Notes on a band I like

It's Steely Dan and I don't care what you think.

Beavis, Butthead, guitar.

I didn’t know there was a Steely Dan Problem until 1993. I was standing in a queue at Tower Records in London behind Beavis and Butthead - maybe not the actual cartoon characters, but two young men who snickered a lot like them. As they were waiting, they noticed, behind the counter, the four-CD Citizen box set containing the band’s entire studio output at that time. I can’t remember how much it cost then - sixty or seventy pounds? And Beavis (who was American) turned to Butthead and said, “Imagine spending all that money on one song.” The one song, I presumed, was ‘Reelin’ In The Years’, which famously has a long guitar solo on it. (The solo, by session musician Elliott Randall, was later ranked the 40th best solo of all time by Guitar World magazine. I just had a quick look, and I don’t have a lot of time for the other thirty-nine, which came from albums by Cream and Metallica and Van Halen and Pantera, but I suspect Beavis and Butthead would have loved them all.)

One song! If you have already decided you don’t like Steely Dan, I won’t list any of the others, but here is their first crime. They made a proper piece of Wayne’s World hair-shaking classic rock, and put it on an album with a bunch of songs that could have been on a Dionne Warwick album. That was what was great about Can’t Buy A Thrill, but the B&B boys didn’t see it that way. There was no such thing as Yacht Rock then - ironically, seeing as pretty much all the music in that “genre” had already been made. More maritime stuff later.