Street-Legal

In an interview with Guitar Magazine back in March of 2000, the title track to the Two Against Nature album came up, resulting in this interchange:

Guitar.com: On the track “Two Against Nature,” is that played bass or sampled bass?

Walter Becker: No, that is a bass synth that is being triggered by a sequence. That is the only track where we actually used a sequence for anything.

Guitar.com: Did you use all the machine elements in that track to confer a play on words?

Walter Becker: Partially. We had a percussion sequence that we liked. There was something good about it, something a little hokey about it, something sort of like Hollywood session players. There used to be an album I loved called Daktari. It was all this African-sounding stuff played by Hollywood session players. And it was a great take on African music because it sounded vaguely African but there was…

This is the title track from the Gaucho album, but with only bass, drums, vocals, lead guitar and the occasional synth stab.

One of the things I think is so fundamental to understanding the music of Steely Dan / Walter Becker / Donald Fagen and their reputation for being exceptionally hard on drummers and exceptionally picky with bass players and bass parts, is the time and effort they spent getting the bass and drums right. I think of the drummer and the bass player like the pitcher and catcher on a baseball team. The battery. They aren't the whole team, but without the right player at each position, the rest of the team isn't going to fare very well. In this case, both the bass and lead guitar parts are Walter, and you can really get a sense of Walter's bass chops and compositional style around the Gaucho era. There…

June 10 2008: New York City

WB and I walking along in the Upper East Side of manhattan, mid-afternoon, wondering if anyone was across town at Tower (the closest brick-and-mortar music store still open by that point) looking at CM in the racks, maybe picking one up...feeling good...

...approaching an intersection of 72nd and Madison -- a car pulls up to the light, windows rolled down, someone waving something from inside the car - we look over, it's a young couple waving their copy of CM, apparently just purchased an hour before. Big grins and thumbs up exchanged all around as the light changed....

what are the odds of that, honey?

He was so proud of CM -- he was especially grateful for Larry, and especially especially grateful for "his" musicians, who "played their little hearts out" for him on this album, all of them so engaged and invested and…

I'm putting this under street legal because it certainly was public ,sanctioned material that changed every couple of years . I am speaking of course of the storied Becker Bathroom Break ( or Becker Beer Break to some.)

Lutz put up a fine, wide-ranging post over in "Everything Else" which included some opinions about a few of Walter's more frequent tunes , Walter tried a wide variety of them over the year,s, including tunes from Whack and even "Our Lawn". Thus the Becker Bathroom Break was born . The combo of a non-DF noise presenting something no one had ever heard before was just a bridge too far for many DanFans and so would commence a depressing exodus of concert-goers choking the aisles headed for the john or the bar.

But I digress.

Last night I thought of two songs in particular that I believe broke the pattern. One wa…