Steely Dan’s forgotten jingle for a beer commercial from 1973: “We’re gonna write it”
There are a lot of clichés that come with drinking beer. The modern Guinness drinker has migrated from Dublin to East London, where wrap-around sunglasses are used to observe whether or not they have split the G. While your craft beer drinker will most likely have a lightly manicured beard and maybe even a fisherman’s beanie to accompany their snobbery.
But no matter their poison, you can bet your dedicated beer drinker will like Steely Dan.
Music humorously dubbed ‘yacht rock‘ has fallen into the hands of beer culture quite nicely. It’s an appropriate soundtrack for those with a taste, transporting them back to simpler times, the halcyon days of drinking, where cracking a cold one with your mates wasn’t interrupted by anything digital. Music was cranked up to 11, the pool table was racked up, and what was left was an immersion of ignorant bliss.
While the cold beer drinking days of a yacht-driven summer are relatively easy, Steely Dan’s music was anything but. They painstakingly burrowed away in the studio, arranging songs within an inch of their lives to achieve musical perfection. Their engineer Elliot Scheiner said: “Every track, every overdub had to be the perfect overdub. They didn’t settle for anything. They were always looking for the perfect.”
It’s the sort of high art that doesn’t exactly pair well with the kicked-back vibe of drinking a beer. The nuances of their compositional choices are lost, and well, their vocals are absolutely drowned out by the screeching chorus of booze-laden crowds. So it’s somewhat surprising, then, that the band laid down what was supposed to be a jingle for a beer brand.
Between their debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, and their sophomore album, Countdown to Ecstasy, around 1972 and 1973, the band wrote a jingle for the Milwaukee beer brand Schlitz. “It was soon after ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ that someone called and asked if the guys would write a song for the Schlitz commercial,” shared Gary Katz, the band’s longtime producer.
“And as I remember it, Donald [Fagen] said, ‘OK, but we’re gonna write it.’ By which he meant, they didn’t want to do a commercial somebody else wrote.”
In their infancy, the band were keen to explore commercial opportunities but not at the expense of their artistry. So they put together a song, that was a modest two minutes long, but showcased the sort of jazz-fusion the group were renowned for.
“As we were doing it, somebody came by from Schlitz’s ad agency—you know, a guy with a powder-blue sweater tied around his neck and quite literally a stopwatch in his hand,” said Katz, recalling how the band approached working on the jingle.
“He walked into the control room and thought he was going to take over, and that just wasn’t gonna happen.”
Katz continued, “He started asking questions about the song. Donald said aloud to me, ‘Do you have your hand near the red button?’ Then he addressed the ad guy: ‘If you say another word about this song, we’re just gonna erase it.’ So the guy left. I didn’t hear about it again.”
That conflict between creation and bureaucracy ultimately spelt the end of their partnership, and the song was shelved. Schiltz cited the reason for it as Fagen’s lyrical use of the Spanish word for “grab” or “take”, which is reportedly slang for sexual intercourse. Either way, it was another example of how commerce and music don’t always gel.
