’s core hums with Fagen and Becker’s meticulous admiration for everything that makes pop tick. Bitter-mouthed contrarians in interviews, they wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise. The members of Steely Dan appeared to take themselves as seriously as long-suffering jazz purists in a world drunk on three-chord ditties, and then they shot up the pop charts with sunny, flippant ear candy-like “Reelin’ in the Years.”
As badly as they felt the need to differentiate themselves from mainstream rock’n’roll, it was always a part of Steely Dan. They claimed the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Dylan as influences before doing so became an outrageous cliché. Echoes of Zombies’ psychedelia and Beach Boys’ sunshine also waft through Thrill. Fagen and Becker stockpiled their debut with hooks aimed straight at your dopamine receptors, with vocal harmonies and gleaming guitar lines braided tight. The weird was there, embryonic, waiting to unfurl on later, more adventurous albums. But it curled itself up in service of pleasure.
Take “Dirty Work,” basically an Eagles song, or the “na-na-nas” of the post-hippie strutter “Change of the Guard”: No matter how detached they felt from it, Steely Dan put out pop music. They tried to make a ruckus and ended up polishing gems for broad consumption. “We’re a strange band y’know. The music is all WRONG,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1974. “Our songwriting process is not unlike the creation of junk sculpture.” If they identified with the gritty combines of mid-century artist Robert Rauschenberg, the songs they turned out were more like the sardonic baubles of Jeff Koons: fun, often hilarious, easy on the senses, and full of an unwavering disregard for the concept of authenticity.
Decades into their career, Fagen and Becker would claim the early hits as Trojan horses for complex musical ideas. “It was better to have our songs pass as pop songs and then have whatever else we wanted in them afterwards,” Becker said in 1995, as if the shimmering surface of Thrill were merely an excuse to smuggle their real musical passions into the mainstream. But the cresting harmonies and the guitar solos on “Reelin’” don’t sound like a front. They sound like a blast, like a group of young and insecure jazz dweebs egging each other on until they’ve made something so absurd even they can’t deny its allure.
Steely Dan crouched behind irony for much of their early career, and their popular legacy remains steeped in it. The hits from Thrill, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” blare out from classic rock stations right next to Black Sabbath, Yes, and all the other peers they shit-talked at the time. Their flair for melodrama, humor, and quick compositional turns got sucked right up into the most vapid (and delightful) of late ’70s hair metal hits, like Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” and Styx’s “Renegade.” They were so skeptical of rock music they ended up gilding it, breaking it down, and piecing it back together strangely enough for it to approach perfection”.
I am glad that we are getting a fiftieth anniversary release of Can’t Buy a Thrill. It is a shame that, like with The Beatles’ albums, there are not some alternate takes and a larger release, but the fact that we can now get Can’t Buy a Thrill on vinyl is a treat we have been denied for a while! Also getting the other studio albums on vinyl is going to be something every fan can support. Many might have the vinyl copies from years ago, but I did worry that a lack of vinyl albums might mean many are missing out. Introducing that incredible music to new listeners is so vital. Vinyl is the best format for Steely Dan’s music, as you can keep those L.P.s and pass them down through the generations. I have been longing to have Can’t Buy a Thrill on vinyl. It is a relief that this will now happen and, through the next year and a bit, the remainder of the catalogue not widely available on vinyl is going to be coming out. A wonderful group (or duo if you feel it is Donald Fagen and Walter Becker with a rotating collection of musicians), Steely Dan are among the most important significant artists ever. Their 1972 debut still sounds phenomenal to this day! Steely Dan fans around the world are happy that, on 4th November, Can’t Buy a Thrill will be available on vinyl…
AFTER all of this time.