Steely Dan – Black Friday

As stock market indices continue to tumble, here come 70s intellectual rock-jazzers Steely Dan with a typically opaque lyric about a guy who escapes a stock market crash (“watching the grey men dive from the 14th floor”) by fleeing to the town of Muswellbrook in NSW, Australia.

I think I’ve seen some Dan on this blog before (“The Fez”, maybe?) I have to say that I do think they were better as a straight-ahead (if sophisticated) rock’n’roll outfit in the early seventies than the weird, pretentious, pop-jazz fusion studio ensemble that they became later in the decade with albums like Aja and Gaucho. “Black Friday” is from their 4th album Katy Lied and presents the group at a transitional stage; this is the only real ‘rocker’ on the album. I dig the west coast vocal harmonies and the fact that pretty much every instrument is going through a phaser effect.

The phasing is accentuated by the fact that the master tapes were processed through a (then) state-of-the-art DBX noise reduction system which went wrong – and they were never able to recover the original mix. Nowadays of course you’d just hit ‘undo’ on the digital audio workstation and the damage would be undone. But it wasn’t like that in 1975. An object lesson in how not to use the latest technology!

If you want a phaser pedal to get your own Steely Dan sound, you could do a lot worse than check out this Youtube ‘shoot-out’ of 4 different pedals, courtesy of ‘gearmanndude’ – an (unseen) narrator who sounds a bit like Jack Black, and indeed many on the web think he is Jack Black. I’m sceptical myself, but it would explain how he can afford dozens of pedals every week, to test:

So far, I’ve been unable to find any tests of faulty DBX noise reduction equipment on the web, but I keep looking.

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