composed by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen
The seemingly arrogant languor of this album pissed a lot of people off when it came out, but no one more than Becker and Fagen, themselves. It took them three years; Becker was out of commission with heroin and casualties; and Fagen was working through a fascination with disco as transmuted through Dr. Buzzard’s Original “Savannah” Band’s first (and only hit) album (which Fagen had publicly praised). But, as Fagen put it later, “We didn’t get lucky.” I think “Glamour Profession” alone argues otherwise, but, more to the point, the twiddley studio arrangements that seemed so sterile compared to the hookier Aja actually allowed Gaucho to convey a far less pleasant emotional reality with unusual precision. On this opening track, the bass clarinet underlines the feverishly disconnected images of a lotus-eating Los Angeles (largely Becker’s, I suspect), while the tense loping rhythm inches us toward the “point of no return” off-handedly tossed into the final verse. Not since Love’s Forever Changes has such an easy listen had so much death in it. I still prefer the thorny candor of Pretzel Logic, but I play this whenever I need to remember what a bitch being an adult can be.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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