Alex Pappademas

This amazing combination of character analysis and visual portraits is for Steely Dan aficionados, not casual fans. It's a chronological exploration of albums, songs, musicians, locale, and denizens of unique output (even a squonk!). Slices from interviews of the late lamented Walter Becker and the still touring Donald Fagan are mostly hilarious, and they are also given their fair share of abuse, plus a lot of love. The writing is so flamboyantly jazzy and humorous that it's a shame there's only room here for a few quotes rather than the entire opus. A must-have on your gift list for a Dan fan.

Quotes: "This ice-cold ode to the inevitable is perfectly representative of their preoccupation with human frailty and delusion and the unsentimental eye they'll turn on it."

"She described Queens in the '70s as "like death, only less interesting."

"The more you listen to "Like a Rolling Stone" the more you can hear the sneer in it, the derision, the insecurity, but the band behind Bob Dylan is making such an undeniable sound that it pushes the song past what's gnarled and shitty about it, turns it into a fanfare, into bells ringing in towers across the city."

"Steely Dan already has its central binary in Donald and Walter - the laconic guy and the really laconic guy."

"In 1974, the seventies are still sorting out the sixties."

"There's no perfection in art, only degrees of graceful failure."

"The solos are the most famously overdetermined parts of Steely Dan's songs, but they also tend to be the emotional crux of each song. They are the one time in the song where the deeper feeling of the song is allowed to break free of its tightly composed and arranged frame."… (mere)