Masterpiece: Greatest Hits 1972-1978

[Today: An eye-opening collection from the pretty one... the magnificent one... Mr Steely Dan or whatever...]

Like most dumb Americans, I thought Steely Dan was a single person until a few months after I graduated college. It was a name that had always floated around my musical periphery, but until late-1992, I couldn’t have named a single Steely Dan song if you’d paid me a million dollars. During my poor, post-college phase, I shopped around Portland’s record store dollar bins, and my favorite spot for bargains was Django’s well-stocked 3-for-a-buck bin (or 33&1/3 cents apiece!).

One of my prime purchases there was Steely Dan’s Greatest Hits 1972-1978. I bought it on a whim, because again, it was a name I’d heard and was interested in learning more about. Plus that album cover throws off a lot of mystery, and by selecting a double album, I was stretching my entertainment dollar to Manute Bol proportions, paying just a bit more than 16 cents per platter.

Anyway, when I finally got around to playing this album, I was floored that all of these songs (most all of which I knew) came from a single group. This collection leads off with ‘Do It Again’ and I’m certain that I played that song about fifty times, over and over again, before I even made it to the second tune. And so on and so on, one familiar 70’s hit after another – ‘Reeling In The Years’ ‘Kid Charlemagne’ ‘Pretzel Logic’ ‘Doctor Wu’. These songs seemed more like the kind of short stories you’d read in the back of a pulp magazine than something from 70’s AM radio. Becker and Fagan also looked to me like a couple of nerdy bookworms, but their sound was often brass knuckles-tough – very intriguing.

Once I’d cut my teeth on this collection, I spent about ten bucks total buying all of the band’s studio albums – from Can’t Buy A Thrill right through to Gaucho (my personal favorite). And proceeded to… play… the living… shit… out of them. And why not? Each of their albums represent a different hue within the darkest side of American pop. It was all hard-boiled, cynical, and tuneful as could be. Even after all these years of listening, it still amazes me that this collection of songs could come from a single band – or a single man, for that matter.

Listen: Do It Again

Tags: Django's, Greatest Hits 1972-1978, Portland OR, Steely Dan