Fact #91561
When:
Short story:
The second Steely Dan album, Countdown To Ecstasy, enters the Billboard album chart in the USA where it will peak at No35.Full article:
COUNTDOWN TO ECSTASY - STEELY DAN
by Johnny Black
A flawless marriage of Brill Building pop suss, jazz elegance and rock attitude makes this the most consistently satisfying Dan artefact. Founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had crafted their songwriting skills working as staff songwriters at ABC Records but forming their own band gave them a free hand to let their musical imaginations run riot.
Their debut, Can’t Buy A Thrill, included two major hit singles, Do It Again and Reelin’ In The Years, but what Countdown lacks in hits is more than compensated for in sophistication. On Thrill, the band was relatively inexperienced but by Countdown they’d toured together so, as Becker explains, “the musicians got to hear the songs and participate in developing the arrangements at an earlier stage. Because we knew what the band sounded like, we had a more developed conception of it, and it became a more integrated framework.”
The band had lost its original vocalist, David Palmer, so Fagen’s intellectual sneer moved front and centre, proving to be a better vehicle for the band’s scathingly acerbic critiques of America’s foibles.
The Stax sax and stuttering guitar battle in the middle of My Old School, the swing-meets-heavy metal groove of Bohisattva and the strutting cynicism of Showbiz Kids make this perhaps the high water mark of studio-perfect rock, because the passion remains intact throughout.
Unfortunately, the album proved too cerebral for the MCA executives charged with marketing it. Promotion was minimal, and sales were poor, but the passage of time has accorded it the status it always merited.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)
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Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter (guitarist, Steely Dan) : When we did (the first album) Can’t Buy A Thrill, hardly anybody knew anybody. On Countdown we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do. It was a lot more fun doing it. It was a lot more rock’n’roll.
Walter Becker (Steely Dan) : In the case of the second album, the musicians got to hear the songs and participate in developing the arrangements at an earlier stage. Because we knew what the band sounded like, we had a more developed conception of it, and it became a more integrated framework.
Donald Fagen (Steely Dan) : That was the only album where the songs were developed on the road, in rehearsal and onstage. We were playing them before the album was recorded, so it had a more live, blowing feel about it.
Danny Dias (Steely Dan) : When we finished that record, a number of executives came to the studio to hear it played back for the first time, and nobody seemed to like it. They were so unhappy about it that there was hardly any promotion for it, and it was disappointing commercially. We were trying to go higher and better, and they were looking for something more saleable. They were used to AM pop stuff, and what they heard was a little more sophisticated, and they didn't know what to do with it.
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by Johnny Black
A flawless marriage of Brill Building pop suss, jazz elegance and rock attitude makes this the most consistently satisfying Dan artefact. Founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had crafted their songwriting skills working as staff songwriters at ABC Records but forming their own band gave them a free hand to let their musical imaginations run riot.
Their debut, Can’t Buy A Thrill, included two major hit singles, Do It Again and Reelin’ In The Years, but what Countdown lacks in hits is more than compensated for in sophistication. On Thrill, the band was relatively inexperienced but by Countdown they’d toured together so, as Becker explains, “the musicians got to hear the songs and participate in developing the arrangements at an earlier stage. Because we knew what the band sounded like, we had a more developed conception of it, and it became a more integrated framework.”
The band had lost its original vocalist, David Palmer, so Fagen’s intellectual sneer moved front and centre, proving to be a better vehicle for the band’s scathingly acerbic critiques of America’s foibles.
The Stax sax and stuttering guitar battle in the middle of My Old School, the swing-meets-heavy metal groove of Bohisattva and the strutting cynicism of Showbiz Kids make this perhaps the high water mark of studio-perfect rock, because the passion remains intact throughout.
Unfortunately, the album proved too cerebral for the MCA executives charged with marketing it. Promotion was minimal, and sales were poor, but the passage of time has accorded it the status it always merited.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)
--------------------------------------
Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter (guitarist, Steely Dan) : When we did (the first album) Can’t Buy A Thrill, hardly anybody knew anybody. On Countdown we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do. It was a lot more fun doing it. It was a lot more rock’n’roll.
Walter Becker (Steely Dan) : In the case of the second album, the musicians got to hear the songs and participate in developing the arrangements at an earlier stage. Because we knew what the band sounded like, we had a more developed conception of it, and it became a more integrated framework.
Donald Fagen (Steely Dan) : That was the only album where the songs were developed on the road, in rehearsal and onstage. We were playing them before the album was recorded, so it had a more live, blowing feel about it.
Danny Dias (Steely Dan) : When we finished that record, a number of executives came to the studio to hear it played back for the first time, and nobody seemed to like it. They were so unhappy about it that there was hardly any promotion for it, and it was disappointing commercially. We were trying to go higher and better, and they were looking for something more saleable. They were used to AM pop stuff, and what they heard was a little more sophisticated, and they didn't know what to do with it.