Bandsplain - Steely Dan with Alex Pappademas

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Yasi invites music journalist Alex Pappademas on the show to explain the sound, impact, and fandom of the world’s ultimate dad band: Steely Dan. Alex’s book on Steely Dan, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, Babylon Sisters, and Other Soul Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan is out in 2022 on University of Texas, Austin Press. You can follow Alex at @pappademas on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like bandsplain? Okay, what if this show wasn't called bandsplain? Just kidding, it is called bandsplain. I'm your host, Yossi Salek. This is a show where I invite music experts and professional nerds to explain cult bands to me. Today's episode is about Steely Dan.

I didn't think I knew what Steely Dan sounded like, but it turns out I did. If you haven't ever been to a grocery store or drugstore in your life, this is what Steely Dan sounds like. Today, we're talking to a man who in this year of our Lord 2021 literally wrote a book about Steely Dan. Please note, while this show is not actually called Men Explain Bands to me, today this man will be explaining this band to me. Welcome to the show, Alex Papademus. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be the person who's going to sell you Steely Dan today. Although I should say that I have tried this with a lot of different people in my life. And if it works today on you, it will be the first time it's ever worked. We'll see. Alex, can you tell us who you are? I am a writer from Los Angeles and a podcaster. I've written for the New York Times, the New Yorker. I was a staff writer at Grantland. I was the executive editor of MTV News for like five minutes. And I started out as a music critic. That was like the first kind of writing I got paid for.

And if you're a music critic, I think sooner or later, Steely Dan finds you. The most recent thing I wrote about Steely Dan was a retrospective review of their 1980 album, Goucho for Pitchfork's Steely Dan Week. I guess my most important credential right now as a Steely Dan fan is that I'm working on a Steely Dan-related book project with the artist Joan LeMay. And I can't tell you anything more about it, but it will be in stores at some point. Amazing. Well, now that we know who you are, Alex, can you tell us who Steely Dan is? Steely Dan are primarily Donald Fagan and Walter Becker, who met at Bard College in the 60s and went to New York to try their hand as songwriters, writing songs for other people, and found out that other people didn't really want to record. the things that they were writing necessarily.

So they started their own band. They were a band for a minute. And then gradually just became two guys in the studio, kind of making magic with a rotating cast of session players. And they made a string of albums that combined rock and jazz in ways that they had, no one had ever combined them before. And then they went on hiatus for like 20 years and came back and won a Grammy. and it was very confusing, and they beat Eminem and Radiohead and all of those people.

And everybody was like, I don't even get it. So they were like when they were together in the 70s, they had a lot of like big hit songs and super successful albums. And then for 20 years while they were gone, they sort of became this strange cult band that only people like me got into. And so they've kind of, they've lived at sort of both ends of that spectrum. I guess I would have to say that they're my favorite band. It's weird to have a favorite band But I think it might be them There was a moment after Walter Becker passed away

I tweeted about him Or I Instagrammed about him And I thanked him for starting my favorite band It was one of those things that you say And then as you're saying it you realize that it's true Well I feel like this is like a perfect time For us to start For those people who are like

Okay hold on Who is stealing Dan? Let's start with what you think Is their like most obvious most well-known, most recognizable song. They had some monster hits throughout the 70s. That's one of the most interesting things about them is that their music was so weird,

and yet they managed to land a bunch of stuff on the charts. This one is the second single from their first album, and I think it was top 20 and not top 10, but it's the one that I feel like is the most omnipresent if you've ever been to the grocery store or ridden in an elevator. You've probably heard Reelan in the year. I am probably seven years old riding in the back of my mom's Subaru listening to KFog 104.5 in the San Francisco Bay Area or perhaps 98.9 FM, the city, which was a lesser known one. And that just, yeah, takes me right back to that.

But it probably takes you back to like grocery shopping because you've heard this song before. I was going to say, it literally takes me to like the Isles of the Ralph's. last week while I'm just trying to find my snacks and being like, who is this again? So thoughts, feelings, emotions? What is that, like, what's the knee-jerk reaction you get from Reelan in the years? I mean, that song is like, it's like wallpaper to me. Do you know what I mean? Like, I've just heard it so many times. I have no visceral reaction to it anymore. Like, in fact, I was kind of listening more closely than I ever have. So closely, in fact, that I decided to look up the lyrics. And here's what goes down in verse two.

You've been telling me you're a genius since you were 17, and all the time I've known you, I still don't know what you mean. The weekend at the college didn't turn out like you planned. The things that pass for knowledge, I can't understand. Okay, like literally, what are they talking about? It's a very cynical saw. It's Donald Fagan kind of giving a, you know, sort of just talking to somebody whose life has not worked out the way that they imagined it.

And, you know, it's a very kind of an angry young man song. That's the interesting thing about them is that they are, they have a reputation. for being dirty old men, but they pretty much had finished making all their 70s records by the time they turned 30. So they're in their 20s the entire time that this is happening. And they're coming to it from a, you know, 20-something guys' perspective, but they're thinking about the world as if it has passed them by. Like they really sort of wrote from the mindset of like people in their 60s who are like, man, I don't know about this country. And the way these people, the way that's happening. Just very crotchety young men.

dads. Dads. Before they were ever in a position to literally be dads, because you don't have to be the father of anybody to be dad in your sort of your outlook. And I think they were spiritually dad. Spiritually dad. They were extremely spiritually dad. They were kind of like, you know, like it's a good example like that they have all

these, you know, they have all these jazz elements in their music. But when you actually, whenever they were interviewed about jazz, they would have a hard time naming like current jazz guys that they were really into. You know, they would sort of, they would hedge all. on that bet, but they were really into, you know, like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. Like, they'd started out as like, they were hippies and they took acid. They did all the 60s things. But by the 70s, they were really sort of looking backwards in a lot of ways.

Can you give us an example of that jazz influence? Yeah, I can give you, there's a ton of examples, but I feel like this is the strongest one because it is so obvious. And you will get it immediately. But in order for it to be obvious, I'm going to play a little bit of the sort of. material first. I'm going to play you. This is a song by Horace Silver. This is the title song from his 1964 album Song for My Father. And now for reasons that will be super obvious in about two seconds, this is Ricky Don't Lose that number from 1974's Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan.

Okay, well literally everybody knows that song. Everybody knows Ricky don't lose that number. So do I. I'm human. I just didn't know it was Steely Dan. Okay, but also, um, is this. Is the intro to that song not exactly the same as Wallace's? Is that his name Wallace? Horace. Sorry, Horace. Is it not the same as Horace's song? It's not like a straight rip-off of that?

You know, this is one of the complexities of Steely Dan that we can get into, which is that although they seem to really like suing people who sampled them without permission, they seem to take a lot of, like, pleasure in that, not just, you know, the pleasure of, you know, a job well done legally, but they seem to really enjoy it. But they borrowed a lot of stuff from other people. And they actually got sued at one point, not by Horace Silver weirdly, but by Keith Jarrett, who is another jazz piano player and sort of one of the most humorless men in the history of music who objected to their use of a little part of one of his songs in one of the songs on Gaucho. And that was actually resolved in Keith's favor. And Keith has writing credit on the version that's on the album now.

I don't know if Horace ever had a problem with it. I don't think they heard from him, apparently. So, yeah, obviously that is, you know, that's a very blatant version of, you know, the jazz influence on Steely Dan. You can really see it, obviously, that they were listing to jazz records and then dropping them into this kind of smooth 70s rock context. You know, but they also, on all of these records, they surrounded themselves with, you know, when they were sort of hiring all these session players to play on their records, they got the best guys they could find. And most of those guys, a lot of those guys, if they were not, you know, sort of like, some of them were rock guys who played with, like, the Doobie Brothers and things like that. But a lot of them came from the world of jazz. So they were surrounding themselves with guys who could actually play jazz, like really sort of like serious players.

Okay. So is this like part of why people are like so psycho about this band? Like, what's the obsession? Like I feel like this is one of those bands clearly because we're doing a show about it that has that crazy obsessive fan base. Like what's that about? Yeah. The jazz thing is probably part of it and just, you know, that nothing else really sounds like this when you get down to it, like because they brought all these things in there. But I think also there's something about there are these very smooth, yacht rocky kind of songs.

But then when you actually listen closely to them, like there's so much, you know, just strangeness and ambiguity, even a song like Ricky don't lose that number. It's like you don't really know what went on between the narrator and Ricky and what the situation is and like what, you know, what, you know, what Ricky's gotten into that he or she might have to make that phone call to Donald Fagan at some point. And I think it's, you know, that's typical of a steely dance song. They have this ambiguity to them. They are always talking about these like fictional characters who you're never fully introduced to. And you have to figure out what their significance is in the world. You know, it's like who was Hoops McCann or something like that.

You know, like you hear these names. And so I think like that just generates an obsessed fandom because fans are like, or you know, you get an obsessed fandom if you. give fans something to puzzle over forever and figure out in the same way that people have been trying to figure out like what Bob Dylan songs are about or, you know, like James Joyce or David Lynch or Thomas Pynchon or, you know, any of those things. Do you feel like that same reasoning plays into like the new fans of Steely Dan? Because like I think it's pretty clear that there's been kind of a big resurgence in Steely Dan

fandom amongst younger people, dare I say, hipper people. Like, can you talk a little bit about that, that resurgence? It's weird because I can really only equate it to my own experience where I got into them almost ironically. Like I thought it would be funny to start listening to Steely Dan. And then the more I listened to them, the more I started to just really unironically love it and get into it and kind of. of get into that weird fandom world of trying to figure out, you know, who these, you know,

who these guys were and what they were singing about and like why they were singing these weird things. But so I feel like, you know, where that resurgence started is there's, you know, I feel like there's almost like there was a pop cultural resurgence of, you know, kind of jokes about Steely Dan. And that makes you curious about Steely Dan because you're like, what even is this band? Like, what is their, what is their deal? Like, you know, so there's something like, you know, There's that web series Yacht Rock from the mid-2000s that I think had a lot to do with sort of just getting the idea of all of this music, all of this smooth Southern California studio-based music out there. The idea that this was a genre, and then you find out about them as a punchline, like Nick Kroll and John Mullaney's Oh Hello, where they play these two very old and very sort of record. If you ever lived in New York, these very recognizable New York characters.

It's like them playing the guys who stand up at movies. screenings and ask like a four-part question that's really more of a comment, you know? And it's like them, it's a stage play where they play these two guys. And one of the things like the Steely Dan is so important in their mythology because I guess Malaney in particular is a huge Steely Dan fan. And so they do this, at some point they do a fake Steely Dan song that they've made up, you know, called Sweet Rosalie. The yoid, d'ud of the day, bown, bough cane, snort.

We both like to do cocaine. God, what is that song? It's got to be Steely Dan, right? Oh, it's a billion percent Steely Dan. So, and I think those kinds of things like Yacht Rock, I think that makes you wonder about it sort of, it starts, you figure out through comedy that maybe these things are weirder than you gave them credit for when you were hearing them at the grocery store

because, like, placed in a different context. like Steely Dead are actually an incredibly strange band and one of the things that's incredibly strange about them is that disconnect between the smoothness of the music and the kind of darkness and weirdness of those lyrics and I think once you start kind of checking it out like as a goof or whatever you suddenly like you know you go deeper and deeper into that world I mean if you're if you're me if you're prone you know to sort of obsessive you know deep diving into lyrics and things like that well speaking of obsessive we have actually got the chance to talk to some Steely Dan fans. So here's what they had to say.

I think a lot of people have this preconception of Steely Dan that they're this cheesy, sleazy, sleazy, dad rock, yacht rock band. And that's right. In fact, they are the apex of that style of music. The music is so smooth. They also have a brilliant sense of humor. They're soft. They're also very sarcastic. They always support themselves with the absolute best musicians available. Just accepted nothing less than perfection from the musicians in the studio. There are these monster musicians that played with them. Yeah, Chuck Rainey, Steve Gad, Bernard Purdy. Just absolute animals of their time.

And then they took that talent and put that talent through hell in the studio until they had perfection. Just telling them, do it again. Do it again. It's not good enough. Do it again. They're just like perfectly produced and layered, right? Staley dance songs are like a canvas and they really let these masters of 70s rock and jazz fusion. create masterpieces on top of their works. They're slick, they're cool, and no one else sounds like them. Just dig it, you know. Those guys all just sounded like you, but with different voices.

I was really impressed by what those guys were saying. So maybe, yeah, maybe, look, we're all, we all kind of sound the same, and we all sort of think that our opinion is, you know, we're the first person to ever have it. Seriously, though, there is a stereotype that all Steely Dan fans are like white men. But in this resurgence, it's showing us that that's not really true, right? In fact, recently I read this piece in the New York Times by journalist Lindsay Zolads, who is in fact a woman. I think it was called I'm not a dad, but I rock like one, all about her Steely Dan fandom.

Did you read that? I did. I mean, I think the whole resurgence is much less white and male than maybe the fandom was at one time. But I also think that that's a stereotype unto itself. But I understand where it comes from. Like, the resurgence is about people going back and finding something different in Steely Dan than what they were told was there. But I think in the original concept of Steely Dan fandom, it's so bound up with technical proficiency, which is such a stereotypically male obsession in music. You know, not to say

that there aren't women out there who are, you know, love Joe Satriani or whatever it is for the, you know, the tapping and the, you know, all that kind of like like skills with a Z. But like that sort of like performance based thing. I feel like is a stereotypically male preoccupation and like wanting to listen to music played by the most absolute pros at the absolute top of their game in the same way that, you know, you look to sports for something like that. And like both of those things are stereotypes. But like there's truth in all of those stereotypes. I think basically what it is is, you know, maybe more women are appreciating the greatest session musicians ever playing things perfectly because they've played them five thousand times in a row.

ruthlessly demanding perfection. I totally get why it's called Dad Rock now. And they weren't even dads at the time. Yeah, that perfectionism thing is really interesting. I think that that's part of their reputation. And I think they tried to live up to it. But they are famous for rotating people in and out, especially on solos.

Like that was always the thing. Like there's something that they would get different people in to do the solo on a particular song. and until they got what they wanted. And what I find really interesting about their perfectionism is that, you know, while it gives them this reputation for being really uptight, what they're trying to get perfect is often the solo, which is the point where there's this kind of outburst of emotion in the middle of a steely dance song,

and they didn't necessarily know what they wanted. It wasn't that they were sort of dictating every time, like play this here. They were waiting until they heard what they were actually looking for and they wanted to try it seven different ways with seven different players. And I always found that to be really interesting because it was this uptight perfectionism in pursuit of this moment within the song

that would be transcendent and would kind of leap out of what they had been doing up until that point. Take me to the beginning. How did you find Steely Dan? What was your Steely Dan aha moment, your entry point? It was my understanding that I was not supposed to like Steely Dan because I was an alternative rock kid

in the 90s and you grow up with the prejudices that you get from that. And anybody who's too good at playing their instruments, that was a knee-jerk kind of distrust that I had growing up. And then I think what happened was there's an album called Double Nichols on the Dime by the Minutemen from San Pedro, California, one of the great SST bands, one of the great punk bands, full stop to me. Shout out Mike Watt. Shout out Mike Watt.

R.P. D. Boone. shout out George Hurley. And they, that's a very long record where they do a lot, not a lot, but there's like three covers on there. They do a Creedon song. They do Ain't Talking About Love by Van Halen. And they do Dr. Wu by Steely Dan. They do a version of it that sounds like they maybe are here, heard it for the first time

earlier that day and are just kind of singing it together and working it out. But it's, so it sounds nothing like the Steely Dan version. But there was a point where records cost a dollar. Like that's weird now because old records. are $25 now, but at the time when you could just take a flyer on something, Katie Lide was a buck. Katie Lide by Steely Dan. And I think in some hall of dollar records, I was like, I'll check this out because the Minutemen covered this. And their version of it really doesn't sound a lot like the Steely Dan version. It's a very sort of just coming together in the moment. They sound their harmonies

are not anywhere near dialed in in a way that Donald Fagan and Walter Becker would appreciate. but just for comparison so you can hear where they took it we're going to listen to a little bit of the Minutemen's version of Dr. Wu. Don't seem right. There's something about it and it made me take flyer on

Katie Lide for a dollar. It was worth a buck. And then you get into Katie Lide and you're like, oh wait, this is weirder than I thought it was. There's a lot going on here. But let's hear the Steely Dan version of Dr. Wu. Okay, I've definitely heard that song also. Like I'm 99% sure I've heard that song and I just, again, did not know it was Steely Dan, which I do feel there's a pattern forming here. Anyway, Dr. Wu, that song is off their first album, Katie lied. I have a theory that the first album you discover of an artist is always your favorite one. Like, for example, for me, with the replacements. The first album of theirs that I heard when I was like 12 years old was Let It Be. And that will forever be my favorite replacements album. It doesn't mean it's the best one. It's just because it was the first entry point I had to that artist.

It's really special to me. By that token, is Katie Lide, your favorite Steely Dan album? Sometimes I think Katie Lide is my favorite Steely Dan album, and sometimes it's Goucho, but when I am answering in a room full of Steely Dan fans, it is definitely the second one countdown to Ecstasy, which does not have as many big songs on it, but is sort of the most sonically varied.

and it's kind of, it's like their wowie zowie or something. It kind of goes all over the place. And, you know, this one in particular, you'll hear some country stuff in here, some pedal steel. And, you know, there's a lot of those kind of weird. It's the one they recorded on tour. So it's got a sort of like on tour kind of vibe to it. And the song is called King of the World. A lot going on there.

There is a lot going on. There's a lot going on. Tell me about it. One of the things that's really interesting about Steely Dan is how much they pulled from different genres that don't seem to go together. And that's obviously, that's something everybody kind of has the freedom to do now. It's easier than ever to do that. But that song is, that's a 70s song where they're pulling in. There's a, there's some pedal steel in there, some very country pedal steel. And then the, you hear that transition into what's basically like, that song sounds like it could be on dots and

loops by Stereo Lab. Like it really has this very, uh, sort of, you know, kind of strange synth break in there that has nothing to do with trying to sound country. Like, they liked those sounds, but didn't really care if they matched each other that well, if they didn't, you know, went, you know, went together in that way. And then it's all in the service of this song that is a post-apocalyptic scenario about, you know, it's like any man left on the Rio Grande, like in their smoking cobalt cigarettes because everything is irradiated, you know, it's a sort of like they were like, they read a lot of sci-fi novels and they drew on that a lot.

And so I think that's, you know, obviously another reason for their allure. nerds. Okay, Alex. What do we call Steely Dan fans? Are Dan fans? Dan Dan Man's? I've been trying to make Danimals happen. Because that's, that doesn't, you know, that doesn't contain, you know, a gendered response, you know, because I think we're trying, you know, I really want to encourage, you know, this sort of the breaking down of this stereotype about Steely Dan fans. And so Danimals is kind of across the board. It could be anybody. That's good. The last bastion of third way feminism is being able to, you know, like Steely Dan.

Steely Dan. Being able to admit that I like Steely Dan. What do you think, you know, if you polled the Reddit group of Steely Dan fans,

what do you think is like the generally agreed upon best work of the band? So we're jumping ahead in their career a little bit.

In 1974, they stopped touring. They had been a touring band and they were a very good touring band, but eventually they just, they didn't enjoy it as much. They didn't like

getting out there. They were studio guys fundamentally and they wanted to sort of remain in the studio. And so sort of where all of that really pays off in the greatest way is the album Asia, which is you've seen that one. It's the black cover with the, the, the, the, the, you know, that one like red stripe. It's a very iconic album cover. It's their most jazz record, but not in the way that you would imagine a rock band getting really into jazz would sound because the thing that they took from jazz was not like the freedom or like the noise or like, you know, trying to sound like way out kind of John Coltrane or anything like

that. But, you know, this kind of smoothness and professionalism and these like high quality solos by really serious jazz players. They have like Wayne Shorter who is in Miles Davis's greatest band, Joe Sample, Larry Carlton, all of those people. And they also have a man named Michael McDonald, who you are probably familiar with. He went on to be a doobie brother. He went on to be Michael McDonald. He went on to be, you know, a joke in the 40-year-old virgin and has seen kind of all of these things. I interviewed him last year for something and sort of he was kind of saying, like, you know, if you stay in here long enough, like, you know, you get to, he was kind of philosophical about the 40-year-old virgin thing. And it was like you kind of get to come back around

and people sort of appreciate you again. I think he was starting to see that like younger bands are really getting it to him. So Michael McDonald is a vocalist. He's an incredible vocalist. And he kind of does the things with, you know, in the same way that Steely Dan used really great bass players and really great sax players and found just the, like, the best guy for the best job in each of the, on each of these songs. He was the singer who sang the things that they couldn't sing. And so I'm going to play a song called Peg by Steely Dan, which has, you know, there's an amazing thing in there that you will, you'll hear it and it just is going to sound like a good chord, but it's actually three Michael McDonald's singing one note that forms a chord.

like a multi-tracked, a chorus of Michael McDonald's. Let's hear Steely Dan featuring three Michael McDonald's. It's Peg. Just literally had no idea that that was Steely Dan. Never thought to inquire into who perhaps made this song, but I definitely know it. And you know what? Despite it having some lyrics to the effect of a man telling a woman to smile, I really like it. I really like that song.

Well, that song did not just occur randomly in nature. That is a Steely Dan song that you were viving to. It seems so. So many songs I am so aware of to the point that, like, I know the words to them, but I didn't know they were Steely Dan songs. That's their legacy. You know our songs. You just don't know we made them. Well, there you go.

And just while we're talking about Peg, I just wanted to throw in because I spoke earlier about the Minutemen cover that kind of turned me into a Steely Dan fan in a roundabout way. But really technically, probably the first Steely Dan song I ever heard big chunks of repeatedly. is this song because it's sampled in the song I Know by De LaSole on the first Dalai Sol album, Me, Myself and I. So let's, if you want, let's listen to the De LaSole song. I know that samples Steely Dan. Stay with me.

I know this, but not because of all my earthly treasures or regardless to the fact that I'm posse the loose, but because. Actually, that's super interesting. I had no idea that rappers were so into Steely Dan. outside of De LaSoul. Like, what can you tell me more about where Steely Dan exists than rap music? Yeah, I mean, I think probably the, you know,

the most recent and prominent one is champion by Kanye, which samples Kid Charlemagne and like a big chunk of it. And like it is a, you know, it's a cleared sample. And he, you know, like apparently he wrote them a very impassioned letter and talked about, you know, sort of how it was about his mom. And normally they don't clear samples for things. They're pretty, like I said, pretty persnickety.

about that. But that, you know, did you realize you were a champion in their eyes? That's Donald Fagan. That's, you know, Steely Dan. So that's like a big bite of it. The song Black Cow has been sampled a lot.

The most known one is Deja Vu Uptown Baby by Lord Tarek and Peter Guns. And, you know, you'll just sort of, you'll know that right away if you hear it, that the whole, basically the whole song is Black Cow. And I'm pretty sure they sued Lord Tarek and Peter guns out of existence because you never heard from Lord Torea computer guns ever again. But the one I really love that uses Black Howe in a cool way is gas drawls by MF Doom.

Underground Rap Legend. Let's hear a clip from that MF Doom song. I'm kind of in, okay? I don't ever need to hear reel in the years again as long as I live, even though that's not available to me. I will hear it probably a hundred more times before I die. but like Peg is good. It's making me want to do a little more research, hear a few more songs.

I want to hear from you like what's the underrated Steely Dan Jam? Like what's the one that even your other D-Animals might be like, I don't know about this song, Alex, but you love it. I mean, that's an interesting one because I feel like it's a very obsessive fan base in a relatively small catalog. And so people all kind of know all of them. But I think the one that I like the most and, doesn't feel like it's always talked about.

It's not like a greatest hits album selection. It's not one of the ones that people know about. There's a song called Home at Last. So I'm going to tell a story about this song, Home at Last. I remembered once David Dukovny put this song on a celebrity playlist that I saw of David Dukovny's favorite songs. And subsequent to that, I had the job of going to interview David Dukovney about the album that he had made of his own original songs.

and I went to go meet with David Dukovney. He was not psyched to see me, which was weird in a promotional capacity. I was five minutes early and I showed up to his table at a restaurant and I said, oh, hey, David, I'm sorry. I'm like about five minutes early and he's like, well, can you come back in five minutes? Wow. Harsh. And I never really, you know, I wasn't prepared to get harshed in that way.

And I was kind of on my back foot for the rest of the conversation. But I had this, you know, I had this thing that I thought sort of I have in my pocket that like what a me and David Ducon. What do we have in common? We both love the album, Asia, by Steely Dan, and specifically the song Home at Last from Asia, which is a song kind of about Homer's Odyssey and kind of about being married.

And it's one of the great songs about, you know, companion-knit coupled him and sort of going away from somebody and coming back home with all the sort of emotions that that entails. And there was a moment when we started talking about it during that conversation, me and David DuCovney. And I was like, you know, I got Asia out in the car on CD. We can cut this interview short and go out there and listen to it.

And I didn't totally mean it, although if he had said yes, I would have gone. But he was very upset. He was like, no. That was the end of that conversation. I think we moved on. Yeah, I was going to, like I was going to say that worked because that's truly like a psychotic thing to say to somebody in an interview. I have to say, Alex. David Dukovny, please go with me to a second location.

I promise that I am not an obsessed X-Files fan who's going to. to keep you prisoner in a basement and force you to make more X-Files or less X-Files, I think maybe it would be what you would do. Steely Dan did not bring you guys together. Is the ending of this story, is what you're saying? No. We were separated across a gulf of time and emotion and sort of a differential in wanting to be their level, I think is what happened.

But Home at Last is a jam. It is a beautiful song with a very complicated drum part. the famous Bernard Purdy shuffle. So here it is the song that David Dukovini and I both love separately from our own sort of boundaries, Home at Last by Steely Dan. So those drums, that's Bernard Purdy on the drums, the great Bernard Purdy, just session drummer, funk drummer, unparalleled, used to come in the studio. This is something that I know from the classic albums documentary.

When he would show up to do a session date for a band, he would break out these two signs, like these sort of like signs on on poles, you know, like a sign that tells you like this area is out of order or whatever. It would say, so I think it said something like, you done did it. You done hired the hitmaker, Bernard Purdy and like put it in front of the drum kit just so everybody knew that they had hired the hitmaker. So I feel like that is the cut thing that we should all sort of lean towards when we bring our talents to any situation is that we should let everybody know that they have brought in the hitmaker. Yeah, we all need like 20% more of that energy just in life. What do you love about that song, Alex? What do you and David Dukovni both love

about that song? Well, I think David really sort of thought, yeah, I'm not going to give you David DeCovini's thoughts on it. But I think his thing was kind of my thing, which is that it nails something about Los Angeles. It nails something about marriage. There is a feeling, though. I think about it a lot whenever I'm flying back into L.A. having been somewhere else when he's singing about like, I know this super highway, this bright familiar sun. There's something about it. Those two lines always make me just, it's, it captures for me the feeling of missing this place in all of its kind of weird, scummy beauty that it has sometimes and the way that light hits

Los Angeles, you know, at a certain time of the day and thinking about it. And then kind of imagining yourself because there are these references in it to the, the, the Odyssey to being tied to the mast, which is what like they have to do with like Odysseus, so that he doesn't get, you know, the sirens don't call him away to the rocks. You know, the danger of the rocks is surely past and I remain tied to the mast. And so it's you're on the other side of this thing. And there's, there's something very steely Dan about being a normal person and imagining yourself in these kind of, you know, very exaggerated mythical terms that come from the Odyssey. And I sort of, I always like that about them because I think they're, they're

really good at not only creating these protagonists who are losers and, you know, struggling and, you know, kind of like undone by their own wants and desires and things like that, but also capturing the way that they are heroes in their own mind in some ways. And I think that that's, this is sort of, that's the ultimate example of that. Also, those drums are just like tight. They're just like that like, like, to do, do like, like coming out of the verse. Like, that's a really, really nice sounding drum part. Um, because you can get into the tastiness of the licks. That's the thing. You can sort of, there are all these different levels that it operates on. He said tastiness of the licks. I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to

Say it enough times that you can't cut all of them out. Alex, thank you so much for taking the time to be here to educate me and my listeners about Steely Dan. You really sold it. No need to thank me. I would be sitting in a closet at my house talking about Steely Dan even if we had not arranged to do this. So it's good that it can be.

This is just what you do every afternoon. So we just had the good fortune of capturing it on audio. Yeah, sun gets above the yard arm and I just start talking about Asia. and Deacon Blues and all that stuff. Great there. Well, thank you for doing it anyway. And thank you all for listening. Maybe you guys also didn't realize

that you knew every Steely Dan song in existence. Or maybe now you all of a sudden love Steely Dan so much and you really want to dive into their catalog. Alex, what song do you want to leave our listeners with? I think we should close with some proof that this most studio of studio bands could also really kind of bring it in a live setting.

This was from June 1974. It's basically the, I think it's the very last tour of Steely Dan as a touring unit after which kind of like the Beatles, they just became studio people all the time. And this is a song called Bodhisattva. It's a really good version of it. They play it really fast like they have to be somewhere. But the thing that's also great about it is that during this time, they had a truck driver and guitar tech who was also their emcee.

His name was Jerome Anton. And on this night, he had very clearly had a couple of drinks. and when you listen to the intro that he gives them, which is amazing, you can also, I think, hear the guys in the band enjoying it as well, kind of cracking up in the background, and that's kind of what I love about it. From the box set, Citizen Steely Dan, this is Bodhisattva live at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

If you like what you heard today, subscribe to Bandspland for more episodes, only on Spotify. Bansplane is a Spotify original series produced in partnership with Spoke Media. This episode was produced and edited by Cody Hoffmuckle, with help from Sherita Lynn Solis and Dylan Rupert. Mixing in sound design by Will Short. Our executive producers for spoke media are Aaliyah Tevacoleon, Keith Reynolds, and Janiel Kassner. Our executive producers for Spotify are Liz Gaetly, Gina Delvac, and me, Yossi Selig. Our catchy and gorgeous theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cossentino and Jennifer

Clavin and graciously recorded by Carlos De la Garza. Thank you to our Steely Dan fans. Bill Mayo, Tyler Beckett, Max Edelson, and Jim Coonser for providing their voices for this episode. Special thanks to Felipe Guillermo, Leah Edwards, Dana Meyerson, and the framed drawing of Dave Matthews I got on Deepop, whose spirit guides this entire show.