Steely Dan kind of imploded it seems around 1980 and not reuniting for many years. APP seemed to have just gone downhill after Eye in the Sky and finally imploded themselves but eventually reforming in a different way but without calling themselves APP. I like both  but am not familiar with the entire output of both bands so I think I will sit this one out and watch from the sidelines. ;)

   

I looked up that word but it doesn't make sense to me in the context of your sentence. Could you please either explain that better or use a different word? :P 

Uhhh . . . Steely Dan.

Well, my fave album between these bands is Tales of EAP, by a fair margin, and I'd say that I Robot and Pyramid are within the top 5, but overall, Steely Dan's discography is much better on average, since every 70's album of theirs (except Gaucho, for which I care not) fill the next 6 spots, with Royal Scam and Ecstasy inside the top 5 (did I make sense??)

Friendly card woud grab last spot in that combined top 10, so that SD 6 - APP 4

APP.

Still not a fan of Don Fagen's voice.

I explained in the first page the similarities. I don't need to re-post that do I?

You and I were both surprised then.

 

Steely Dan gets the vote!

hahah..

raising your uhhh's. and uh's.. with a big pfff.

like zero contest or actually.. much of any comparison.  APP is nice. and I enjoy their albums.  S.D was the total package however A decade of classic and critically acclaimed, commerically successful albums.. as well as being one of hte most respected groups by muso's for they were among the best.. if not THE best collections of musical talent ever put to vinyl..and the cherry on top.  Next to Lennon-McCartney.. perhaps the greatest songwriting duo popular music has ever seen.. or will see.

More form than substance. APP worked more on musical composition.

But I prefer Steely Dan, they have done music author.

The first Steely Dan are the most spontaneous ones.

I don't doubt SD's talent but they seemed to have the knack of arranging that made most of their songs stale before they finished playing the first time

^ Overworked?   Yeah that's fair, though I suspect they were just so seasoned by the time they started recording together that the seamless production probably couldn't be helped.   You can't go backward.

Well, from watching the classic albums docu about Aja and reading Ian Dury's writings about the band (he loved them), I think it is FAIR to say the duo did make the musicians play it again and again and again until they got what they wanted.  Apparently, the musicians had nicknamed Fagen "Mother" for being a real pain in the whatever.  So the spontaneity does get sucked out of the final recording.  HOWEVER, I don't hear any spontaneity in APP's music either and if anything, the grooves are half-dead if not totally.  Only the melodies and Woolfson's serene delivery thereof keep the music going (consequently, some of the more questionable guest vocals suffer in comparison).  Whereas, certainly CTE, Pretzel and Royal Scam (esp the last) don't lack in grooves; Green Earrings is practically roaring to my ears.

I have discussed about music a lot with Ken and I can say he is not very fond of ironic or snide music.  In that case, you can't really relate to the very soul of Steely Dan because it's pretty much drenched in irony save maybe a Deacon Blues.  Me, I love the irony and especially the way Fagen delivers it.  Some music is meant to make you laugh, not cry.  Apparently, Fagen and Becker would be laughing their ass off all the time at the lines they came up with and it's not hard to imagine that.

Sorry but that doesn't really make sense. If they were good at arranging how would that make their songs stale? 

Anyway, for the longest time my biggest problem with Steely Dan is they seemed "stuffy" to me for lack of a better term. Kind of like to music what Woody Allen was to movies. "Hey, I'm cool but you don't get it because you didn't go to college or read the books that intellectuals read" kind of thing. In other words pretentious in their outlook and presentation if not necessarily in the final product. It always seemed like they were a rock band who wished they could play jazz and be a jazz band but wanted instead the commercial success of a  rock band and to me that seemed pretentious and off putting. It wasn't until way later when I learned to just accept them for what they are which was a band making music they wanted to make which in a way was what prog was all about even though they weren't a prog band.

Funnily enough,  that reads like the typical Christgau criticism of prog rock.  That said, I do agree in that I was always curious why a band that didn't seem to like rock all that much nevertheless fitted their jazz elements into a rock format.   I later learnt that while they may not have liked straight up rock much, they did like blues a lot and that's where the rock element came in. 

I also don't think going commercial is necessarily bad and it's good for commercial music when a band like Steely Dan gets involved in it.

Exactly.  The core of their music is so strong that I have never bothered about the slightly commercial sound.  Just the solo of Kid Charlemagne alone is worth its weight in gold.

I totally understand where Ken is getting at

SD's tunes are extremely finely crafted (maybe too much so) that rare are the Dan tracks that feel fresh & spontaneous or even less as "immediate". Excitement is certainly not a feeling I'll feel when I listen to SD (or APP, FTM). SD thought their concept so thouroughly that any dust of improvication is automatically annihilated by their mercyless and pityless professionalism

In other words, , just like Toto (another studio-only band for the major part of their relevant discography, but SD is sooooooo much superior to them), they were just too professional.

rogerthat wrote: Exactly.  The core of their music is so strong that I have never bothered about the slightly commercial sound.  Just the solo of Kid Charlemagne alone is worth its weight in gold.

Mmmhhh!!!... SD's sonics are extremely commercial and IMHO was designed to be so from day 1... In some ways, SD and Toto were extremely cynical (make a fortune while not moving out of the studio and hit the road >> PS, I know SD did tour in their early days), but APP is not really much less so.

And yes, Charlemagne's guitar solo is the only really exciting part in their entire discography... and the reason why Royal Scam is my fave album of theirs.

=================

BTW, nowadays, I only own one album from either bands: Tales of EAP

At the height of my vinyl collection in the early, I owned  APP albums and only one SD album (TRS)

And if my taste & interest for APP has dwindled over the years, SD's has slightly grown as I "matured".

Actually, there are many, many wonderful leads of theirs across their stellar run of albums in the 70s.  From Royal Scam itself, Everything you did has Carlton in fine form again.  The sax lead in Cave of Altamira is another.  Sax again rules the day in the underrated Doctor Wu.  Your Gold Teeth II from Katy Lied has another brilliant guitar lead.  Aja is just full of amazing guitar solos with the exception of two tracks (Black Cow and Deacon Blues).

I am also surprised you don't find much spontaneity in Countdown to Ecstasy (assuming since you didn't mention anything about it) which was with a 'real band' still and does sound like one to me, especially My Old School. I do like that album very much but I am also glad they didn't make it their essential direction for the subsequent albums because there was plenty other middle of the road rock (can't envisage Dan ever going down an out and out hard rock route) but there's only one band that made albums like Aja.

Believe me, I was definitely not trying to sound like Robert Christgau. Jeez.  Anyway, I see it more of them trying to fit into pop music structure and not so much "rock" per se. I think maybe the first album is as close to regular rock as they got and it happens to be one of my favorites. Although, as I stated, I have grown to appreciate Steely Dan I do wish they had stretched out more and not stayed so close to the confines of pop music structure. I think the only exceptions were the title track to Aja and maybe some stuff from Countdown to Ecstacy. Other than that you could say they were a band who wanted to get played on the radio(and their plan worked obviously).

What I meant was that it was their arrangements that made the songs sound stale, so their "knack" was in achieving this undesirable quality.  But in rethinking, it's also the way they construct their "melodies".

Peg is a perfect example of that.  Listen to the chorus.  There is no hook, no warmth, just "I'm so clever but in a cool unemotional way" doodling, so yes I am in agreement about the stuffiness you mentioned. 

I have similar criticisms of most of Paul Simon's solo work.  He really wasn't a great singer so he sang nonchalantly or spoke.  No emotion anywhere, as if emotion is a bad thing.  That came to a head on the abominable Graceland

I was referring to the part where you called them pretentious for wanting to fit jazz into a commercial format.  That is a common complaint of prog from those critics who did not like it and Christgau was one of the most vocal.  

As for more pop than rock, other than large parts of Gaucho, I don't really agree.  Most of their songs have a riff and a guitar solo.  Other than rare exceptions like Carpenters' Goodbye To Love, how many pop songs from the 70s had a guitar solo or were so guitar oriented in any other way as Dan were?  I think it's the polish rather than the structure that makes them sound not-rock.

Here is a bit about SD's studio crafting, I was looking up some things about their times at The Village Recorder and found this in an interview with Dick LaPalm, former manager at The Village, regarding "Aja,"  

I wouldn't quite agree with that Madan.  The discussion is has taken off from a purely musical standpoint.. but ignores the 2nd half of what made S.D so special and why it does connect with many prog fans.. and was the daggar in the heart to the opposition to having them added here.

what keeps them from being considered by many to be rock.. it what I mentioned...  their songwriting writing skills. That in itself has two heads. Melody... and lyrics.  Melody is what it is... but the lyrics of S.D were most CERTAINLY not rock and roll... and were highly intellectual, thought provoking and highly topical.  None of that squeeze my lemon bullsh*t... real life stuff.. like the pervent living next door who shows dirty films to your kids when you are not around.  

the biggest problem critics always had with prog... was not the music.. it was about the overintellectualism of rock which has always had its roots in adolesence, and rebellion.. using ones fists or one's dick.. not one's brain.

those have everything to do with it. 

case in point...  care to name the bands which you believe met those same conditions.  Whose work resonated with music critics, and was able to appeal to listeners of all stripes those actually sell boatloads of albums, yet attain of a validity born of a near universal respect of the musician world.  

the reason why it means so much.. is you might find it very hard to come up with list of any length.  Many bands, we are talking big bands, can hit a couple, very VERY few can stake claim to all 3. 

Ah, but you are going in a different direction there because their lyrics then are even further removed from pop than rock.  At least rock had Dylan.  I just don't hear pop structure in Dan, unless by that is meant verse-chorus-bridge-chorus which is essentially, uh, rock too, with the only difference that the bridge often becomes a guitar solo (again often the case with Dan).

yeah that would be it for me as well...but Do it Again was so overplayed I don't really need to hear it ever ever again

Really? Can you count to two? 

Exactly what I feel.

When SD was added, I listened repeatedly their first five albums, and simply bore me.

If it was only for Tales, I Robot and Pyramids, APP would still be ahead by a country mile for me...Andrew Powell made anything sound great, even their later albums that were inferior.

Meh...Perfect word.

I don't think that's correct. They had hit songs before Aja. Rikki Don't Lose That Number, just to name one example, was huge. 

That could be. Maybe the couple of hits they had up to that point weren't enough for them. Aja certainly changed that. 

 

they had two major hits right from the start with their debut album (Do It Again & Reelin In The Years) well before Rikki (which dates from 74 and Pretzel) 

 

But yeah, with Aja, it seems like the whole album was top 40 hits on the FM & AM airwaves back then.

I always thought of APP as prog lite ...(similar to Supertramp.) Not dissing those bands but they never grabbed me in any way,  but the Dan had this sassy, clever, and cryptic thing going on lyrically and the music was simply great sophisticated rock with plenty of jazz fusion thrown in. But I can understand how a 'classic prog head' might not 'get them'.

;)

There is more musicality & lyrical wit in one of their songs than in a whole APP album.

Their music bears multiple repeats listenings and always rewards.

This is also very good. There are many copies on ebay. Well worth the approx $10 you will pay for it. 

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=classic+albums+steely+dan+aja&_sacat=11232&_sop=15" rel="nofollow - https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=classic+albums+steely+dan+aja&_sacat=11232&_sop=15

 

that's (in bold) the only thing I'll give you in that statement

 

Cos, sorry, but if you're not part of an initiated crowd, SD' lyrics are hard to decipher (Rollie's & Micky's respective  reviews are a lot of help, though), especially when compared to Floyd, Tull or SEBTP texts.

 

And I could easily spend the rest of my life never hearing a SD song again (or APP, FTM)

So up to and including Pyramid or later? Or just the first two? 

That about sums it all up......

Those who have a low tolerance for pop probably would not like much of their stuff from the eighties.  I guess maybe pyramid is sort of their And then there were three with Turn of a Friendly Card being their Duke. ;)

To my dying day, I will never understand the appeal of Steely Dan. Yes, they had a lot of catchy hits, but their ultra-devoted following just utterly mystifies me. If there's one quality that sets them apart from every other band of their time, it was the smug, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS that permeated everything they ever did. It was almost as if they were continuously, yet implicitly saying, "Aren't we cool? Your college professors have approved of our lyrics/attitude/swagger, so digging our music affirms your intelligence. And don't forget how subversive we are!"

The Alan Parsons Project, while far from perfect, created something far more significant and meaningful over their 10 (11, if you count Freudiana) albums. Like Steely Dan, they had their share of catchy hits and "lighter" moments. Yet they did so without becoming anyone's critical darlings while marching to the beat of their own drummer. Because of Parsons's engineering work on Dark Side of the Moon, the Project were often compared to Pink Floyd. That's stretching it just a bit, but maybe Pink Floyd without the anger and contempt. This comes from someone who considers Stereotomy (1986) to be their best album.

Same here! Have Steely Dan ever recorded a song as good as this? No, Don't Answer Me. 

Steely Dan is the best of both (or several) worlds. You get spectacular jazz fusion with great grooves performed by top notch players, great songs and storytelling... everything you can ask for. Don't Answer Me is very nice and pleasant but also a dime a dozen adult contemporary-pap*. Really nowhere near the artistic level of Steely Dan's exceptional run of classics 1972-1980.

*Alan Parsons Project has stronger material though.