Steely Dan: My Old School
[purchase]
Here is a song from 1973, with horns, about school. So this is the third week in a row that this could be posted.
The number three is actually my theme for this post. You see, most people think of Steely Dan as a duo. But I would argue that, in their original run of studio albums, from Can't Buy a Thrill through Gaucho, there was a third member: producer Gary Katz. Katz would be there with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen when they entered the studio to start a new album. He would help find the musicians who would play in the sessions.
But the best way to make the case for Katz as the third member of the group is to listen. "My Old School" comes from Steely Dan's second album, Countdown to Ecstasy. In the song, you can hear an early example of the classic Steely Dan sound. The rough edges of their early work start to get smoothed down, and jazz harmonies sneak their way into the mix, in the horn charts and guitar parts. And the whole thing has a glossy pop feel to it, which is entirely misleading.
If you take Walter Becker out of the equation, as on Donald Fagen's first solo album The Nightfly, you lose some of the more sneaky jazz elements and much of the bite in the lyrics. But if you remove Gary Katz, as on Steely Dan's comeback album Two Against Nature, you lose the pop sheen and much of the musical subtlety. And, by subtraction, the case is made for Gary Katz as the third member of the classic lineup of Steely Dan.