“It wasn’t fun at all”: Steely Dan’s most tragic album
In American universities, an English major can enrol in no shortage of courses completely unrelated to his primary field of study. In my case, this included 10-pin bowling, geology, and sound recording. It was in the latter class—taught by a 45-year-old bearded man in ill-fitting khaki trousers and a pale blue checked shirt—that I learned about Steely Dan. Don’t get me wrong; I had known about Steely Dan since early childhood. My dad, as a middle-class American boomer, was required to own Aja on vinyl, and classic rock radio still played either ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ or ‘Dirty Work’ every hour on the hour. It wasn’t until I found myself standing at a mixing board with an “expert”, however, that I truly understood the band’s status among appreciators of the craft of audio production.
“I want you to listen to this song 15 to 20 times over the next day,” the instructor told his bemused students, handing us burnt CDs with Steely Dan’s ‘Hey Nineteen’ as the lone track identified therein with a magic marker. Our task was to write down every observable element in the mix, for this was, in his judgment, an infallible piece of popular music. In retrospect, perhaps the subject matter of the song—an ageing narrator voicing his annoyance with a university student who doesn’t understand how cool he is—might have been part of the appeal for this fellow, as well.
However, the general marching orders were to ignore the lyrics and focus on the instrumentation, the meticulous engineering, the innovative robot percussion, and the pristine clarity. This was, as best I could tell, the antithesis of punk rock, released insultingly in the same year as London Calling. Who wants clean perfection from a rock n’ roll band anyway?
Of course, what I didn’t know, and what my audio production teacher likely didn’t know either, was that ‘Hey Nineteen’ and the LP of which it’s a part, 1980’s Gaucho, actually emerged from a time of chaos, tragedy, and sadness for Steely Dan. Yes, it was the most expensive record ever made at the time, and the sheen of the finished product doesn’t hint at any quick fixes or last-second rewrites. But, in truth, Gaucho was survived as much as it was perfected.
“It wasn’t fun at all, really,” guitarist Walter Becker later said of the album. And that’s probably an understatement. While working on the songs that would become Gaucho, Becker was struck by a car on a walk home to his apartment, leading to a difficult six-month recovery. Shortly thereafter, when recording of the album was finally underway, Becker’s girlfriend, Karen Roberta Stanley, died of a drug overdose.
Perhaps as a direct reaction to these events, Becker and bandmate Donald Fagen only ramped up their obsessive focus on the minutiae of the Gaucho recording sessions, spinning plates with 40 guest musicians, a new £150,000 drum machine, and the stretched nerves of engineer Roger Nichols and producer Gary Katz.
Several weeks went into their work on a song ironically titled ‘The Second Arrangement’, and an assistant engineer accidentally erased the master tape. Attempts were made to re-record it, but Becker and Fagen decided the magic had been lost, so they abandoned the song entirely.
Famously, it also took 55 takes just to get the 50-second fadeout of ‘Babylon Sisters’ up to snuff. This kind of painful spiralling into a Brian Wilson level of over-tinkering could easily have resulted in a catastrophic misstep after the huge success of Aja a few years earlier. Instead, either in spite of its creators or as a considerable testament to their dedication, Gaucho proved to be another critical and commercial hit.
The finished product, which wound up with just seven tracks at a total of 38 minutes, still took two entire years to make. It was nominated for several Grammys, and while it didn’t take home ‘Best Album’, it did unsurprisingly win for ‘Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical’, as Roger Nichols shared the honour with fellow engineers Jerry Garszva, Elliot Scheiner and Bill Schnee — not to mention all the sound recording instructors of the world, forever in its debt.
