Steely Dan - Countdown To Ecstasy (1973)

Steely Dan's second album, Countdown To Ecstasy, is a highly charged, musically sharp assessment of America in the aftermath of Vietnam and on the cusp of Watergate.  In that respect it's much like Bruce Springsteen's debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., released that same year, but offering observations with a degree of intellectual cynicism rather than with Springsteen's proletarian fatalism.  Water Becker and Donald Fagen's lyrics sneer at small-time hustlers and middle-class sybarites who hope to get the most - but not the best - out of life before everything falls apart.  With singer David Palmer out of the band, Fagen assumed all of the lead vocals and erased most of with little sentimentality there was in Steely Dan's music, while adding to the excitement of the band's trademark jazz-rock fusion.  

Countdown To Ecstasy bursts out of the gate with the boisterous, steady rock of "Bodhisattva," a devastating indictment of self-importance with its take on people who give both their worldly possessions and their mental faculties to cults, with drummer Jim Hodder providing a piercing backbeat to cutting guitar solos.  The more somber "Razor Boy," which follows, takes an admonitory tone in asking if there would be anything left when self-suffusion was no longer available, the slide guitar as foreboding as that cold and windy day ahead with vibraphone notes punctuating the melody like sleet.  The whole tone of Countdown To Ecstasy is one of ironic amazement, the words expressing surprise at a world that Becker and Fagen have no trouble understanding, from the neighborhood gangster of "The Boston Rag," whose appetite for pleasure is as threatening as the intense piano and guitar that underline the track, to the spoiled brats of "Show Biz Kids," with their booze and drugs and their self-absorbed hipness; they're too busy pleasing themselves sexually (I'll assume that the lyric about the kids "making movies of themselves" has nothing to do with cinematography) to care about anything else.  Becker and Fagen even throw in misanthropy toward their own hipster fans in "Show Biz Kids" (who all end up in "Lost Wages," a pun on Las Vegas) with a reference to the Steely Dan T-shirts on their shapely bodies, a moment disguised as self-deprecation.  The mockingly grinding guitars of Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and Denny Dias just add to the satire.

Becker and Fagen seem amazed as much as appalled with the trajectory that popular culture was taking, titillated by their observations but resisting the various temptations they document; the long modal jam of "Your Gold Teeth" is almost a line of defense against the come-ons of a sexy grifter with her bag of tricks.  In the only nod to sentimentality on this (or any other) Steely Dan record, they recall lost innocence in "Pearl of the Quarter," about a Cajun sweetheart left behind in New Orleans to the tune of a relaxed, warm Dixieland arrangement.  But Walter and Donald know where all of this is headed.  "My Old School," with its charging beat and a bright brass section you can't help but pump your fist to, tells the tale of a real-life drug bust from their days at Bard College that ends in disillusionment and bitterness.  For Countdown To Ecstasy, its title as ironic as its music, it all ends with the apocalyptic "King Of the World," a scary, synthesizer-driven ride through the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust in which nothing matters and few are left standing.  For Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, though, exploring that frightening but entertaining underside of American civilization was only beginning.  And ecstasy was still a long way off.