Chain Lightning: Steely Dan’s Katy Lied at 50
Looking back at the album that made Becker and Fagen studio masters (and hermits)
Steely Dan was tired of the road.
To be more specific, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were damn tired of it.
“The difference between when we stopped touring in 1974 and now is immense,” Becker told the Boston Herald in 1994. “In the ’70s, touring was a very disorganized, hit-or-miss kind of business involving young, possibly intoxicated performers knocking out what they could remember of some tunes.”
Becker and Fagen turned their backs on the road and being in a band, indulging in their obsession with studio perfection. The first result in this direction, Katy Lied, just turned 50.
Steely Dan was allegedly a band at this point, but was really down to Becker and Fagen. Drummer Jim Hodder, already getting pushed to the sideline in favor of studio whiz kid Jeff Porcaro by the picky pair, left. Guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, unhappy with the decision to quit touring, left to join the Doobie Brothers. Guitarist Denny Dias was still around as a session player. They were establishing who they’d be for the rest of their existence — the main two aided by various and sundry studio hired guns.
In this case, this meant a lot of guitarists, including the likes of Rick Derringer and Larry Carlton (who’d later deliver one of the best solos on a Steely Dan record on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne”). Future Doobie Brother lead singer, solo star and yacht rock royalty Michael McDonald supplied backing vocals as he had on the group’s ’74 tour.
Considering how much the duo wanted things to be “just so” with its production, they must have thought not having to worry about all that extra travel would make things easier.
Well, be careful what you wish for.
“Anyone who watches old science fiction movies knows that strange things start to happen when you encounter a mysterious mist. I am thinking of the day that the steam generator went berserk,” Dias wrote in 2011. “It was supposed to keep the air in the studio at a perfect 50% humidity, but on this day it felt more like Biscayne Bay. The air was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The glass was foggy. Everything was damp, including the sound. The drums actually sounded like they were soaking wet even though they had been recorded on a normal day. It was almost funny except that we couldn’t work that day. We all went home and the steam generator was soon fitted with a new control unit. The studio was given a clean bill of health, but I can’t help thinking that there was some unseen oxidation that caused the studio and even the tapes themselves to fester.”
The explosion from four-track recording to 24-track over a short period of time in the ’60s greatly expanded sonic possibilities. It also meant more hiss, with more tracks on the same tape.
Dolby responded with its first noise reduction unit in 1965. Years later, dbx entered the market.
Having recorded the first two Steely Dan albums mostly at Village Recorders in Los Angeles, Becker and Fagen returned to a familiar building on Beverly Boulevard — ABC Recording Studios.
During the pair’s days as songwriters-for-hire, they wound up on the staff at ABC. Although they didn’t suddenly come up with massive hits for other artists, it was a fruitful time. They developed relationships with producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols, who’d be in the booth for Steely Dan throughout the ’70s. It was also where the band began, as they teamed up with other session players, recording the demos after hours.
Stepping into familiar turf, into the place where they’d recorded the songs that got Steely Dan signed to ABC, seemed like a good omen.
But the studio had changed since they’d last put down songs there, with new equipment, including a new dbx noise reduction system, which was less common than Dolby.
It’s there where the issues happened, as the actual recording, from November, 1974 into the following January, went smoothly for the most part.
It wasn’t cheap (especially for a band that wouldn’t have touring income to rely on anymore), between equipment expenses (like a new piano) and all the new session musicians.
Dias said everyone was surprised that the album sounded “dull and lifeless” when it was mixed.
He said, “Mixing was an absolute nightmare. Every song was mixed at least twice, and not because we were being fussy. “
Not being fussy. The same Becker and Fagen who, along with Katz and Nichols, took 55 attempts to come up with a mix for the 50-second fadeout on Gaucho’s “Babylon Sisters.”
Okay. Sure.
Whatever the case, it’s clear by all accounts that nobody was pleased with the result, especially the two main men themselves.
There had been some issues that had nothing to do with the noise reduction. The microphone placement with the cymbals created a bit of a problem later, with Dias saying they “required too much acceleration for the needle to track.”
The problem with the dbx unit seemed to be that the something was causing a degree of degradation when the songs went through the mix. The Steely Dan camp, hardly studio neophytes, were puzzled as to why this was happening.
As Katz later told Rolling Stone, “It was better sounding than anything you’ve ever heard to this date, Even Aja. Unbelievable. We went to mix it, and the tape sounded funny. We found out the dbx noise reduction system we were using was not functioning properly.”
They eventually flew to dbx headquarters in Boston to work with the company to figure out the problem and, hopefully, come up with a solution. Some additional equipment was made, but it still was a challenge.
Things would sound good, only for similar problems to crop up again. Various fixes and patches were tried. Two mixing facilities were used.
According to Dias, it was Becker who finally finished the mix at Kendun Recorders. He’d gotten it to sound closer to what he and Fagen wanted, but not really there.
The other option would have been to switch to a Dolby unit, but that would have meant more money and time. ABC, which had hoped for an album to come out in time for the holidays at 1974’s end, was collectively tapping its watch. Tired by the process and not looking to add more expenses, Steely Dan decided to go ahead with what they had.
The final result hit stores and, frankly, it didn’t sound as bad as Becker and Fagen thought. It wasn’t as if Katy Lied came out sounding like Steely Dan’s equivalent to Exile on Main Street (with its beloved murk) or St. Anger (nothing beloved about it).
Sure, there were things one could notice, especially if their stereo systems were nice enough. And, to be fair, the exacting standards Steely Dan’s platonic power couple had for their own albums, aided quite well by Katz and Nichols, were the reason the sound of those records was so well regarded.
Even if Becker and Fagen found the finished product, at least in its initial released form, impossible to listen to, what Katy Lied did have was a strong collection of songs. It may not have produced a big hit as albums before and after did, but its material has held up well.
The closest thing to a hit would be the first song —“Black Friday,” which peaked at No. 37 on the Billboard singles chart and would be heard for years after on album rock stations.
Steely Dan often specialized in reputable songs about disreputable characters. In the case of “Black Friday,” it was a financial grifter who absconded to Muswellbrook, New South Wales, Australia (chosen because it seemed really far away from Los Angeles and because, even though Fagen mispronounced it, it still rhymed with “book”).
Recognizable from that electric piano groove by David Paich (like Porcaro, a future key in Toto), “Black Friday” rides that groove as the crook is not all that concerned about his victims or his fate, complete with a well done guitar solo from Becker, a reminder that, as picky as they could be, sometimes they realized the best solo choice was from within.
The lovely, glamorous sound of “Doctor Wu” belies the unsettling nature of the lyrics, tinged with longing for love and drugs, decades before the Purdue Pharma scandal.
Becker told Rolling Stone in 2009, “It’s about that uneasy relationship between the patient and doctor. People put faith in doctors, yet they abuse their power and become dangerous.”
Yet it’s the sax work from jazzman Phil Woods, who’d supply the solo on Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” a few years later that helps the bitter medicine go down smoother.
Characters don’t get more disreputable than in “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a title with double meaning, referring to a time window in which the evil protagonist can commit his crimes and the type of movies he wishes to either show or, even worse, make. Its sophistipop chorus makes the bastard’s pitch to his intended victims all the more intentionally unsettling.
It’s also a typical Steely Dan move to marry the happiest-sounding piece of music on the album to arguably the worst character in their discography. It contains more than a kernel of truth (the friendly face the perpetrator puts on for the would-be victim and no doubt, their family. It also underscores why they didn’t make it as songwriters for others. One can’t see the Carpenters, Linda Ronstadt or Three Dog Night lining up for material like this.
It isn’t all crime. The flowing lilt of “Bad Sneakers,” helped by the now recognizable voice of McDonald in the background, helps the tale of the lifestyle of the rich and aimless go down smoothly.
At first glance, or even several listens in, “Rose Darling” sounds like a perfectly romantic plea for physical affection and consummation. But even with its nice harmonies and tasteful, fleeting Dean Parks solo, the feeling sinks in that knowing these guys, the song could also be about the leadup to a sad, resigned evening of self-pleasure.
If the man in “Bad Sneakers” is feeling he’s losing his grip, the one making his way through the keyboard-driven mood of “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” is more determined to keep moving forward(“I got this thing inside me/That’s got to find a place to hide me/I only know I must obey/This feeling I can’t explain away”).
There’s, dare I say it, a sense of hope, even if he doesn’t know how something good will manifest itself.
Not every song carries as much to be sussed out lyrically. “Your Gold Teeth II,” which is the lone song in which Dias makes an appearance, is a case in point, as it’s more about the jazzy, light rock swinging feel.
The con man in “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More” is much less successful than his “Black Friday” predecessor, settling for “driving like a fool out to Hackensack” and “drinking his dinner from a paper sack.” The song is more blatantly rock, working a groove that that Steely Dan would mine in slicker hit fashion on the title song they wrote for the 1978 movie FM.
Fagen was never going to be believable as a blues singer, but he certainly could play it, as the scenester snapshot “Chain Lightning” shows, aided and abetted by Derringer. It’s a rare straightforward moment for a band that didn’t always make them its stock-in-trade.
“Throw Back The Little Ones” ends the album more cryptically, where the criminality is vague, but the musical changeups (blaring horns here, loungey piano there) are the most interesting part.
While Katy Lied wasn’t quite as commercially successful as its predecessors, it hardly derailed Steely Dan’s career or deterred Becker and Fagen from their particularly detail-oriented artistic mindset. They kept it going on 1976’s The Royal Scam and the following year’s Aja, which many regard as their peak.
By the time of the long-delayed Gaucho in 1980, the cracks showed a little. Despite its highlights, the pursuit of perfection (46 drum takes by Porcaro for the title song alone) had a tendency to leave things too sterile. It felt like the air had been sucked out of the room, leaving A5 wagyu to turn into beef jerky.
That was it for the original peak run of Steely Dan, as the working relationship of the two leads wasn’t going as well, due in no small part to Becker’s drug habit, as he was still using at that point.
He cleaned up, which led to the two starting to work together here and co-producing there. The official reunion came in 1993, first with the return of touring. They eventually released a pair of albums in the next decade that, if not the Steely Dan of 20-plus years prior, didn’t sully the legacy.
Even if Becker and Fagen avoided discussing Katy Lied in the future, it certainly deserves better than to be the musical relative the two didn’t want around on holidays. Its lyrical sharpness and keen musicality allows it to hold its place proudly in the run of albums that built their devoted fanbases.
The destination in their first steps in life off the road, it’s still a welcome place to visit.
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