The album Steely Dan were never satisfied with: “Could be blamed on mechanical failure”
Any Steely Dan was always going to be a treat for audiophiles everywhere. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were always known for putting the strangest jazz chords known to man into their songs, and yet somehow made the grooviest music known to man whenever they walked out of the studio. Even though they may have had a high pedigree when it came to who was playing on their records, they didn’t have their eyes on the ball when putting together the mix of Katy Lied.
For the first part of their career, the band started to slowly realise that they were going to become a studio creation. They certainly weren’t going to get noticed for their magnetic stage presence, so why not spend time honing your craft in the studio and putting all of your money into making the best music that you can?
Even though they seemed to be influenced by everything except rock and roll, it’s strange to think of how many big names ended up popping up on their tracks. Outside of the jazz greats like Denny Dias and Larry Carlton, hearing people like Jim Keltner and Mark Knopfler lend their talents to the band tends to sound like if Daniel Day-Lewis starred in a Michael Bay movie.
After they put together the basis of Katy Lied, though, everything seemed to go perfectly until the very end of the recording. Right as they were about to go over the final mix, they decided to go with a different kind of mastering equipment that they would come to regret the minute that they heard the final mix.
As Dias recalled in an interview years later, the noise reduction software they used completely wrecked the first version they were working on, saying, “They sounded great. The songs were great. The musicians were grateful. What could go wrong? Well, things happened. Some could be attributed to human error. Others could be blamed on mechanical failure. The rest will never be explained.”
The end result was one of the most scattershot production jobs heard on a Steely Dan project, including pianos that should logically decrescendo suddenly getting louder for no good reason. Fagen and Becker were allegedly so pissed off at how the final mix turned out that they wouldn’t bring themselves to listen to the album for years after it was released.
The thing most people know about Steely Dan is their insane dedication to getting the perfect sound down on their studio records, but while this might have been a practice they had hoped to imbue on everything they ever did, it was after this record that the band renewed their focus.
Since a studio band is supposed to sound pristine every time they play together, ‘The Dan’ seemed to overcorrect on their following albums. After finding their edge on The Royal Scam, Aja feels like everything they had worked towards since moving away from the road, with every single instrument sounding magnificent in the mix.
Then again, a lot of the imperfections of Katy Lied have helped give it its own unique character. While a lot of audiophiles may not be that happy to hear songs like ‘Dr Wu’ getting an audible clubbing, those subtle faults make the record feel much more lived-in, as if it was made to sound like an old record that’s been stranded on a record store shelf for a bit too long.
It may not have been right for the perfectionists of the group, but since when was any good music meant to be completely perfect?
