Fallen Heroes Dept. - Steely Dan Gets Tin Worm

This pitcher is, like, a metaphor. A metaphor is like a simile.

 

Way back in, ooh, seventy-three or whatever, there was nobody cooler on the face of the planet than Steely Dan. Carrying a Dan album around marked you out as one of the hipster elite. Compared to their lawyer-level snark smarts and jazzbo academy chops, Little Feat were a bunch of body shop slackers, filling the back of the project Camaro with bong smoke. And the Doobie Brothers were hillbillies, eternally falling off the same porch. Th' Dan VIP Leisure Lounge was where the smart kids hung out, in our dreams, snorting lines of pure Bolivian snow off the tits of the Latina room maid. Snickering at the Secret Lodge humor that only the initiated understood. The shine of your Japan, the sparkle of your China! Every arcane Dan delight was enriched by the knowledge that their music went wayyy over the heads of the shmuck in the street. Those fugitive melodies? The collegiate use of language qua signs? That indescribable, ineffable, incommunicable Dan-ness hung on you like some mystic glowing lamasery tour laminate. If you knew, you knew. Like New Yorkers believe that a "New York thing" is some private privilege only understood in all its deliciousness by scaly-skinned loft lizards, Dan Man Fans peered out warily at the rest of the world and opted to stay inside, clamped under the headphones.

Case in point: the author [left, and gee fucking whiz - Ed.] - Dan Man Fan, counting down to ecstasy. I bought all the albums. Even after the muse of melody crept away into the night, me and my hip pals carried the sodium torch of th' Dan, basking in its cold glow. Meanwhile, the dumb straights were out partying and pretending to like Motown and getting laid. Hah! Joke's on them, right? Right?

I'm trying to remember the last time I - metaphorically - reached for a Dan album. Not that that's any measure of their worth - I'm also trying to remember what I came into the room for - but their appeal has atrophied to the point where memory drifts into forgetfulness. I still listen, with vein-pulsing pleasure - to Little Feat, and the Brothers Doobie, but if I'm going to have to choose a Dan album I might listen to today, it would be Becker's 18 Tracks Of Whack, which the quick-witted among you will have noted isn't even a Steely Dan record. And that would be because it's sincere and moving and mostly unironic and the jokes don't require a thesaurus to get. And if I chose just one Dan song to carry with me into the gilded eternity, it would be American Lovers, which they didn't even record, th' shmucks.

Today's Freeload™ is the oft-booted and variously-yclept Yellow Peril, as chock full o' good tunes as any album they released. I may even listen to it again. If I remember. And below is their best song, sung by the great Thomas Jefferson Kaye.