The mechanized hum of another world
By CHRIS FUJIWARA | August 29, 2006
Opening with “Bodhisattva” boded well, and it was funny to hear people cheer the line “Sweet things from Boston” in “Hey Nineteen,” but it wasn’t until the next song, “Josie,” that, 20 minutes into their nearly-two-hour set at the Tweeter Center last Sunday, Steely Dan found their hypnotic groove. Courting accusations of a ’70s-nostalgia wallow, keyboardist Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker played nothing but songs from the first seven albums and even brought along Michael McDonald (who will never shake Rick Moranis’s SCTV parody). Between offering a legitimate live experience and not messing up perfection, they had a fine line to walk, and they walked it.Singing “Home at Last” without the insistent “well the” on the two beats before the chorus (so memorable from the record), Fagen made the song intimate and forlorn. A menacing “Black Friday” drew a Fagen vocal that was at once bluesier and more clipped than his original reading on Katy Lied. Played slower than it was on the same album, a codeinated “Chain Lightning” added two superb choruses from the four-piece horn section. Fagen, repeating “I don’t mind” at the end of the coruscating “Green Earrings,” sounded scary and dead, an impression not dispelled by the way he said “Now we’re really havin’ fun” before introducing the next song, a radically rearranged “Dirty Work.”
“Show Biz Kids,” with McDonald taking the lead vocal, became a funk workout; “Do It Again” picked up a new set of altered chords that made it modernistic and collage-like. On the other hand, the band stuck to the script with “Peg,” down to the thumb-slap bass (by the excellent Freddie Washington), and two dark songs from The Royal Scam, “Don’t Take Me Alive” and “Kid Charlemagne.” Hearing Fagen snarl “All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face/They’ve joined the human race” in front of 12,000 people who had paid off their mortgage was a strange and resonant moment.
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