from the LP The Royal Scam, ABC Records, 1976I held out for a long time with Steely Dan, and if there was a hologram of me at 15 years-old seeing myself now, posting a positive blog entry on them, well, my former self would be infuriated; back then, if it didn’t reek of the underground in some way, it was all just useless---ah, the naivety of youth! What’s so funny, of course, is that Steely Dan (essentially Donald Fagan & Walter Becker) are indeed the ultimate rebels, verbose and too smart for their own good, strikingly ugly & asocial pop geniuses, narcissists of the highest order but never taking the business too seriously. I didn’t bother to notice, as a kid, that they took their name from the crazy dildo in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or that they were, in fact, penultimate junkies and all-around wastoids throughout all of their adult contemporary success; I must confess, I was always a secret fan of their classic rock radio staples “Reelin’ in the Years” and “Do It Again”, but I would never have admitted that back then. At any rate, I finally broke down and got a bunch of their albums, old enough then to both get the nuances in their stories & not care what other people thought about it; that’s one of the great things about getting older---caring less about being “cool”, ‘cause once you get passed a certain point, you haven’t got a shot in hell unless you get comfortable in your own skin. Perpetual skeptics that they were, the duo penned this particular song about the death of the psychedelic revolution’s dream, although both guys admit to having been users of LSD back then. I can never decide whether this was meant as a scathing rebuke of those idealistically utopic goals by people who felt cheated, or rather a practical and mature reprieve by guys who had grown up & out of that as well; what isn’t in debate, however, is that this song uses famous LSD “chemist” Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley (also sound tech for the Grateful Dead) as an allegory for the whole late ‘60s scene, “…just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl, you turned it on the world, that's when you turned the world around…on 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 their wall, you must have had it all…now your patrons have all left you in the red, your low rent friends are dead, this life can be very strange; all those dayglow freaks who used to paint their face, they've joined the human race, some things will never change…” It’s interesting to note that Owsley did, indeed, “get along”; in fact, he’s been living in the deep outback of Australia for the past couple decades, annexing land with each successive year, which Australian law allows one to do (because who the fuck wants to live on land where everything you touch will make you burn or die?!...). Their own drug problems and legal issues tore the band apart in the early ‘80s, but the music Steely Dan recorded before that time remains wholly engaging, both lyrically and musically, a feat many of today’s artists could really take a lesson from.
