Released - February 1974
Genre - Jazz Rock
Producer - Gary Katz
Selected Personnel - Donald Fagen (Keyboards/Saxophone/Vocals); Walter Becker (Bass/Guitar); Jeff Baxter (Guitar); Denny Dias (Guitar); Jim Hodder (Backing Vocals); Jim Gordon (Drums); Michael Omartian (Keyboards); David Paich (Keyboards); Wilton Felder (Bass); Dean Parks (Guitar/Banjo); Plas Johnson (Saxophone); Jeff Porcaro (Drums); Victor Feldman (Percussion)
Standout Track - Pretzel Logic
Steely Dan's third album is not my favourite of theirs, as it would be difficult to argue that it's objectively better than their other masterpieces like Can't Buy A Thrill or Aja. That said, it probably is the Steely Dan album that's closest to my heart, despite my awareness of its drawbacks and limitations, and that for two main reasons. Firstly, it features by far and away my favourite Steely Dan song in its marvellous title track, and secondly, it's the one that most strongly takes me back to how I first discovered this wonderful band. As I've mentioned elsewhere, it was a friend's mum who is sadly no longer with us who first told me that "If I liked Supertramp, I'd love Steely Dan." My friend Eve piped up with a huge amount of endearing enthusiasm for the song "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," which her dad used to sing to her as a kid as "Evie Don't Lose That Number." It's an endearingly sweet story that has long stayed with me, and that prompted me to quickly seek out Pretzel Logic, the album containing that song, as one of the first Steely Dan albums to become familiar with.
As a piece of historical interest, it essentially captures the band in an interesting transitional period, and delivers some of their very best music in the meantime. After the longer, slightly more free-form instrumental jams of Countdown To Ecstasy, it sees de facto bandleaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen instead trying to channel their songwriting into the three-minute-pop-song format in a way that, while largely successful, they never really stuck with - certainly by the time of their next great album, 1976's The Royal Scam, they were back to longer and slightly more free-form musical territory. But their effort to condense their jazzy, bohemian sensibilities into a more accessible, radio-friendly format did begin to see the more earnest beginnings of Becker and Fagen's notoriously exacting method of working in the recording studio, to the frustrations of their fellow band members. While plenty of session musicians and overdubs had been used to finely hone the band's sound on their early albums, this was the first time that guitarists Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias, plus drummer Jim Hodder began to feel alienated and sidelined by the bandleaders' insistence on using multiple session musicians and marginalising their own contributions. Hodder, formerly the band's full-time drummer, is here relegated solely to backing vocals, and had departed the band by the time of 1975's Katy Lied.
To their credit, though, Becker and Fagen's reliance on session musicans was occasionally at their own expense as well as that of their bandmates - Becker has claimed that he was so impressed with the bass playing of sessionman Chuck Rainey that he no longer felt the need to play bass himself, and started contributing additional guitar as well as bass in order to continue contributing. Also to the frustration of the rest of the band, Becker and Fagen were increasingly less interested in touring or live performance, and the idea of sculpting music out of disparate parts in the studio became their main raison d'etre - there's a real sense beginning with Pretzel Logic that Steely Dan was barely a band in any conventional sense, but rather a musical project helmed by Becker and Fagen in which they exactingly tried to find the best possible way of packaging and presenting their musical ideas.
And in doing so they here created some of their finest music, even if the overall package is a somewhat mixed affair. "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" was the album's big hit, proving that the duo's interest in radio-friendly material paid major dividends as it became one of their best-known songs. From the swathes of chimes and slow percussive intro, slightly recalling the Latin rhythms of "Do It Again" on Can't Buy A Thrill, to its once-heard, never-forgotten pop chorus, it's a classic tune, with a taut, unshowy guitar solo that, as ever with Steely Dan, serves an entirely functional purpose without indulging in excessive virtuosity or intensity. Then there's the true showstopper, the moody and brilliant "Pretzel Logic," which follows the formula of ancient blues tunes but swathes it in murky keyboard fills and chattering drums, with occasional snarls of fearsome guitar and irresistably catchy harmonies on its chorus, it's easily the best combination of mood and pop catchiness that Steely Dan ever achieved. Allegedly, it's some kind of exploration of the idea of time travel, but one I've never quite managed to unravel ("I have never met Napoleon, but I plan to find the time" is easy enough, but, as ever with Steely Dan, there's plenty of other nonsense here, like that bit about shoes). But its meaning is secondary to the incredible mood that pervades the whole thing. The other song that really makes a strong impact is the brilliant, chugging rock of "Night By Night," with its insistent guitar riff.
Pretzel Logic's downfall is that, unlike most other great Steely Dan records, beyond those three excellent tracks there's not a huge amount to really stick in the mind. There's a great cover of the jazz instrumental "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" that sees Baxter ably justifying his presence by impersonating a muted trombone with his guitar, but there's other a lot of throwaway, forgettable stuff like "Through With Buzz" and the rockabilly fluff of "With A Gun." The problem with people like Becker and Fagen, who usually paint on a wide canvas, trying to condense everything into a three-minute format is that it inherently results in a few misses here and there. Steely Dan feels like a band that just functions better when given room to stretch its legs, and the duo's songwriting is more enjoyable when it has ample space to explore its more idiosyncratic elements, rather than trying desperately to fit into a radio format. "Barrytown" is good fun, and there are some nice chord progressions and harmonies in "Charlie Freak," but by and large a good half of the record tends to pass me by without exciting me much.
Still, it's a short enough album that its moments of definite filler don't outstay their welcome, and in places it manages to be right up there with the very best things that Steely Dan ever achieved. It also reversed the downward fortunes that had crept in with the fairly ambivalent response to Countdown To Ecstasy thanks to the solid performance of "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" as a single. While Becker and Fagen might not have stuck for long with their three-minute-pop-song format, the positive response to Pretzel Logic presumably encouraged them to forge ahead with their new aversion to live performance and their commitment to using Steely Dan as a means of finessing and sculpting sound and perfecting the recording of their songs rather than as a real functioning band, as that attitude only increased over subsequent years, ultimately reaching the heights of using as many as 42 session musicians on 1980's Gaucho. The other band members gradually distanced themselves from Steely Dan, with both Baxter and Hodder deciding to call it a day straight after Pretzel Logic. They were perhaps wise to extricate themselves just before Steely Dan recorded objectively their worst album, the hugely disappointing Katy Lied, but the "band" of sorts would be back in 1976 with something that reached the same heights as Pretzel Logic, but achieved far greater consistency.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, except where noted.
1. Rikki Don't Lose That Number
2. Night By Night
3. Any Major Dude Will Tell You
4. Barrytown
5. East St. Louis Toodle-Oo (Duke Ellington & Bubber Miley)
6. Parker's Band
7. Through With Buzz
8. Pretzel Logic
9. With A Gun
10. Charlie Freak
11. Monkey In Your Soul
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