Don BreithauptReseñas

Even more boring than the album.

There's some good info found in this book, but there is FAAAAAAARRRR too much information on the specific musicality and chording. There's a point where the author states something along the lines of, "if you are A Flock Of Seagulls fan, you're reading the wrong book."

I happen to like them, but that's not the point. A book like this should have the regular listener in mind. I love music, and it's interesting to understand some of the musical theory that Steely Dan brought to this album, but there's no need to go into the ridiculous, anal retentive detail the author goes into.

It's the equivalent of appreciating a sunset, then being given the advanced astronomy and physics behind the interplay between the star and the planet and the planet's atmosphere and the observer's eye, then the biology between eye and brain. Meanwhile, the observer is just digging the reds and the oranges.

As I said, there's some nuggets strewn within all the crap. But not sure it's worth the time or effort.

If you just want to learn the words and melodies, this is an okay recording. Most of the singers (except on "My Favorite Things") indulge in the nasal sliding modern voice that I personally loathe.
The "Avalon Children's Choir" is a one-off studio ensemble.

How I fell in love with pop music

I have a distinct physical memory of the plastic AM clock radio I got sometime before turning ten years old. I can close my eyes and see it perfectly: glowing amber incandescent illumination falling on the rolodex-style stacks of "digital" numbers, which would flip over nearly silently, just a little louder on the hour. For the next five years or so I kept it plugged in next to my bed, mostly on Denver's KHOW, listening before school (Charlie and Barney) and after.

I was intensely involved with the songs, on a pre-adolescent kid level. I had no understanding of how music was produced, packaged, or broadcast. Even the idea that these were recordings was lost on me at first -- I assumed it was all being performed live. I remember wondering vaguely if there was some revolving door at the station that would somehow rotate the singers in and out every 3 and half minutes.

Later, roughly in the transition from Junior High to High School, in a mini-Pleasantville transisiton, everything went from AM to FM, mono to stereo, top 40 to AOR. Suddenly music that was raceless became color-coded, and all of a sudden I started to get all the sexual double-entendre, or knew that I should pretend to. The old clock radio made way for the Radio Shack 8-track receiver with *two* speakers and the all-important FM band. But that's a different book.

This one covers my kid-pop period in fantastic detail and with a sympathetic eye, nice in light of the permanently ironic mode retro-70s fetishism typically takes. The authors don't deny the silliness of alot of this stuff, but they also don't miss a chance to commend especially great records. They are also excellent on the pre-"format" radio culture of the day, when this incredibly varied stew of sublime pop weirdness could co-exist on the AM dial.

It was a good thing I bought three different titles in this series and didn't get just this one, because if I had I might have made the mistake that they were all like this volume and I wouldn't have written about this series at all. You have to understand, this might be the best technically written examination of any Steely Dan product in the known universe, but it was written by a music geek for music geeks who understand composition, music theory, and the nuts and bolts of jazz right down to its modal chord progressions. Even for fans, the Dan have always been morbidly obtuse, but the music can be appreciated without a degree in music from Berklee or a PhD in cultural anthropology.

It can be difficult when you bring along your personal baggage to someone else's party, and for me with Aja that baggage is heavy. The summer that Aja was released my closest friend Pete and I hung out at my girlfriend Laura's house listening to that album endlessly while planning films we would and would not get around to making. The way Mozart can have an effect on the learning and retention of information for young children, Aja was like a creative elixir that seemed to be feeding something inside our 16 year old brains. It could have been the heady mix of accessible jazz and raging hormones that made us write a 25 minute silent slapstick comedy adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, shoot another couple weekends worth of cut-out animation a la Monty Python, and send prank letters to our "mortal enemy" who was off leading a Boy Scout camp that summer. We would listen to that album in silence sometimes before finally flipping the sides, starting over and getting down to business. In fact, on the rare occasions when Laura was home (and where was she anyway?) she kept a daily diary of our film-to-be and only one entry was noted simply as "did NOT listen to Aja today."

From that perspective it would be easy for me to fill a book that would delve into the essence of the Dan on the teenage psyche, when our taste for bland pop wasn't easily or comfortably sated by the emerging punk and new wave music but by a pair of articulate throwbacks to another era. While the other outsider kids were eating up the beat generation we had the Dan teaching us hipster sex slang and leading us to Charlie Parker. There was a kid named Larry who, at the end of that school year, joked about how we'd all be totally into rock and roll until we got married or turned 30, whichever came first, and then we'd mellow out to jazz. "Except for you Steely Dan fans, who are going to be the ones telling us what we should be listening to because you'll have been there all along."

While it is true that the jazz runs deep and thick throughout the later efforts of Steely Dan it's impossible to know exactly what's going on without being schooled. In that sense it falls into the "you-know-it-when-you hear-it" category, as Breithaupt's book very quickly points out because without that schooling you'll never really get what he lays down. Song after song, track after track, chords and chord progressions are striped-searched to the point where it might as well be a textbook of modern math. Nine years of playing the viola didn't come close to preparing me for what I was reading and so I found myself skimming over whole sections looking for the nuggets that would feed me what I wanted.

What I wanted, what I think many Dan fans want, is the impossible; clear, concise answers to the lyrical and musical inspirations of the Dan core, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Cryptic and elusive, Becker and Fagen have made a life's game out of shutting the doors and throwing misinformation out the windows to the fans. It isn't necessarily a hatred of fandom and fame -- though it sometimes can come off as arrogance -- but an operational ethic that basically says "We do what we do, you either like it or you don't." What I wanted was a book that could never be written.

To that end I give Breithaupt high marks for writing the book that could be written, that lays down the law and breaks it. I'm willing to guess no other album in this series of equal or greater popularity could have withstood the mechanical scrutiny of Breithaupt's analysis. Cold, yet informed, he marks every segment of the album's DNA and shows you how it was constructed.

But even all that science can't explain why I wore through two copies during the summer of 1978.½