Lunch With Gina, quite simply, seems like 'forever'...
I was working in the garden on that Sunday afternoon and as usual I had song texts running through my head. On that occasion it was Steely Dan - Blues Beach, Home at Last, My Old School, Cousin Dupree... in some cases it's taken me 40 years to unearth the wit and the depth in these private jokes shared between the writers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. But that is part of the pleasure: this cryptic but brilliant jazz-pop is an integral part of my life.
Once again it was the wonderfully precocious Aidan Potter who introduced Can't Buy a Thrill into our sixth form common room. The lewd album cover with a picture of prostitutes lining the street was way beyond me and the limited experience I ever got from an all boys catholic grammar school; and it was girlfriends who smiled knowingly at the texts of songs like "Dirty Work" long before I got round to thinking about 'sending the maid home early'... And so it went on, slowly getting to know these wonderful songs with obscure hints which romanticised, while making fun of, a shady lifestyle I was never going to experience in a thousand years.
And then later that Sunday evening (3rd September 2017), I found out that Walter Becker had died. Full stop.
Steely Dan had actually quit (definitively, I thought) in 1981 after the Gaucho album. But then years later - in 1995 - came a live album Alive in America and then, like a resurrection from the dead, in 2000 a brand new album: Two Against Nature and I had the great privilege to see them perform - at the Phillipshalle in Düsseldorf (they even played My Old School as an encore - just for me). In 2003 came another new album Everything Must Go, it looked like they were back: prolific as ever.
This one seemed to me to be a very accessible album - taking as its theme the very topical subject of the failure of a
business. It starts in comic style with The Last Mall about the closing down of a supermarket. It's flippant up-tempo
pop music: kiss the checkout girls goodbye... yes the big adios is just a few hours away.., but the album
closes with the title track on a more melancholic note as the business finally goes into liquidation. There's
lots of stuff about time here too: apart from the watch salesman on the cover there is the nostalgic and unusually
tender
Things I Miss The Most and Blues Beach is filled with juvenile cliches as these two middle-aged gentlemen fantasize
about their lost past. Godwhacker is an existential cry of human defiance in the face of death.
Lunch With Gina, quite simply, seems like 'forever'...
The album also includes Slang of Ages which Becker sings (unprecedented on a Steely Dan album). One imagines it is pure Becker - there are certainly similarities with the songs on his solo album 11 Tracks of Whack: the word play, the sharp witty put-downs and allusions to drugs all seem typical.
But then comes the finale, not at all cryptic, but surely, as always, ironically intended...
And if somewhere on the way we got a few good licks in no-one's ever going to
know.
'Cos we're going out of business, everything must go.
Fans waited hopefully for another album. Steely Dan continued to perform but no more new material came, just an album of early stuff and a live studio performance from 1973... It is clear now of course, there was no irony, they meant it: they were going out of business and they had written their own dignified finale. It was indeed the big Adios to the perfect career.
Donald Fagen says he will continue to perform the music they wrote together. So he should. They certainly did get a few good licks in. Thanks.
