Steely Dan - Countdown To Ecstasy

9.0 - USA - 1973

The Dan's most rocking record, and, by their own reckoning, the only one recorded for and as a band (whereas later records would configure the "group" as the Fagen-Becker duo with a supporting cast of ringers and Denny Dias). As always, the tracks are nicely perfected. Hit single "My Old School", with its wry retelling of Becker and Fagen's college misadventures, is a particular highlight, and "Show Biz Kids" is awonderfully caustic evisceration of celebrity culture that seems even more relevant in today's social media age -- its sampling in the SFA's "The Man Don't Give A Fuck" is supremely apt even if the Dan's insistence on 95% if that track's royalties comes across as the churlishness of a dinosaur who doesn't understand sampling. Elsewhere, the concluding track, "King Of The World", pulls off the none-more-Dan trick of being a jaunty number about the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust. The only flaw, really, is the lead-off hit single "Bodhisattva" which just sounds like a trite rock and roll cliché.

Best quote from the reissue liner notes: "For a lark we sent the little piece of defective tape back to 3M. Months later, they sent us their report. The piece of tape had a tiny blister where the oxide had bubbled up from the backing. Inside this little blister was a drop of mustard. Some clot up in Minnesota had taken his sandwich into the room where the huge sheets of mylar were coated with oxide, taken a bite and squirted a tiny drop of mustard onto the mylar on the exact spot where we were going to put Denny's guitar part. In effect, our efforts had been sabotaged in advance by a careless worker. This was a theme that was to haunt us over and over in the years to come."