Steely Dan – Katy Lied

When I saw this well, I just couldn’t believe that someone was actually selling it. I had walked down from school, through Grange Road in Birkenhead three or four times in the past month, heading purposefully for Skeleton Records and unusually, I had not really come across that much of interest.

I knew the album was released and available of course, but I’d had no luck in getting myself a copy, without some way of hustling the money to pay up the full price.

It became like a nagging interior monologue in my head – What do you think Donald ? I don’t know man, you better ask Walter – I liked those moments when I only had that to compare it all with.

The vague idea was, I would steal a few cricket balls, glinting like shiny red apples in the box when I looked at them. The office door in the gym was left open now and then and sure enough…. I quickly counted about 10 and took two, one for each pocket so as to disguise the evidence.

I had hoped to sell them, back at home… One of the Chester lads took them off me on the bus for £2. He reckoned he could make another £1 on the pair where he was from. He asked me if I could get a basketball. How much ? Depends. I’ll pay £10 for a Medicine Ball.

Boys.

I can’t remember in what order, or for which albums I needed, but I also sold amongst other things; Fishing Tackle, …. I also stole a £1 note from the blazer pocket of John Kelly (humblest apologies John) …. His father Noel owned a Sports shop…. and some old Florins from my Dads coin collection. Thinking back these were probably for cigarettes circa decimalisation while they could still be spent. Plus a pound for the Gilbert o’ Sullivan 45 record from that lad in the 5th Year…. ‘Alone Again Naturally’ …. my mum would kill me if I owned up to that one….Sorry Mum.

This is getting too Catholic for my own good. Guilty as charged.

‘Katy Lied’, hinges on the solid backbone of a beautifully crafted suite of songs, that even with repeated listens, leak away almost nothing in the way of fat.

Bad Sneakers. Rose Darling. Doctor Wu. Your Gold Teeth II. Throw Back The Little Ones.

It’s quite a short album by contemporary standards. Of the ten songs only ‘Your Gold Teeth II’ exceeds more than 4 minutes. Remember, this came out 2 months before ‘The ‘Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’ by Rick Wakeman. I know, I saw it on the racks. I even listened to it. The way you had to…. we were learning…. the way we did when absorbing music continually at that age. I did, in my defence, avoid the spectacle of the ‘dancing on ice’ performances.

Within ‘Katy Lied’ there is anguish everywhere you look, piled high in each corner and yet the whole, is full of an accepting optimism.

Standing at Woodside bus station in Birkenhead, waiting for the C4 back to Ellesmere Port, I watched the hands on the Town Hall clock push around to 4.10pm and eventually, finding a seat up the front on the top deck of the bus, opened my pack of 5 Park Drive and lit a cigarette. I read the sleeve-notes and looked at the curious photographs on the cover, turning it over and over in my hands. I just wanted to get home and get under my headphones. Many years later, I even wrote a song about the whole glorious occasion.

I remember coming in through the back door and slipping into the chair in the living room, nearest to the front window. I don’t recall exactly the lay out of the space at that time, but remember well my parents and my brother Kev, watching television and eating food from their lap, served from the hatch, while I listened to their voices, bleeding through the intermittent silences between the tracks.

I was trying to hear the sureness of the changes I had heard about, signalling a shifting of prescence between the ‘old’ band members and the manicured settings for the new recruits. There was a feeling that ‘the band’ had broken up…. remember this was when we got our information from the NME and Melody Maker…. once a week…. You wouldn’t hear that much radio talk about Steely Dan that was for sure. Apart from a slice of an ‘In Concert’ appearance on the OGWT there was barely any ‘video’ footage either.

Unexpectedly, ‘Black Friday’ makes for somewhat of an uneasy start. The rolling guitars, despite the efforts of Denny D and Walter cry out for Jeff Baxter. It is full of reflection and ploughs its way with a weary, expectant air. It is by far, the nearest to formula that a side from this album could be. The lyric is sharp as always, and coloured with the proper and personal names that litter the albums narrative from the start, but it has a concrete arrangement, that is setting quickly and firmly, within the shuttered, oblique memories of Pretzel Logic. It is too earnest and unsurprisingly, made it as the first 45rpm off the album. A record company cert that. Even so, for all my criticism…. I wish I could have written it.

Mmm.

And then….

Michael McDonald, saves his first clear and discernable words in the Steely Dan pantheon for….

‘Going Insane…. Laughing at the Frozen Rain…. So Alone….’

I often wonder how the conversations rattled on between DF, WB and Michael. I have a hopeful consideration, that he found his form early in the afternoon and went home to pick up his groceries in a paper bag, gently humming ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Movies’.

I somehow doubt it.

‘Bad Sneakers’ stinks of class, it is almost nauseous with it’s self-belief and knells a defiant …. we shall expect no less…. for all the staggering rest. Supreme, in procuring a slice of barely digestable lyrics and allowing them to become so much more over time. It is unprecedented in it’s hope, it’s relief and it’s purpose.

‘Rose Darling’, brings no respite from the tangle of emotion. It plays out its understated sureness magnificently. Fagens’ voice is sublime, it’s authority a far cry from the supposed reluctance about singing, that history would have us believe about him and his relationship with his own voice.

Where previously, the complexity of the songs had enticed my admiration, my friend, Mr Nigel, one of five names that I can always stand to hear…. taught me about the simplicity of ‘Rose Darling’ and its relative depth.

‘Daddy Don’t Live….’ struts along to Jeff Porcaro’s insistent beat. Where the fuck was Hackensack ?…. It would have taken days of rooting and tooting to find that out in those internet freedays.

With ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Movies’, playfully arousing as it is, they are a rabid coupling as they wrap themselves around ‘Doctor Wu’.

Oh ‘Doctor Wu’. Siren like, holding yourself high. As if bearing a hostage from helplessness to danger, who wonders …. ‘Have you done all you can do’ ? It is exhiliratingly cinematic in its scope.

‘Your Gold Teeth II’…. What can I say. Surely, impossible to even contemplate writing nevermind playing. Unbelievably, it trumps YGT from Countdown, striving and reaching and scaling its’ heights, nailing this summit of rarified air, leaving me gasping, trying to steady my excited heart.

‘Chain Lightning’ continues to sound to these ears like a Bob Dylan barrel-organ romp to match ‘Rainy Day Women No’s….’ The only thing missing is a wailing harmonica….

The common observed thread for this song, is that of a Nazi rally but, I have to admit it was the furthest thing from my own thoughts until I read that about it. 

With ‘Any World that I’m Welcome to’  we have the nearest thing to the early Brill Building pieces. Some of these had a life before and were subsequently refurbished, including ‘Caves of Altimira’ from ‘The Royal Scam’.

They form a neat, twisting pair in my mind….

‘Throw Back the Little Ones’ (Barrio) – The voice again, is so full of purpose, consuming the uneasy words sounding almost like a theatre hall singer, Newleyesque …. Fagin like…. holding on for dear life to the unrehearsed script. Waiting for an aside to halt the ad lib….

Somehow, remarkably, it takes and remains in full control.

….

‘Katy Lied’ was always more than an album. It was a time and a world that I was always welcome in and despite the passing years, indeed because of them, it was an awkward album in some ways. Others I am sure, would recommend different Steely Dan albums than this. 

Of the previous albums’ highlights, ‘Do it Again’ after all, is an absolutely perfect beginning to all that would become important and show that, from now onwards, everything would be different from how it used to be.

Really.

I know that kind of statement is usually saved for Beatle commentators but at 6 minutes long it is a dark, streaming dream of a song with a considered tight arrangement, fleshed out and coloured with immaculate solos’. It has a superb vocal stuffed full of confident phrasing. What is this shit about Donald not being able to sing. I am almost certain that he put that rumour around himself. He thrives on that kind of alienation. They both do.

‘Countdown’ dwelt in Razor Boys and Pearls of the Quarter while ‘Pretzel Logic’ bathing in a similar deep undertow to the territory of ‘Katy’, used the raw material that would see them forge their futures.

” Bring your heart along and you can add to the pure conviction…. ”

Donalds’ keyboard arrangements are the most important difference in the five immaculate vertebrae of the key songs from ‘Katy’ Lied. Like a latter day Prufrock, measuring out a life in other peoples coke spoons. Allegedly.

The urban angst, jazz tinctures and disco future tremblings of ‘The Royal Scam’, ‘Aja’ and ‘Gaucho’ respectively, would duly follow.

The mature musings of the solo sets, have covered the lush ground that pre-empts and cradles the rehabilitating ‘Two Against Nature’; together with the sharp, often removed eye of ‘Everything Must Go”.

As for Donald and Walter well, I have never met them of course. The nearest I ever got, was being an old friend of Gary and Eddie from ‘China Crisis’. 

I hope I would have liked them, although even if I had, I imagine they would have slit my throat if I ever told anyone.

Surely the whole back catalogue deserves a re-appraisal. It is bitty and predictable generally and there must be occasion to get the the oddites onto one disc.

‘Dallas’, ‘I Sail the Waterway’…. My old copy of the ‘Citizen Box Set’ even has the wrong chronology.

Even Bob has done that for us and look at how much material he has to manage.

No offence.

As for the album itself, the whole piece ends with  a piano flourish…. exactly as it should do.

Some of my favourite Steely Dan songs are not on this album…. but no album could hold these songs like this one.

As the old saying goes…. Form is temporary, class is permanent.

Side One.

01 – Black Friday
02 – Bad Sneakers
03 – Rose Darling
04 – Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More
05 – Doctor Wu

Side Two.

06 – Everyone’s Gone To The Movies
07 – Your Gold Teeth II
08 – Chain Lightning
09 – Any World (That I’m Welcome To)
10 – Throw Back The Little Ones (Barrio)

Released 1975 on ABC Records.