What song have Steely Dan played live the most?
Stepping into the studio with Steely Dan isn’t for the faint of heart. The deeply textural melodic compositions you hear on their discography aren’t by chance; in fact, they are a product of deeply intensive creative labour that has pushed some of music’s fiercest musicians to their very limits.
“It was a strange experience,” Dire Straits’ guitarist and rock icon Mark Knopfler recalled when asked about his time spent in the studio with the band. “Like getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boot.” Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were notorious for stretching studio sessions to their absolute ceiling in pursuit of perfection, and while they may have lost some friends in the process, you can’t help but deny it shows.
Their 1977 album Aja remains one of the band’s most important works to date. Contemporary artists have extracted beats and hooks from the record and injected them into their own songs. It’s a deeply influential piece of work that culminates on the fourth track, ‘Peg’.
And if you ever had any questions about the effectiveness of Steely Dan’s obsession, then this song should always act as a reference point. A true labour of love, it was reported that the pair enlisted the help of highly talented musicians for a session before scrapping every performance to bring in an entirely new band the next day.
“Every track, every overdub, had to be the perfect overdub. They didn’t settle for anything. They were always looking for the perfect,” said Elliot Scheiner, the poor soul tasked with engineering this exhaustive project.
Like all great tracks of that decade, it climaxes during the song’s guitar solo. But such was the importance placed on the recording of it that Fagan and Becker blitzed through seven different session musicians before landing on the performance of Jay Graydon as the cream of the crop.
Given the intense meticulousness of the recording, it’s a wonder they ever managed to evolve the track into a live show staple. Of course, all musicians know that the live stage is an environment where error can be turned into improvisation and the constant threat of something unique happening is what lends the magic. But for Becker and Fagan, anything but their intended creative direction is largely deemed a failure, so leaving ‘Peg’ from their live set would obviously be a sensible thing to do.
But in fact, it’s been quite the opposite. ‘Peg’ is their most-played live song of all time, with 787 performances. Following just behind are ‘Hey Nineteen’ with 776 performances, ‘Kid Charlemagne’ with 760 performances, ‘My Old School’ with 734 performances, and ‘Josie’ with 704 performances.
How did ‘Peg’ do on the charts?
Ultimately, there’s a reason Steely Dan needs to keep ‘Peg’ a firm staple in their live shows, given its chart performances. While it never hit number one on the US Billboard, it peaked at number 11 and stayed there for a 19-week run. It shares that duration of chart success with ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ and ‘Hey Nineteen’. The former was the highest performer of the lot, peaking at number four on the Billboard charts.
But as a record, Aja firmly remains Steely Dan’s standout work. Not only was it their most concise album creatively and a flying example of their ability to fuse genres, it also earned double platinum status, signifying sales of over 2million units in the US.
