Steely Dan at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, CA

July 11, 2011 0 Comments

Through all my years as a Steely Dan fan, I’d never had the opportunity to see them live. Friday’s show at The Greek was the first Los Angeles stop for the band on their “Shuffle Diplomacy” tour, and featured the The Dan performing their seminal album Aja start to finish followed by a set of the band’s choosing. While I was looking forward to the show, I was also somewhat skeptical, as I’d heard the charge frequently leveled against them that they’re just a studio band and can’t reproduce the complex instrumentation and precision their albums are known for.

With this thought clanging around in my head, we took our seats amongst the sold-out crowd as the band played a warm up instrumental. But thirty seconds after Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, and company launched into “Black Cow,” the first track from Aja, I thought: studio band my ass. The band was super tight, Donald Fagen’s voice was strong and clear, and the infectious and meticulously crafted grooves that are so seductive on their studio albums were even more so in a live setting. Seated behind his Fender Rhodes electric piano adorned with a black and white photo of Duke Ellington and his band, Fagen is a riot to watch sing and play, almost like a white sighted Ray Charles, all lips and facial contortions and head whips, a gesture which almost resulted in his sunglasses flying from his face during an especially animated moment in “Deacon Blues.” Apart from looking a bit like a retired high school chemistry teacher, Becker hasn’t lost his touch in the slightest, peeling off glassy jazz licks and riffs as effortlessly as breathing.

The band churned through the rest of Aja without missing a beat. Just before “Peg,” backup singer Carolyn Leonhart stepped to the front of the stage and dropped the needle on a piece of vinyl, and it was as if the crackles and pops and hisses that echoed throughout the Greek for that brief moment were not only a reminder of where and when this band started, but were also a subtle “fuck you” to all the critics who deride them as nothing more than a studio band. After finishing Aja with “Home at Last,” “I Got the News” and “Josie,” the crowd went wild with a well-deserved standing ovation.

Throughout the performance of Aja the band stayed true the studio versions of songs, rarely deviating from the compositions so familiar to fans of the album. And as electrifying as the performance had been up to this point, it was as if they were just getting warmed up. Beginning what Fagen referred to as a “more normative set,” the band came out even looser and funkier with “Throw Out Your Gold Teeth” followed by “Hey 19,” the definitive song about May-December romances of which there had to be several hundreds in attendance amongst the aging Hollywood crowd. Just as I was congratulating myself on making this association, Becker stepped to the mic and said, “I could make some lame joke now about bringing your girlfriend to show, but we all know that here in Hollywood things are even weirder than that.” And this was another surprising thing about Steely Dan: Walter Becker is quite the entertaining raconteur. He proceeded to spin a fantastic scenario about purchasing drugs that turn out to be 99% baking soda but not caring as the placebo effect sends you into parallel universes where you and your much younger girlfriend watch the UFOs come in for a landing at LAX from your home in the Hollywood Hills, all while pontificating about concepts such as having a clitoris in your brain. He laid down this rap while the band kept the groove, the whole story punctuated by the backup singers breaking into “the Cuervo Gold” line from “Hey 19,” sending the crowd into a communal groovy frenzy.

The band that Fagen and Becker have assembled is a collection of virtuosos. Freddie Washington’s groovy bass melds seamlessly with drummer Keith Carlock’s unsurpassed genius on the skins, while the horn section’s (Michael Leonhart, Jim Pugh, Roger Rosenberg and Walt Weiskopf) bright and piercing punctuations bridge the gap between jazz and rock. The three backup singers–Carolyn Leonhart, Catherine Russell, and Cindy Mizelle–lent a nice helping hand to Fagen’s voice as he occasionally struggled in the upper registers, effectively insuring that the melodies as Fagen wrote them stay true to form. Jon Harrington’s lead guitar and Jim Beard’s work on the keyboards complement and deepen the playing of Becker and Fagen.

The rest of the set burned hard and funky, a mixture of classics such as “Time Out of Mind” and “Show Biz Kids” and less familiar material (to me) from the band’s 2003 album Everything Must Go, including “Everything Must Go” and “Godwhacker,” a supremely funky number that had the crowd shake shake shaking. They finished with “Reeling in the Years” and “Bodhisattva,” leaving the stage to another standing ovation before coming back and performing “Kid Charlemagne” as an encore. On the way out I bought my wife a $10 t-shirt adorned with the tour’s slogan: “Steely Dan: Jazz-Rock Ambassadors to the Galaxy.” I wish them well on their mission of peace throughout the universe, and just hope that the crowds on Venus and such will come to same realization that I did, which is that Steely Dan is a band who is better live than in the studio.

SET LIST:
Instrumental  
Black Cow  
Aja  
Deacon Blues  
Peg  
Home at Last  
I Got the News  
Josie  
Your Gold Teeth  
Hey Nineteen  
Everything Must Go  
Time Out of Mind  
Godwhacker  
Show Biz Kids  
Neighbor’s Daughter  
You Got The Bear  
Reelin’ in the Years  
Bodhisattva  