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Anteater · 02-08-2015, 03:41 PM

Steely Dan - Aja (1977)

"On the counter / By your keys / Was a book of numbers / And your remedies. / One of these / Will surely screen out the sorrow / But where are you tomorrow...?"

A landmark in music production and one of the best albums ever made in any style or genre, Aja is the bona fide king of Californian smooth & yacht-friendly jazz rock. Hell, if I had a list somewhere of essential albums in regards to this thread, you'd find this sucker near or at the top. Like Thriller, The White Album and a couple of key others throughout the music industry's history, you get a taste of perfection here that will people will probably still be referencing and listening to long after I'm dead.

I won't spend too much time on the background of the album here, as I've already posted the Classic Albums documentary piece on it and the background of each song is extensively covered over on Wikipedia and other places. Among some of the more interesting factoids, however, include Jay Graydon being chosen over Eddie Van Halen and many other greats who auditioned for the guitar solo in 'Peg', which is also the song that got Michael McDonald his big breakout in the 'biz, which subsequently opened the door for him into The Doobie Brothers.

All that being said, Aja is usually the first thing that comes to mind for most people when it comes to albums that "sound realllllly fuckin' good on my $3000+ home theater". The dynamics, mixing and general instrumental clarity are phenomenal to an extent where even some of your favorite death and black metal musicians have probably studied it at one point.

That being said, if there was one chink in the armor of an album bordering on perfection, its the fact that I feel it was frontloaded. 'Black Cow' is a slippery groove-laden love-gone-wrong crime narrative, leading into the languid but pitch perfect title track where Wayne Shorter steals the show about five minutes in on tenor sax. You then get the rather telling 'Deacon Blues' [They got a name for the winners in the world /And I want a name when I lose], and of course there's 'Peg' and 'Josie' with their surreal choruses and horn sections right out of the Chicago playbook. It's 'Home At Last' and 'I Got The News' that prove to be the weakest of the seven cuts overall: the former has some killer Clavinet, and on other albums they'd be the best songs on the set...but here, they're sort of shoved awkwardly together on Side B and feel more like opening acts to 'Josie', which is a killer closer.

Aja would go Platinum faster than you could say Larry Carlton, outclassed in '77 on the charts only by Rumours (Fleetwood Mac) and The Stranger (Billy Joel), setting a new standard for the industry and proving that jazz-fusion and pop music weren't necessarily incompatible or that audiences were allergic to sophistication on their FM stations. Donald Fagen was a more biting lyricist and frontman than American audiences were typically exposed to, a loveable sleaze who sounded closer to Tom Waits than Tom Jones in the voice department. Still, his quips and near-nightmarish commentary on the more apathetic and demoralizing aspects of professional life in L.A. continues to resonate decades later.

The last of the "classic" Dan albums would come a few years later in the form of Gaucho, an album that took the obsessive perfectionism of Aja into even odder waters, but for all intents and purposes the yacht rock emperor was coronated in 1977...and still he reigns.