FEATURE:
Rose Darling
Steely Dan’s Katy Lied at Fifty
_________
THIS is an interesting anniversary…
IN THIS PHOTO: Walter Becker (right) and Donald Fagen photographed on 23rd November, 1975 in Los Angeles, California
to mark, as I am looking back at the original release of Steely Dan’s Katy Lied. Their fourth studio album was released on 1st March, 1975. I wanted to mark its fiftieth anniversary. Even though the 1975 album is extraordinary and features some of Steely Dan’s best songs, there are issues with the sound and mix. Not sounding as even, clean or polished as other albums from them. I shall come to that. A reissued version of the album is available now. You can read more about it here. It is an ultra-high quality version of the album that addresses some of the issues with the original. I hope that it gets more people listening to the album. Even if Walter Becker and Donald Fagen felt that it was one of their least favourite releases, I would suggest that it is not the group’s worst album. With ten tracks that are perfectly sequenced, Katy Lied is this overlooked masterpiece. It was the first album Steely Dan made after they stopped touring, as well as their first to feature backing vocals by Michael McDonald. I want to get to some features and reviews for Katy Lied. The first piece is from Backseat Mafia:
“The general consensus seems to be that Katy Lied is Becker and Fagen’s least favourite Steely Dan album, because it didn’t match their levels of studio perfectionism that they had achieved on their other albums. As it turns out that is exactly the reason that it is my favourite Steely Dan album. I’m a rock fan you see and I’m one of those rock fans that appreciates the feeling of how something is played rather than how well it is played. This is a slightly scruffier and more natural sounding Steely Dan album than the rest, it sounds organic rather than meticulously structured, and as such it seems a little more fallible. A little more human if you like.
Probably the reason that Becker and Fagen are so harsh on Katy Lied is that this was the first time that they had recorded a whole album with a significant amount of support from some of the top session musicians that the 70s had to offer, and so they were probably expecting the most note-perfect and slick Steely Dan album to date. Quite why this wasn’t achieved is anyone’s guess, but I’m glad they didn’t. The songs on Katy Lied are among my personal favourite Steely Dan numbers, particularly “Doctor Wu” and “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”. I also have a thing for “Bad Sneekers”, though quite why I have never really figured out.
At this point in their career Becker and Fagen were kings of smart-arse smug-bastard songwriting, with only 10cc able to match them when it came smart arrangements and Randy Newman was their only peer when it came intelligent and concise lyrics. Becker and Fagen’s faith in themselves should have been at an all time high, especially as they had abandoned touring and were concentrating all their efforts in the studio, but the comparatively rough-around-the-edges sound of this Steely Dan album just wasn’t what they were looking for, they wanted perfection and from now on nothing short of that would be good enough”.
When people think about Katy Lied, they often talk about the sound quality and its shortcomings – rather than the brilliant songwriting. Denny Dias, who played guitar on the album, wrote about some of the horrors that he witnessed when Katy Lied was being made and mixed. Something that has been addressed with the new vinyl reissue of a classic from 1975:
“Guitarist Denny Dias, writing for an early Steely Dan website, recounted the details of the dread incident, which may or may not have involved a mysterious mist straight out of John Carpenter’s The Fog. “Something happened during the remix of ‘Doctor Wu’ that scared the hell out of us,” Dias recollects in the essay, reproduced here with the author’s permission. It’s the kind of spooky story that will make any audiophile wonder whether ghosts hang around recording studios too.
Happy Halloween!
Katy and the Gremlin
By Denny Dias
She is lovely yes she’s sly, but we were ordinary guys. I still have a 30ips safety (copy made from the master tape) of Katy Lied that Roger Nichols signed in blood! Yes, Katy was a bug. She got to all of us. I remember trying to master the record by myself because no one else wanted to work on it any more. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
In 1975 we had great expectations and lots of enthusiasm. We had excellent musicians ready to perform in a state-of-the-art recording studio. We had our radical super hi-fi monitor system that consisted of electromagnetic flat panel Magneplanar speakers with three amplifiers and two subwoofers and active crossover tuned to the room with a real-time analyzer. They sounded great. The songs were great. The musicians were grateful. What could go wrong? Well, things happened. Some could be attributed to human error. Others could be blamed on mechanical failure. The rest will never be explained.
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. It was supposed to keep the air in the studio at a perfect 50 percent 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 actual recording went fairly well for the most part. There was, of course, the tambourine fiasco when Roger accidentally erased part of Victor Feldman’s track on “Rose Darling” (Roger had never done anything silly like that before or since), but the worse mistake didn’t become apparent until much later when it was time to transfer the record to vinyl.
Mixing was an absolute nightmare. Every song was mixed at least twice, and not because we were being fussy. In fact, we had mixed the entire record before we realized that there was a problem. We were using the new dbx noise reduction system, which was supposed to give us a better signal-to-noise ratio than Dolby, and for some reason the dbx units could no longer decode the mixes on tape. They sounded dull and lifeless, and no one could explain why. After all, all of the equipment had been properly aligned for each session. This was especially puzzling since each mix was played back immediately upon completion. How could the sound deteriorate so quickly? Even if there had been some awful mistake, it couldn’t have happened the same way twice and certainly not more than twice.
Several of us formed a contingent to storm dbx headquarters. We packed up the tapes and the dbx units, and Gary and Roger (and one or two others) boarded a plane to the East Coast. They confronted dbx and discovered that no one could fix it or explain it. The people at dbx built us a special pair of units with adjusting knobs that could alter the settings that are normally sealed inside at the factory. This too was a miserable failure. Could the tapes have been exposed to gamma rays? Why didn’t any one else using that studio have a problem? And why only the two-track mixes? The two-inch 24-track masters were still sounding good, so we decided to remix the entire record using Dolby.
I just dusted off my copy of the first mixes and gave them another listen. They still sound quite dull as expected, but I wanted to see if there was anything lost in the remix. Let me assure you that the new mixes are better in every case. I’ve heard some people describe the mixing process as a “thankless task,” but I think it’s more like a performance. It’s done with feeling, and depending on the mood of the day the result can vary quite a bit. Here are just a few differences that can be described with words:
• We were so impressed with the performance of Phil Woods on “Doctor Wu” that when it came time to fade out at the end of the song we couldn’t fade Phil. In the first mix, everything fades out except the saxophone!
• On “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More,” there is no special effect on the lead vocal. For the remix Roger implemented a manual phasing technique that required him to stand near a tape machine and slowly turn a dial by hand.
• On “Bad Sneakers” there is a drum bash that happens at least a half dozen times during the guitar solo. In the first mix it sounds kind of ordinary, but in the final mix Roger found a compressor that he could set to make it sound really special.
Something happened during the remix of “Doctor Wu” that scared the hell out of us. I mentioned that we were impressed with the performance of Phil Woods, so you can imagine how we felt when his saxophone suddenly sounded dull and lifeless! This required immediate investigation. The 24-track master was encoded with dbx so there was big tension while Roger did some troubleshooting. When he cleaned the heads on the tape machine the sound cleared up for a while. Then it got dull again. It seems that the tape head developed an irregularity on track 17 and was scraping bits of oxide off the tape! We decided to keep working on the mix, but we would avoid playing any part of the tape containing that saxophone. When everything else was ready, Roger cleaned the head once more, and we recorded the mix on two-track tape.
Then it came time to make master disks. Records that are re-released with the indication “direct from the master tape” are generally disappointing because here is the last chance for the people who made the record to correct any mistakes made during mixing. A little adjusting here and there can really make a record sparkle. “Katy Lied” needed more than a little adjustment. I remember the first time we brought it to Allen Zentz’s mastering facility, it became obvious that there were things on the tape that couldn’t be transferred to vinyl. Roger said, “I’m getting out of here,” and left before we knew what the problem was. Apparently, his use of condenser microphones in close proximity to the cymbals required too much acceleration for the needle to track.
The mastering process now became a desperate attempt to produce a vinyl disk that could be played on an average phonograph. We moved to Kendun Recorders, where they had more processing equipment. The speakers there were foreign to us, and all we could do was look at each other and shrug. The engineer suggested some compression, we shrugged and when we brought the disk to a more familiar setting it was awful. As I said, the job was left to me because no one else wanted to work on it any more. I brought my own speakers to Kendun and, after a week of disappointing attempts, Walter stepped in to produce the final release version. It was still disappointing, but it sounded better on more sound systems, so it was the better choice.
At this point it might be a good idea to read the back cover of the original record. There are some comments about bandwidth and transient response that should have new meaning now. However, the music is still on the tape, and the tape is well preserved. The sound of the digital CD version on Citizen is better than any vinyl by far. It’s interesting that after all these years there is finally a released version that sounds good”.
I am going to end with a review from Pitchfork that was published in 2019. Without a weak moment and some deeper cuts that Dan fans should check out – including Rose Darling, Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More and Your Gold Teeth II -, this is an album that still sounds stunning. It turns fifty on 1st March so I wanted to shine a light on it:
“It captures Steely Dan in the thick of it all, still hungry and energized by their early burst of creativity but not taking anything for granted. Before Katy Lied, Steely Dan were a rock band, but this is the record where they became something else.
In 1974, following the shows to support their third album Pretzel Logic, Fagen and Becker decided that they didn’t enjoy touring, didn’t make much money from it, and would prefer to focus on making records. It was like the Beatles after Revolver, except that Steely Dan weren’t especially huge and their lives weren’t especially crazy. More than anything, the shift was an outgrowth of their studio obsession. With no upcoming gigs, they no longer needed a steady band, and Steely Dan became officially what it already kinda was—Becker and Fagen and whatever musicians they deemed good enough to complete their vision.
Katy Lied lives at the midpoint of Steely Dan’s first act. Behind them were three records that were incrementally more sophisticated and less rock-centered. After this one were three increasingly finicky and obsessive albums that would find them reaching for a kind of perfection, albums that found them chronicling the decadence around them from the inside. Where they once wrote about the delightfully sleazy underbelly of life in America from a remove, they started to write more about what they saw around them. Katy Lied is the fulcrum in this progression—it’s messier, less sure of itself, besotted neither with youthful confidence nor veteran polish.
After the departure of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter following the dissolution of their touring unit, guitars moved a half-step into the background. These are songs for piano, jazzier and lighter, and the keyboards are higher in the mix. Listening to it brings to mind nearly-empty cocktail bars after the people with something to live for have all gone home and cabaret shows in seedy theaters. Fagen sings with gusto but if it’s possible for sweat to make a sound, then you could say he sounds a little sweaty. Almost all the drums were played precocious by a 20-year-old genius named Jeff Porcaro, who would become one of the world’s most in-demand session players, and there are many distinctive background vocals from Michael McDonald, who would become one of yacht rock’s most in-demand session singers.
The songs Becker and Fagen came up with are the usual mix of the funny, cynical, and cryptic, but here and there are moments of what seems to be actual sweetness. The brilliance of their songwriting is that they always aimed for complexity and never allowed themselves to be pinned down. Everything was up for negotiation, even when the lyrics were studded with clear meaning. “Black Friday” is a brilliant depiction of chaos, describing what it would be like to make your way out of town and cash your checks when the apocalypse hits. Fagen makes evil sound appealing, suggesting that it might be the only sane response to living in an insane world, but listen with the other ear and you hear the satire and even a kind of yearning from someone who might actually wish for a better world. Meanwhile, Becker plays the best guitar solo on the album, capturing the ragged edge of the moment.
Steely Dan made songs about the destructive force of male vanity that came from two people you knew were speaking from personal experience. They never hold themselves above their characters, but they don’t let them off the hook, either. On “Bad Sneakers,” we see a man bopping around the street near Radio City Music Hall like he owns the place. We feel what he feels but also see how ridiculous he looks, while McDonald’s background vocals suggest grace in his awkwardness, celebrating the energy that powers him even though his actions are laughable. “Rose Darling” is the third track in a row to mention money specifically, but on a more casual listen it sounds something like a pure love song. And then two cuts later, the A-side closes with “Dr. Wu.”
Lodged in the middle of the album that came in the middle of the decade and in the middle of Steely Dan’s decade-long, seven-album run is one of their very best songs, a weary and funny and specific and mysterious ode to longing and loss. “Dr. Wu” gave the album its title (“Katie lies/You can see it in her eyes”) and crystalizes its essential mood. One moment it’s about drugs, the next it’s about a love triangle, and then you’re not sure what’s next or even what’s real, and weaving through it all is the saxophone solo from Phil Woods, connecting dots between musical worlds both corny and elegant, from Billy Joel to Billy Strayhorn.
The characters flailing clumsily throughout Katy Lied are paralyzed by desires they aren’t introspective enough to understand, so all they can do is keep stumbling forward. “I got this thing inside me,” Fagen sings in a bridge on the late album highlight “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”, “I only know I must obey/This feeling I can't explain away.” Sometimes obeying those desires lead people to something ugly and inexcusable, as on “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a song about a guy who is almost certainly grooming kids for abuse. It’s a Todd Solondz film rendered in sound, and Fagen only shows us the lead-up, forcing us to assemble the pieces in our heads as he hides the crime behind the album’s cheeriest arrangement.
This collision between word and sound—in which the precise moral takeaway and is obscured even as the music makes it go down easy—made the band hard to trust. “The words, while frequently not easy to get the definite drift of, are almost always intriguing and often witty,” John Mendelsohn wrote in a review of Katy Lied in Rolling Stone. But a few paragraphs later he concluded: “Steely Dan’s music continues to strike me essentially as exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock.”
It sounds harsh but Mendelsohn captured how a lot of people think about Steely Dan, then and now. This band was always about asking questions instead of giving answers, and Katy Lied came out in a particular moment of uncertainty and confusion. The fact that Becker and Fagen themselves couldn’t bear to hear their own creation only deepens the mystery. They wanted desperately to render their tragically amusing scenes just so, and the sonic purity they’d been chasing would soon be theirs. But here they give failure a kind of twisted majesty”.
The incredible Katy Lied is fifty on 1st March. Steely Dan’s fourth studio album might not be viewed as highly as Pretzel Logic (1974) or Aja (1977), though it does deserve more love and attention than it has received through the years. In 2023, Far Out Magazine placed it third (out of nine studio albums). They said it is a “grand celebration of everything Steely Dan, even if it’s not the band in true innovation mode”. In 2022, Classic Rock ranked it in seventh. In 2015, Stereogum ranked Katy Lied fifth. This is what they noted: “The ways in which they seethed were rangy, often drenched in wit and charisma and disguised as paeans to self-reinvention and/or self-negation: the speculator in "Black Friday" who sees the next big imminent calamity as a good excuse to fuck around on some lost-weekend tomfoolery; the farewell to the presence of a career dirtbag booze-and-guns aficionado in "Daddy Don't Live In That New York City No More"; the roamer of "Any World (That I'm Welcome To)" who, amidst his optimistic daydreaming, lets slip the despair of "the one I come from.” But now-what ambivalence isn't exactly a grand step up from cynicism, and the seediness is hard to shake, with the predatory con-job m.o.s of teen-luring skin-flick screeners ("Everyone's Gone to The Movies") and outsiders playing undercover for cryptic rewards -- drugs? women? live gigs? ("Throw Back The Little Ones") -- all calling the shots. As for fan-favorite "Doctor Wu," an existential gem about friendship in the face of relationship woes, Fagen eventually revealed that the song was really about a love triangle -- between a woman, a man, and heroin”. With a new version of Katy Lied out on vinyl, it is the perfect time to embrace and digest a Steely Dan work of brilliance. One that turns fifty on 1st March. I really hope that it endures and it is discussed…
THROUGH the generations.