The 1973 Steely Dan song that was written as a joke: “A parody”
No one really expects a band like Steely Dan to be the lighthearted kind.
Considering their penchant for making sophisticated takes on pop music and their workhorse mentality in the studio, the band have remained incredibly professional behind the scenes, and the jury’s out on whether the band have ever truly smiled for a photo. The band did have their playful side when they wanted to, and their second album kicked off with a send-up to American stereotyping on ‘Bodhisattva’.
When looking at where the band started, they seemed like a completely different band from where they ended up. And that’s because they basically were. For all of the great music that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen made, the idea of having one band that would record everything swirling around in their head wasn’t their idea of a good time, leading to many of their greatest hits featuring a revolving door of musicians.
Right out of the gate, though, Can’t Buy a Thrill still had more than a few shares of those thrills in its runtime. Compared to the other arena rock bands that were trying to get airplay, no one had heard anything like ‘Do It Again’ on the radio before, featuring the trademark guitar solo and sitar solo from Denny Dias.
That would only be the tip of the iceberg, with ‘Reelin in the Years’ still being heralded as one of the finest songs of the 1970s. Any good album does have the danger of falling prey to the problem that comes with any good movie…the sequel’s almost never as good. On Countdown to Ecstasy, the band went in a more experimental direction that didn’t always suit their sound, leading to songs that drag out a bit longer than they should.
That wasn’t exactly a surprise, though. Becker and Fagen had never been the kind of writers who wanted to repeat themselves just because something had worked once before.
If Can’t Buy a Thrill proved they could write radio hits, Countdown to Ecstasy felt like the moment they started asking how far they could stretch the formula before it snapped. Sometimes that meant wandering off on lengthy detours, but it also laid the foundations for the perfectionist mindset that would eventually define everything they touched.
For all of the great songs on the back half, like ‘My Old School’, ‘Bodhisattva’ practically grabs you by the throat from the minute it starts. While the backing track feels like you’re listening to the band cutting loose in the studio with endless amounts of guitar and keyboard solos, the lyrics were a bit more tongue-in-cheek than the band had been used to.
When talking about the origins of the song, Donald Fagen intended it to be a joke about how Americans stereotype Eastern culture, telling Classic Rock Stories, “That’s sort of a parody on the way Western people look at Eastern religion–sort of oversimplify it. We thought it was rather amusing–most people don’t get it”.
Then again, anyone listening to a song like ‘Bodhisattva’ for the lyrics needs to get their ears checked for the musical marvels going on below everything. Whereas ‘The Dan’ had always flirted with elements of jazz across their albums, this feels like the wildest jazz gig that anyone has ever walked into, featuring blistering solos that would have made a handful of jazz veterans give a knowing nod of approval.
That’s the trick Steely Dan always seemed to pull off. One minute they were throwing out a sly joke or an obscure cultural reference, and the next they were letting world-class musicians run wild over a groove that sounded effortless despite being anything but.
For all of the friendly jabs happening in the song, Steely Dan got far more serious as they became a studio-only entity, eventually working musicians down to the bone to get the right tracks for albums like Aja and Gaucho. Becker and Fagen may have been known for their dry wit, but ‘Bodhisattva’ at least showed they could shoehorn their brand of humour into their material.
