#240 - Steely Dan - Can't Buy a Thrill (1972)

MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:

BACKGROUND – STEELY DAN

Steely Dan was founded in 1971 in New York by Becker (guitars, bass, backing vocals) and Fagen (keyboards, lead vocals). Initially the band had a stable lineup, but in 1974 Becker and Fagen retired from live performances to become a studio-only band, opting to record with a revolving cast of session musicians. Rolling Stone has called them "the perfect musical antiheroes for the seventies". The band enjoyed critical and commercial success through seven studio albums, peaking with their top-selling album Aja, released in 1977. 

Becker and Fagen met in 1967 a Bard College, in upstate New York. As Fagen passed by a café, he heard Becker practicing the electric guitar. In an interview, Fagen recounted the experience: "I hear this guy practising, and it sounded very professional and contemporary. It sounded like, you know, like a black person, really." He introduced himself to Becker and asked, "Do you want to be in a band?" Discovering that they enjoyed similar music, the two began writing songs together.Becker and Fagen began playing in local groups. One such group—known as the Don Fagen Jazz Trio, the Bad Rock Group and later the Leather Canary—included future comedy star Chevy Chase on drums. They played covers of songs by The Rolling Stones, Moby Grape Willie Dixon), as well as some original compositions. Terence Boylan, another Bard musician, remembered that Fagen took readily to the beatnik life while attending college: "They never came out of their room, they stayed up all night. They looked like ghosts—black turtlenecks and skin so white that it looked like yogurt. Absolutely no activity, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes and dope."

After Fagen graduated in 1969, the two moved to Brooklyn and tried to peddle their tunes in the same midtown Manhattan building where Kenny Vance of Jay and the Americans worked, and took an interest in their music. This led to work on the soundtrack of the low-budget film (featuring Richard Pryor and Robert Downey Sr.) You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat. Becker later said bluntly, "We did it for the money." Becker and Fagen joined the touring band of Jay and the Americans for about a year and a half. They had little success after moving to Brooklyn, although Barbra Streisand recorded their song "I Mean To Shine" on her 1971 Barbra Joan Streisand album. Their fortunes changed when one of Vance's associates, Gary Katz, moved to Los Angeles to become a staff producer for ABC Records. He hired Becker and Fagen as staff songwriters, and they flew to California. Katz would produce all their 1970s albums in collaboration with engineer Roger Nichols. Nichols would win six Grammy Awards for his work with the band from the 1970s to 2001.

Realizing that their songs were too complex for other ABC artists, Katz suggested Becker and Fagen formed their own band with guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, drummer Jim Hodder and singer David Palmer. Fans of Beat Generation literature, Fagen and Becker named the band after a "revolutionary" steam-powered dildo mentioned in the William S. Burroughs novel Naked Lunch. Palmer joined as a second lead vocalist because of Fagen's occasional stage fright and because the label believed that his voice was not "commercial" enough. During the first tour, however, Katz and Becker decided that they preferred Fagen's interpretations of the band's songs, persuading him to take over.

Released in 1973, their 2nd album Countdown to Ecstasy was not as commercially successful as Steely Dan's first album. Becker and Fagen were unhappy with some of the performances on the record and believed that it sold poorly because it had been recorded hastily on tour. The album's singles were "Show Biz Kids" and "My Old School", both of which stayed in the lower half of the Billboard charts. Pretzel Logic was released in early 1974. A diverse set, it includes the group's most successful single, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" (No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100). Becker and Fagen sometimes asked their multiple studio musicians to record as many as forty takes of each track. Pretzel Logic was the first Steely Dan album to feature Walter Becker on guitar. "Once I met [session musician] Chuck Rainey", he explained, "I felt there really was no need for me to be bringing my bass guitar to the studio anymore".

A rift began growing between Becker-Fagen and Steely Dan's other members  who wanted to tour. Becker and Fagen disliked constant touring and wanted to concentrate solely on writing and recording. The other members gradually left the band, discouraged by this and by their diminishing roles in the studio. Steely Dan's last tour performance was on July 5, 1974, a concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in California. Becker and Fagen recruited a diverse group of session players for 1975's Katy Lied. The album went gold on the strength of "Black Friday" and "Bad Sneakers", but Becker and Fagen were so dissatisfied with the album's sound (compromised by a faulty noise reduction system) that they publicly apologized for it (on the album's back cover) and for years refused to listen to it in its final form. The Royal Scam was released in May 1976, and is the band's most guitar-oriented album.  The album sold well in the United States, though without the strength of a hit single. In the UK the single "Haitian Divorce" (Top 20) drove album sales, becoming Steely Dan's first major hit there. 

Steely Dan's sixth album, the jazz-influenced Aja, was released in September 1977. Aja reached the Top Five in the U.S. charts within three weeks, winning the Grammy award for "Engineer—Best Engineered Recording—Non-Classical." It was also one of the first American LPs to be certified 'platinum' for sales of over 1 million albums  Peg" (No. 11) was the album's first single, followed by "Josie" (No. 26) and "Deacon Blues" (No. 19). Aja solidified Becker's and Fagen's reputations as songwriters and studio perfectionists. Planning to tour in support of the album, Steely Dan assembled a live band. Rehearsal ended and the tour was canceled when backing musicians began comparing pay. After Aja's success, Becker and Fagen were asked to write the title track for the movie FM. The movie was a box-office disaster, but the song was a hit, earning Steely Dan another engineering Grammy award. It was a minor hit in the UK and barely missed the Top 20 in the U.S.A.

Becker and Fagen took a break from songwriting for most of 1978 before starting work on Gaucho. The project would not go smoothly: technical, legal, and personal setbacks delayed the album's release and subsequently led Becker and Fagen to suspend their partnership for over a decade. Misfortune struck early when an assistant engineer accidentally erased most of "The Second Arrangement", which remained lost until a recording was discovered in 2020  More trouble—this time legal—followed. In March 1979, MCA Records bought ABC, and for much of the next two years Steely Dan could not release an album. Becker and Fagen had planned on leaving ABC for Warner Bros. Records, but MCA claimed ownership of their music, preventing them from changing labels. Turmoil in Becker's personal life also interfered. His girlfriend died of a drug overdose in their Upper West Side apartment, and he was sued for $17 million. Becker settled out of court, but he was shocked by the accusations and by the tabloid press coverage that followed. Soon after, Becker was struck by a taxi while crossing a Manhattan street, shattering his right leg in several places and forcing him to use crutches.Still more legal trouble was to come. Jazz compose Keith Jarrett sued Steely Dan for copyright infringement, claiming that they had based Gaucho's title track on one of his compositions, "Long As You Know You're Living Yours". Fagen later admitted that he'd loved the song and that it had been a strong influence. Gaucho was finally released in November 1980. Despite its tortured history, it was another major success. The album's first single, "Hey Nineteen", reached No. 10 on the pop chart in early 1981, and "Time Out of Mind" (featuring guitarist Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits) was a moderate hit in the spring. Roger Nichols won a third engineering Grammy award for his work on the album.

After Steely Dan disbanded in 1981, Becker moved to Maui, where he became an "avocado rancher and self-styled critic of the contemporary scene." He stopped using drugs, which he had used for most of his career.  He and Fagen worked sporadically on solo projects through the 1980s, though a cult following remained devoted to the group's work. Since reuniting in 1993, Steely Dan has toured steadily and released two albums of new material, the first of which, Two Against Nature, earned a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Their final album of new studio material was 2003's Everything Must Go, though the band has continued to release compilations, box sets, and live albums on a regular basis. After Becker's death in 2017, Fagen reluctantly continued the group with himself as the sole official member. 

They have sold more than 40 million albums worldwide and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2001. VH1 ranked Steely Dan at No. 82 on their list of the 100 Greatest Musical Artists of All Time, and\ Rolling Stone ranked them No. 15 on its list of the 20 greatest duos of all time. 

Bands that have cited Steely Dan as influence at one point or another include Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers, Toto, The Eagles & Little Feat

ALBUM BACKGROUND – CAN’T BUY A THRILL

Can't Buy a Thrill is the debut studio album by American rock band Steely Dan. It was released in November 1972, and was written by band members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and recorded in August 1972 at the Village Recorder in West Los Angeles, with producer Gary Katz. The album is one of Steely Dan's most stylistically eclectic, encompassing the sounds of soft rock, folk rock, jazz-rock and pop, alongside philosophical, elliptical lyrics. Much of the lyricism features themes of war, prostitutes, and gangsters, sardonically and mockingly written.

A commercial success, in the United States the album peaked at number 17 on the Billboard albums chart, bolstered by the popular singles "Do It Again" (reached 6th) and "Reelin' In the Years" (11th) and was eventually certified Platinum. It was also met with positive reviews,  Along with "Dirty Work" (sung by David Palmer), the songs became staples on radio. The album cover features a line of prostitutes standing in a red light area waiting for clients, created as a photomontage by Robert Lockart. The title of the album is a reference to the opening line of the Bob Dylan song "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry"