Through With Buzz: Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic Turns 50

Any major dude will tell you it’s a fool’s game to try and suss out the most humane Steely Dan album, but they know all about fools’ games.

Their third outing, Pretzel Logic, leads with a big one, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” which went all the way to number four on the Hot 100 in 1974, the most successful pop hit from the most Burroughsian soft-rockers ever. They were transgressive jazzbos who previously just missed the top ten with one of the all-time diss tracks, “Reelin’ in the Years” (“You’ve been telling me you’re a genius since you were 17 / In all the time I’ve known you I still don’t know what you mean”) and hit number six with their very first song, “Do It Again.” It’s about a lowlife of such little consequence they won’t even hang him for his crime. So you can only imagine how charming their idea of a love song might be.

AUDIO: The Horace Silver Quintet “Song For My Father”

Except it may be less transgressive five decades later. The ambiguously gendered name Rikki and the giveaway “you tell yourself you’re not my kind / But you don’t even know your mind” may scan less as pushy dudes trying to brainwash a woman (“you don’t want to call nobody else”) than a gay narrator trying to convince this person he sees them, too. It could be neither, or both, but either way, this being a Steely Dan song, if there’s a happy ending, they lose interest before we find out. But I’m pretty sure Rikki doesn’t get executed or told off, so for once the tenor doesn’t deviate too much from the laid-back groove they tap into, swiped from Horace Silver’s 1965 “Song for My Father.” In fact, this is the rare Steely Dan album where the character behind the record’s darkest moment expresses sorrow, even regret. The narrator of “Charlie Freak” rips off the title addict for his gold ring and tries to give it back to be buried with after the junkie’s body “died in 15 ways.”

But again, a fool’s game. Just because “Barrytown” doesn’t completely twist the knife on its territorial protagonists and “Night by Night” is a relatively cookie-cutter depiction of the dog-eat-dog world they love to draw from mostly just means that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were maybe, just maybe, more interested in pleasure than pain for once. For these guys, that means lots and lots of jazz. So on the last album they made before boycotting touring, they get to the heart of why they’re doing this: their love of complex composition and immaculate performance. You know, the diametric opposite of having to knock it out of the park every night. Freed from that grind, they can set Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s squawking wah guitar loose on Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” like it’s a trumpet, and catalog their misgivings with the road on “Parker’s Band,” with parts inspired by actual heads from Bird himself.

I really call Pretzel Logic their humane album because it’s Steely Dan’s rootsiest, and the way to humanity with these guys is through their love of music. It’s their shortest record, always a plus for jazzbos and conceptuals alike, and the longest tune is the hit, with a small bounty of sub-three-minute goodies toward the end, not to mention the 92-second double entendre “Through With Buzz,” signaling the moment they decided the pressures of their industry no longer called the shots.

And I wasn’t kidding about the roots, especially the second half: “Pretzel Logic” is their straightest blues-rock, followed by the minor-key boogie-strum of “With a Gun,” which could be either Fairport Convention or Creedence, the even more baroque-folk shuffle of “Charlie Freak,” and the flat groove of “Monkey in Your Soul” is decorated with horns Otis Redding could fuck with. With this kind of pop-rock friendliness and nothing too sadistic underneath, Pretzel Logic is almost too sensible. It’s one of the best Steely Dan albums but I probably prefer Countdown to Ecstasy or something where they show off a bit. Of course, a rock band surviving a troika of Ellington/Silver/Parker bites is impressive in itself, there’s just not quite a preponderance of head-exploding chord changes like “Razor Boy” or any one track that will make your jaw drop like the guitar takeoff on “Bodhisattva.”

So true to its title, Pretzel Logic ends up a most quixotic victory: a surprisingly smooth listen from the band that tried their best to sabotage easy listening. A joke they’d surely appreciate, and their last great album before their perfectionism (enter Aja) and perversity (the bros really get off on being dirty old men) came full flower.

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Ted Miller

Ted Miller is trying to collect the head of every Guns ‘n Roses’ guitarist for his rec room. He currently has three.

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