Steely Dan - Katy Lied (1975)

The first album recorded by Steely Dan after Walter Becker and Donald Fagen disbanded the original group and became a duo supported by session musicians (though they would still rely on original Dan guitarist Denny Dias from time to time), Katy Lied also represented a musical departure.  Except for the sharp opener "Black Friday," about a stock market crash, the music on Steely Dan's fourth album is dominated by muted rock guitar, moderately slow tempos, and morose jazz passages.  Katy Lied, like many of the rock albums of the mid-seventies, was about exhaustion, specifically about an America emotionally exhausted by war, Watergate, and crisis with no clear direction to take.

The lyrics were just as much a change of direction as the music.  Becker and Fagen once again populate their songs with seedy characters, but instead of staking their own places in the world, they seem more resigned to their fates.  "Daddy Don't Live In That New York City No More" depicts a one-time underworld big shot on his last legs, while "Everyone's Gone To the Movies" looks in on a pervert showing kids dirty films. A sense of desperation and a need for relief are evident among the small-time hoodlums and disillusioned souls who shuffle through Katy Lied like harried commuters in a subway station, and the music provides an appropriate backdrop.  Angular guitar solos from guest guitarists Larry Carlton and Rick Derringer are paired with pianos and electric keyboards that sound plaintive and restless, anchored by the drumming precision of Jeff Porcaro (who played on all but one of the tracks here).  Moments of release, such as Phil Woods's superb saxophone solo on "Doctor Wu," are fleeting, their effect merely temporary.  Steely Dan's music was going more deeply into jazz and away from fusion rock, as if Becker and Fagen were searching for meaning in their music more than their listeners were in their lyrics.

Katy Lied deserves to be included with Steely Dan's previous three albums (Can't Buy a Thrill, Countdown To Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic) as a core of essential seventies rock, even though this album differs from its predecessors in offering empathy for the walking wounded that populate the world it creates.  The brooding tempo of "Bad Sneakers" complements the loss and confusion the narrator feels walking down the avenues of Midtown Manhattan (New York was on the edge of bankruptcy in 1975), while the quite subtle keyboard pulse of "Any World" (augmented by Michael McDonald's backing vocals and the low-keyed drums of session ace Hal Blaine) asks the obvious question of how to escape the reality of alienation for the welcoming embrace of others.  The answer - if there is one - isn't enunciated.  There's a sense of finality to the hopelessness that defines Katy Lied, though the funereal piano coda that ends the LP's final song, "Throw Back the Little Ones," sounds too final.