{"id":103436,"date":"2016-10-06T12:04:12","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T16:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103436"},"modified":"2016-10-06T15:25:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T19:25:28","slug":"leave-alexa-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/06\/leave-alexa-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"Leave Alexa Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listening to Steely Dan\u2019s <\/em>Gaucho.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

The cover of Steely Dan\u2019s 1975 LP Katy Lied<\/em> shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad\u2019s leather reading chair and wondering who this \u201cSteely\u201d was. He sounded sort of like Bob Dylan, if Bob had just been defrosted out of a block of carbonite. (I was intensely devoted to The Empire Strikes Back<\/em>, so carbonite was almost always on my mind.) Other Steely Dan records like Countdown to Ecstasy<\/em>, Pretzel Logic<\/em>, The Royal Scam<\/em>, and Aja <\/em>opened onto a strange and ominous world: double helixes in the sky, Haitian divorc\u00e9es, the rise and fall of an LSD chef named Charlemagne, someone who drinks Scotch and then \u201cdies behind the wheel.\u201d The photo on the inside gatefold of the Greatest Hits <\/em>showed two nasty-looking guys standing in what appeared to be a hotel dining room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A few years later I found out \u201cSteely Dan\u201d was actually Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, and that their name was lifted from a William S. Burroughs novel (it\u2019s a dildo), a discovery made while ditching seventh-grade social studies to read back issues of Rolling Stone<\/em> in the public library. (I also learned that that the insect on the cover of Katy Lied <\/em>was a katydid, not a praying mantis.) As an only child growing up in an unincorporated townlet in Wisconsin, there were many nights when it was just me in the chair and the Dan on the turntable and a few owls hooting in the woods. The sound of Dan music became as natural and enveloping to me to as the countryside itself. It led me to champion the songs of Becker and Fagen among the self-styled punks I later started hanging out with, provoking j\u2019accuse-like denunciations: I was the enemy within, the guy who liked easy listening.<\/em> I found disses among learned rock pedants in the magazines, too, which I began to catalog: Steely Dan was\u00a0\u201chippie Muzak\u201d and \u201cValium jazz\u201d; their music \u201csounded like it was recorded in a hospital ward\u201d and was \u201cexemplarily well-crafted schlock\u201d; they were a \u201cbrain without a body.\u201d How could these people say such things about songs that were so deviant and bizarre and yet so warm and often staggeringly musical? The fact that the Dan had hits\u2014really huge <\/em>hits, actually, like \u201cDo It Again,\u201d and \u201cReelin\u2019 in the Years,\u201d and \u201cRikki Don\u2019t Lose That Number,\u201d and \u201cPeg\u201d\u2014only made the whiff of some lurid, freaky luxury in the music seem more pronounced. You could be lyrically weird and musically oblique and still have lots of people like it. A mystery lurked at the center of it all. And the uncut essence of that mystery\u2014the distillation of Dan music, the point beyond which the aesthetic cannot be pushed any further\u2014is their airless, lacquered Masterwerk, Gaucho<\/em><\/a>. Alternately held up as the apex of bloodless studio cerebration and fiercely defended among elite musos as multitrack record making at its finest, the sound of Gaucho<\/em> is unmistakable. It shows up as recently as Usher\u2019s just released Hard II Love <\/em>record, the second track of which, \u201cMissin U<\/a>,\u201d is built entirely around a four-bar sample taken from the last song on Gaucho,<\/em> \u201cThird World Man<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

Gaucho <\/em>took two years to record, is only thirty-seven minutes long, and was the most expensive record ever made when it came out in 1980. The cover art shows a mustachioed man in a black hat doing a tango with a woman whose back is to us, the two of them frozen mid-caress in a yellow frame against a backdrop of speckled blue. The pair are cast in some kind of stucco, giving a tableau-like relief to the image that prepares the ear for the sculpted music within. Drop the needle on the opening bars: three tuned toms slink down to a sumptuously recorded Fender Rhodes electric piano breathing out the first eerie licks of \u201cBabylon Sisters<\/a>.\u201d There are chords on Gaucho <\/em>so cold and queasy they make you feel seasick. Reeds, guitars, pianos, horns, synths and human voices form mixtures achievable only in the controlled laboratory of the studio. (Like the Beatles, the Dan had stopped touring to focus exclusively on recording.)<\/p>\n

As for the words, here is the second verse of the \u201cGlamour Profession<\/a>,\u201d the last song on side A:<\/p>\n

\n

All aboard
the Carib Cannibal
Off to Barbados
Just for the ride
Jack with his radar
Stalking the dread moray eel
At the wheel
With his Eurasian bride<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is what I mean about lurid luxury: a high-tech yacht equipped with radar for stalking eels. Gaucho <\/em>is packed with these sorts of perverse details, all with the glazed clarity of an opium trance. Take the title track<\/a>\u2019s \u201cCusterdome,\u201d which I imagine as a kind of dystopic Civil War memorial\/penthouse, the residence of a gay couple whose domestic serenity is upset by a man in a \u201cspangled leather poncho.\u201d The jaded LA scenester in \u201cBabylon Sisters\u201d \u201cjogs with show-folk on the sand\u201d and \u201cdrinks kirschwasser from a shell\u201d; on \u201cTime Out of Mind<\/a>\u201d the narrator \u201cchases the dragon\u201d leading him to junk visions of a \u201cmystical sphere straight from Lhasa, where people are rolling in the snow.\u201d There are also \u201ccelluloid bikers,\u201d \u201cSzechuan dumplings\u201d and a detective who wears a hearing aid. Nothing could be further from the tepid clich\u00e9s of the era\u2019s reigning soft rock.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Becker and Fagen, as depicted in Steely Dan\u2019s Greatest Hits<\/i> LP.<\/p><\/div>\n

3.<\/p>\n

During the recording sessions for Gaucho, <\/em>audio engineer, computer wizard, and Dan right-hand man Roger Nichols heeded Fagen\u2019s wishes for superhuman perfection in drum performance and custom built a percussion sequencer he named Wendel. Designing and making dedicated hardware to meet the demands of a musician or composer is the sort of thing you might find going on at Pierre Boulez\u2019s acoustic research facility under the Pompidou Centre, but rarely does this happen in the pop world. Yes, Michael Jackson had MIDI percussion triggers sewn into his pants and shirtsleeves so he could build drum patterns while he danced (genius); and yes, Prince actually invented a drum-machine sound, <\/em>that wonderful clooshk<\/em> you hear all over 1999 <\/em>and Purple Rain <\/em>and Around the World in a Day, <\/em>which he discovered while experimenting with the tuning parameters on a Linn drum machine; but Wendel\u00a0was built from scratch. It allowed for superfine inflections\u2014there were sixteen different hi-hat samples instead of the single pulse of white noise typical of the drum boxes of the time\u2014thus avoiding the ear fatigue that results from hearing an identical pattern looped over and over. \u201cWendel\u00a0can play exactly <\/em>what a drummer plays,\u201d Nichols evangelized. And that was important to the Dan, who were known for ruthlessly plowing through ten or twelve drummers at a crack in search of the perfect take (more than forty musicians played on the recording sessions for Gaucho <\/em>and only seventeen made it onto the record). Wendel\u00a0was insanely expensive\u2014one crash cymbal cost twelve thousand dollars\u00a0worth of RAM<\/small>\u2014and getting the machine to \u201cplay\u201d anything was a laborious, coding-intensive process undertaken in the 8085 assembly language, a now obsolete protocol for translating symbolic code into object code. Fagen remembered Nichols typing for twenty minutes and then pressing return for only a single snare hit to come out. It\u2019s crude by today\u2019s standards, but in the spring of 1979 it was, well, the radar equipped eel-stalking yacht of programmable percussion. WENDEL was awarded a platinum record after Gaucho <\/em>sold a\u00a0million copies.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Wendel victorious.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

4.<\/p>\n

A few years ago I went to see the Dan play through all of Gaucho <\/em>at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan (they started touring again some time in the midnineties). I found a single seat online, right in the middle of the first row of the balcony. We happened at the time to need a new toilet seat in our apartment and my wife, who was staying home to care for our infant son, said, If you\u2019re going out to the Beacon tonight can you get a new toilet seat while you\u2019re at it? I figured this would need to happen before the show, which would start at about nine. So I left early and found one meeting my wife\u2019s specifications at a place just up the block from the theater and then headed over. I\u2019d timed it perfectly: the opening band had just finished and people were getting amped to see the Dan. I did that side-step move you do at a baseball game or a movie theater to reach the middle of a row\u2014actually pretty perilous since I was holding a toilet seat over my head and to my right was a sheer drop off the balcony. I smelled weed and got scared because I thought the contact high would cause me to lose my balance and fall over the edge. When I got to my seat there was almost no room to move because I was squeezed between two Upper West Side Danheads with wispy gray ponytails (one of whom was the source of the weed) so I clutched the toilet seat to my chest and watched as a scarily well-rehearsed nine-piece band played through Gaucho <\/em>from start to finish. Hearing a couple thousand people collectively singing lines like \u201cbodacious cowboys such as your friend will never be welcome here \/ high in the Custerdome\u201d and (of course) \u201cthe Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian \/ make tonight a wonderful thing\u201d was fun, even moving. But I also resented the experience because I wanted Gaucho <\/em>all to myself, and finally cursed my decision to go to the concert when it would have been better to stay home and listen to the twenty-four-bit remastered version on my Bose noise-canceling headphones. Gaucho <\/em>burned brighter as a recording, I decided, and I craved the guaranteed exactitude of repeated listens heard again and again, always the same way. The toilet seat, still clutched to my chest on the subway ride home, seemed a fitting (or at least conveniently available) emblem for the way the resentment partially eclipsed the excitement of hearing Gaucho <\/em>played live.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n