Steely Dan: Pretzel Logic (1974)

(This review originally appeared in August 2003.)

 

The coolest band of the seventies? You bet.

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are the most accomplished fusion players in rock history. Their first three Steely Dan albums - Can't Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Pretzel Logic, all recorded when the Dan was a real group - are among the most essential albums in all of seventies rock, noteworthy for their immaculate musicianship, their crisp production methods (courtesy of Gary Katz), and their inventive melodies and cryptic lyrics. Jazz rhythms, heavy blues lines, and straight rock all blend seamlessly to create pretty much what Al Kooper had in mind when he formed Blood, Sweat and Tears, only to see his own bandmates force him out so they could water down and commercialize Kooper's idea. By contrast, Becker and Fagen never wavered or surrendered; they even broke up their original ensemble and have relied on session players ever since to be true to their fusion game.

Pretzel Logic, recorded before the original group disbanded, was perhaps the greatest fruition of Becker and Fagen's ambitions. The music cuts with the same intensity of a jam in a 52nd Street nightclub, grounded in biting rock arrangements. Steely Dan presents a variety of shady characters and savvy hepcats that fit right into Becker and Fagen's cool, cynical world. "Night By Night" tells a tale of surviving on the streets set to chilling horns and jaded guitars that feel like broken glass. "Charlie Freak," by contrast, is (amazingly) even more ominous. Its heavy piano serves as the backdrop of a story of a homeless man who pawns a ring for a drug fix; when the buyer returns with some regret, he finds Charlie dead and places the ring he cannot own on the dead man's finger. As a song about homelessness, "Charlie Freak" devastates Phil Collins's homilies on the subject.

Becker and Fagen allow themselves some room for more hopeful visions of life in a cold world on Pretzel Logic, but with strings attached. "Any Major Dude Will Tell You" is a straight ballad offering lyrics of hope in the future, and the LP's hit single, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," is, on the surface at least, a love song perfect for Top Forty radio. The hesitation before the coda in the former and the muted, bubbling percussion that introduces the latter song, though, hint that bliss may not always come for everyone and, for some, maybe not at all. Becker and Fagen are in fact rather paranoid as they survey the world around them; the creepy protagonist of "Through With Buzz" (with a Third Stream arrangement right out of Charles Mingus's score book), the provincial townspeople of "Barrytown," and the murderous thief in "With a Gun" remind us that distrust runs rampant everywhere. The duo seem happiest when reverting to their devotion to jazz; the real hope on Pretzel Logic is offered through affectionate tributes to their jazz heroes, be it their remake of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" (the only cover in the Dan's career) or their big, brassy celebration "Parker's Band," with sly references to Charlie Parker himself and to Dizzy Gillespie in the relatively straightforward lyrics.

After Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan made a couple of pretty decent records in the latter half of the seventies - their fourth album, Katy Lied, is certainly on par with its predecessors - and the more recent reunion albums, Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go, draw more from jazz and blues and less from rock than any of Becker and Fagen's seventies work did. But Pretzel Logic remains the Dan's moment of triumph for its grand fusion of pop influences and its refusal to romanticize the streets that made that fusion possible.