Steely Dan - 1995 - Alive In America

Giant Records – 9 24634-2  411.63MB FLAC

Alive in America is Steely Dan returning to the stage after nearly two decades away from regular touring and discovering that the old songs can survive contact with a very different band. Released in 1995, the album draws from performances recorded during the 1993 and 1994 reunion tours, the first sustained Steely Dan live appearances since 1974. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had spent the classic 1970s period increasingly treating the studio as the real instrument, hiring elite session musicians, refining arrangements, and eventually abandoning touring altogether. Alive in America reverses that logic. The material is no longer being perfected in isolation. It is being rebuilt in front of audiences by a large ensemble that includes Tom Barney on bass, Warren Bernhardt on keyboards, Dennis Chambers and Peter Erskine on drums, Georg Wadenius and Drew Zingg on guitar, Bill Ware on vibes and percussion, a horn section, and three backing vocalists. Fagen produced the album, and the performances were selected from dates across 1993 and 1994 rather than presented as one complete concert. 

The set list is almost perversely good: “Babylon Sisters,” “Green Earrings,” “Bodhisattva,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Josie,” Walter Becker’s “Book of Liars,” “Peg,” “Third World Man,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Sign in Stranger,” and “Aja.” It is not a chronological survey and it is not quite a greatest-hits package. The sequencing favors songs that can stretch, breathe, and show off the touring band’s precision. Several of the performances run longer than their studio counterparts, but the extra time is rarely wasted on loose jamming. Steely Dan’s live looseness is still suspiciously organized. 

“Babylon Sisters” is the perfect opener because it already contains one of the band’s strangest combinations of seduction and unease. The live version moves with a broad, luxurious pulse, the backing singers carrying the chorus while the rhythm section keeps everything heavy but controlled. Fagen’s voice is older and rougher than on Gaucho, which actually helps. The studio Steely Dan voice can sound almost clinically detached; here there is more wear in it, more evidence that a human being has been hauling these songs around for years.

“Green Earrings” immediately gives the band more room to attack. The groove is harder and more obviously live, with guitar and drums taking on a muscularity that the studio version keeps under glass. “Bodhisattva” pushes that further. It has always been one of Steely Dan’s most aggressive early songs, and here it becomes a showcase for the touring band’s ability to hit hard without losing the obsessive precision that defines the group. Dennis Chambers in particular gives the 1994 material a physical force that keeps the arrangements from becoming polite jazz-rock museum pieces. 

“Reelin’ in the Years” is interesting because it is probably one of the songs least in need of rehabilitation. The original is already canonical, and the famous Elliott Randall guitar solo hangs over every later performance. Alive in America does not try to beat that recording at its own game. Instead, the song is widened and made more muscular, almost as if the band is acknowledging that the tune has become public property and simply playing it through the machinery they now have.

“Josie” benefits enormously from the live rhythm section. The song’s original groove is already famously slippery, but here the bass and drums give it more weight while preserving the off-center feel. “Book of Liars” then shifts the album’s personality by giving Walter Becker the lead vocal. The song came from Becker’s 1994 solo album 11 Tracks of Whack, and its inclusion keeps Alive in America from becoming a simple Steely Dan retrospective. This reunion period was also about Fagen and Becker bringing their separate post-Dan lives back into contact. Becker’s dry, almost conversational delivery gives the middle of the record a different temperature.

“Peg” is compact by comparison, bright and immediately recognizable, while “Third World Man” slows the album into one of its darkest stretches. The latter had originally appeared on Gaucho, and the live version preserves its exhausted, suspended atmosphere without trying to make it more crowd-friendly. That is one of the strengths of Alive in America. The band does not treat every song as a vehicle for applause. Some of them are allowed to remain strange.

“Kid Charlemagne” is one of the obvious high points. The song’s combination of cynicism, groove, and tightly controlled guitar work already contains almost everything Steely Dan does well, and the live arrangement lets the band lean harder into the rhythm without losing the narrative. “Sign in Stranger” becomes another extended ensemble piece, opening enough space for the horns, keyboards, and rhythm section to make the song feel less like a preserved 1970s artifact and more like something actively being rebuilt.

Then there is “Aja,” nine minutes long and completely comfortable taking up that much space. It is the natural closer because the song was always bigger than ordinary rock structure, and the live band has the personnel to make its internal architecture visible. Saxophones, drums, keyboards, guitar, backing voices, and Fagen’s vocal all move through a piece that can feel both meticulously designed and slightly unstable. The album does not end with a sentimental goodbye. It ends with Steely Dan demonstrating that the complicated thing they once built in studios can now be carried onto a stage.

The Oakland Public Library copy adds another history to the record. The front cover is already bizarre: a mummy-like figure carrying an unconscious or reclining woman, photographed in black and white under the Steely Dan logo and the red Alive in America title. The image feels half pulp-horror poster, half joke, which is appropriate for a band that has always distrusted straightforward emotional presentation. The library’s CD / ROCK / STEELY classification sticker and pink handwritten “R” sit directly over the lower-left corner, turning the artwork into another piece of working public property.

Inside, the left panel uses contact-sheet style concert photography, repeated frames of Fagen, Becker, keyboards, guitars, drums, and stage equipment. The repetition is almost forensic. These are not glamorous hero shots so much as evidence that the band was physically there, actually playing in front of people again. Beside it, the disc is bright red with black stage scaffolding and musician silhouettes. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker and barcode strip are placed directly on top, making the disc look less like a collectible and more like something that has entered service.

The back cover is especially effective. A huge desert landscape surrounds an outdoor concert stage, making the human activity at the bottom of the image look tiny. The track list floats over the open terrain while a large Oakland Public Library barcode occupies the upper-right corner. The stage appears almost temporary against the geography, which suits a live album assembled from performances that happened in different cities and then disappeared. What remains is the recording.

The album’s title is a little funny in retrospect. Alive in America sounds like an announcement that Steely Dan has returned from the dead, which is more or less what the 1993 and 1994 tours represented to listeners who had never had the chance to see them. The band had become famous partly by refusing to behave like a normal touring rock group. Then, after years apart, Becker and Fagen returned with an enormous, highly trained ensemble and proved that these studio-built songs could survive outside the studio.

This library copy pushes that survival even further. The performances were recorded in the early 1990s, assembled into a 1995 CD, entered the Oakland Public Library system, stickered, numbered, handled, borrowed, returned, and eventually photographed again. Steely Dan called the album Alive in America. The object has spent the decades since proving the title.

— ChatGPT