/random/ - random

The first time I heard Steely Dan, I thought to myself: “So this is what rock music is supposed to sound like.”

It was when I was back in college — back in “My Old School” (which was SUNY Purchase, and not, as with Steely Dan, Bard College).

Freshman year was “Reelin’ in the Years,” (yes, that is Bill Cosby in the video). “Reelin’ in the Years” was a complex piece of music. It uses almost every note of the chromatic scale. You can forget about those three note rock songs; this was the real deal.

Sophomore year was “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”

Senior year, and my first year in rabbinical school was “Doctor Wu,” from the “Katy Lied” album.

Every song on that album spoke to me, or sang to me.

Musically, that is.

Lyrically? Steely Dan famously populated their songs people on the margins of society: drug dealers (“Kid Charlemagne”); perverts (“Cousin Dupree”), (“Hey Nineteen”); Charles Whitman sniper in the bell tower types (“Don’t Take Me Alive”), and various losers and wannabes.

The music soared (for sophistication and complexity, there is nothing quite like “Aja”), but the lyrics were snarky and dark.

That is why the death of Walter Becker hit so many of us so hard. Walter, along with Donald Fagen, comprised Steely Dan.

For decades, they were legends — not only for their music, but for the fact that they created it in virtual solitude, along with studio musicians, and rarely touring (which in fact only happened in later years).

I feel blessed to have been able to see Donald Fagen in concert, just last month. It was an amazing experience that I still carry inside my head.

Wait a second, you are saying. This isn’t Rolling Stone, which has been filled with encomiums to Becker’s craft. This is supposed be a column about merchants and Judaism.

For years, there has been speculation about whether or not Walter Becker was merchantish.

Some have said “yes.” Most likely not; at least, that is what Mark Oppenheimer wrote last year in Tablet.

What about Donald Fagen?

Totally merchantish. In fact, his parents helped found a synagogue in New Jersey.

More than this. Are you ready?

Fagen has been known to use aliases — among them, Illinois Elohainu.

Get it?

Only a former Hebrew school cutup could invent something like that.

So, beyond the mysterious Illinois Elohainu, was there anything “merchantish” about Steely Dan’s music?

If there is, it would need to be in a different category of merchantish from Bob Dylan, or Matisyahu, or the late Leonard Cohen, or Peter Himmelman, or Simon and Garfunkel. In many of their songs, you can find merchantish elements — sometimes right out there, but often, much more subtle.

So, what was “merchantish” about Steely Dan’s music?

It is merchantish as metaphor. It is the kind of marginality that we encounter in their lyrics — of people who are totally on the outskirts, looking in.

Take, for example, the song “Gaucho.” The narrator is perturbed by the presence of a gaucho — an Argentinian cowboy — at some kind of social event.

Just when I say

‘Boy we can’t miss

You are golden’

Then you do this

You say this guy is so cool

Snapping his fingers like a fool

One more expensive kiss-off

Who do you think I am

Lord I know you’re a special friend

But you don’t seem to understand

We got heavy rollers

I think you should know

Try again tomorrow

Can’t you see they’re laughing at me

Get rid off him

I don’t care what you do at home

Would you care to explain

Who is the gaucho amigo,

Why is he standing

In your spangled leather poncho

And your elevator shoes

Bodacious cowboys

Such as your friend

Will never be welcome here

High in the Custerdome

One commentator notes:

It’s obvious that the singer is berating an acquaintance (a roommate or other such cohabitant?) for his association with some poseur, a lightweight, freeloading hipster fraud who’s long overstayed his welcome. Beyond that, though, we know nothing. Who are these characters? What are the circumstances of their involvement? What is the Custerdome?…

The gaucho character lives in galut — in exile from his homeland. He is the social outsider, the one whom we would like to avoid, the parvenu — and the Custerdome, whatever it is, is an exclusive club, at which the gaucho will never be welcome.

Rest in peace, Walter Becker.