Did Donny Osmond love Steely Dan and did it kill their allure?
‘Reelin’ in the Years’ is undoubtedly one of the best tracks to have come from Steely Dan‘s catalogue, and is a fine example of their early work that managed to stand up to their late-career highlights. Given how adored it is by fans of the band, and how protective the most diehard factions of the fanbase can be, it might well be a horrific thought when someone says they’re going to cover it, not least Donny and Marie Osmond.
Now, let’s not use this as an excuse to be critical of The Osmonds on the whole. They’re a far more musically adept band than a lot of people choose to give them credit for, but that was largely down to the exploits of the older siblings, who were responsible for releasing the astonishingly good hard rock track, ‘Crazy Horses’, alongside an equally impressive album of the same name. Donny and Marie’s respective careers have considerably fewer highlights to speak of, and regularly relied on them performing safe pop covers of other people’s material.
Their rendition was laughable at best, and punishing at worst. There was something so saccharine and twee about their work that rubbed audiences up the wrong way, and the squeaky-clean image was a little dated by the end of the 1970s. People were actively looking for something, either a little more raw or cerebral, and Donny and Marie Osmond, it has to be said, weren’t exactly providing anything that was breaking new ground at this point.
So, their choice of covers may well have ruined people’s perception of the original artists, but were they responsible for the negative feelings held towards Steely Dan? Cerebral they may have been, but their soft rock stylings put plenty of people off, and a number of people who regarded their jazz-inflected style often dismissed them for being pretentious, too clever for their own good, and lacking in enough bite, so to speak.
It wasn’t just ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ that they did. Donny also covered the later Steely Dan hit ‘Peg’ at the Miss USA pageant in 1980, if you can imagine such a thing. Of course, the track was rumoured to be about a star of the stage, presumably actress Peg Entwistle, so the decision to cover the song isn’t exactly out of place, but to hear Donny Osmond performing the track there is perhaps something that couldn’t have easily been predicted.
He’d go on to record his own version of ‘Peg’ 34 years later for his The Soundtrack of My Life album, where once again, he dished out a number of covers of songs that had inspired him throughout his career. However, was the damage already done? Had Osmond already tarnished the reputation of Steely Dan enough by association, or did the band have enough of their own critics to destroy any chance of their music being able to appeal on a grander scale?
Given how much of a renewed interest there is in Steely Dan among younger generations, and how little reappraisal they’ve offered to Donny Osmond, it’s fair to say that his choice to cover the band on multiple occasions did no damage to their popularity in the long run. Of course, the elder Osmonds may have been better candidates for covering the works of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, but at least it wasn’t Little Jimmy Osmond squeaking his way through their catalogue.
