Books like Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years

Lou Reed said once he was after a kind of music which fused James Joyce with Little Richard, or words to that effect. Well, he wasn’t being literal (Awop bam boom, stately plump Buck Mulligan, all rootie). What he was imagining was a kind of rock music where you didn’t write down to your audience, you assumed, like grownup novelists do, some level of knowledge and aesthetic appreciation. He may have been a little nettled by the feeling that the wordy folkies who emerged with Dylan and of course after Dylan appeared to assume that any lyrical qualities in popular song grew out of a folk sensibility, onto which you then grafted a four-four beat, hence folk-rock, not the other way round. So there was Tom Wilson dubbing drum n bass onto S&G’s Sound of Silence , and there were the Animals taking a folk song and turning it into four minutes of incandescence, in 1964. It took a while but Lou got a few contenders for his New Literate Rock – Beefheart, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman – these guys were not folkies. Neither were Steely Dan, they were jazzers if they were anything. Very few albums on my ipod in the last couple of months have given my drooping brain so much energy and pleasure and that feeling that you want to run out and tell everyone about this music as my own 22 song selection of Steely Dan. This is the New Literate Rock, look no further. (note - it’s not NEW new, it’s 30 years old). I don’t pretend to follow completely what goes on in a lot of these songs. Either they sound like overheard conversations where you don’t know what came before or later, you just hear the sharp bitter exchange in the middleWe hear you're leaving, that's OK. I thought our little wild time had just begun.I foresee terrible trouble and I stay here just the same I heard it was you talkin' 'bout a world where all is free. It just couldn't be - and only a fool would say that Just when I say "Boy we can't miss, you are golden", then you do thisHot licks and rhetoric don't count much for nothingYou been tellin' me you're a genius since you were seventeen In all the time I've known you I still don't know what you mean Or they’re crammed with that incomprehensible (to us English types) American slang that we love so muchThere ain't nothing in Chicago for a monkey woman to doDo you throw out your gold teeth, do you see how they rollFive names that I can hardly stand to hear Including yours and mine and one more chip who isn't hereOn the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene but yours was kitchen clean Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home Every A-Frame had your number on the wall Ruthie will give you the silver key to open the red door. Lay down your Jackson and you will see the sweetness you've been cryin' for But that only makes them better, and a real alternative to the lazy reach me down surrealism which infests most of rock lyrics. I’ve mentioned before the cultural cringe which was evident in American writing in the 19th Century (see Henry James, Edith Wharton, etc etc). It was a great thing to see this turn right round, it would be interesting to figure exactly when this happened, but I think the movies had a lot to do with it – but by the end of WW2 any cringing going on was on the English side of the Atlantic. We had discovered American cool, and we gazed in horror at each other and realised we’d got bad teeth, no refrigerators, and we couldn’t go cruising because we didn’t have a car. It took the Beatles to stem the tide (thank you moptops). Along with inventing popular entertainment, Americans also reinvented the English language – John Dos Passos, Faulkner, Hammett, Chandler, Kerouac, Salinger, Ellroy, dozens more – love em or loathe em, they wrote books in the American language. Steely Dan likewise. And if you think, as you might when listening to the folky end of the spectrum, that the music is just the hammer that knocks the nails in, in every Steely Dan song along will come one or two great solos which will take their own time to get to the end of a different conversation in that other language which is not of words. And this is what Lou Reed was after. I like to read music books but I have the feeling that anything I found out about these two hipsters Fagen and Becker would be inharmonious coke-hoovering groupie-groping anecdotes which might induce some measure of disrespect in my conservative breast and might darken the light from the grooves, so I’ll decline this book. The less I know about Steely Dan, the better I like them.