Blue Monday
March 3, 2008
Lately I’ve had the third Steely Dan album, Pretzel Logic, in heavy rotation on the car stereo. It’s my favorite Steely Dan record, even though it doesn’t have my favorite Steely Dan songs: “My Old School,” “Black Friday” and “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” are elsewhere in the catalogue. But Pretzel Logic is the record that turned me into a jazzbo. Not only does the album feature a perfectly acceptable version of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” that sent me off to buy my first Duke collection, but there’s a song that name-checks Charlie Parker, and the piano riff that supports “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was copped from Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father.” For a teenager in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s, Pretzel Logic was like a friendly clerk at a good record store offering tips on where to start some jazz exploration.
The title tune is a slow blues vamp supporting lyrics that bring to mind Bob Dylan in one of his playfully surrealistic modes:
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
‘Cause he looks so fine upon that hill
They tell me he was lonely, he’s lonely still
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago, oh yeah
Maybe it’s the cover photo of a pretzel vendor on a snowy day, but Pretzel Logic plays in my mind as the most New Yawkish of the Steely Dan canon. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen subsequently tipped their sound toward Los Angeles and the cocktail lounge end of the jazz spectrum. I know there are lots of people who consider Aja the perfect Steely Dan record, but the first three albums — Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstacy and Pretzel Logic — are the ones I still play.
