Steely Dan - 2007 - The Best Of Steely Dan

 

Geffen Records – B0007497-02  308.25MB FLAC

The Best of Steely Dan: The Millennium Collection is exactly what its title promises: a compact entry point into the band’s catalog rather than an argument about what the absolute definitive Steely Dan compilation should be. Released in 2007 as part of Universal’s 20th Century Masters series, it reduces a complicated, obsessively produced career to ten tracks: “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Only a Fool Would Say That,” “My Old School,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Any World (That I’m Welcome To),” “Deacon Blues,” “Josie,” “Time Out of Mind,” and “Third World Man.” The selection moves from the early, more obviously rock-oriented records through the increasingly polished studio world of Aja and Gaucho, and the sequence makes one thing obvious very quickly: Steely Dan changed dramatically without ever becoming difficult to identify.

The early songs still carry more of the shape of a working band. “Do It Again” has the Latin-leaning pulse, electric sitar, and circular groove that made it such a strange hit in the first place. “Reelin’ in the Years” is harder, brighter, and built around Elliott Randall’s guitar work, while “Only a Fool Would Say That” is looser and lighter on the surface than the band’s later material. Even here, though, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are already writing from an angle. Their characters tend to be compromised, deluded, arrogant, unlucky, or quietly ridiculous. The hooks are direct. The people inside them usually are not.

“My Old School” is one of the best examples of Steely Dan’s ability to make bitterness sound celebratory. Horns, guitar, and a huge chorus turn resentment into something almost triumphant. The song’s relation to Bard College and the drug bust that inspired it is well known, but the recording works even if the biography disappears. It feels like somebody winning an argument several years after the argument ended.

“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” marks the point where the surface becomes smoother without becoming emotionally simpler. The opening keyboard figure, relaxed rhythm, and Fagen’s conversational vocal all make the song easy to enter, but the lyric never settles into one completely stable position. The collection is good at showing how Steely Dan repeatedly used elegant arrangements as camouflage for uncertainty.

“Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” is a less obvious compilation choice and therefore one of the more useful ones. It gives the disc a little room away from the songs everybody already knows and makes the movement toward the later studio albums less abrupt. By the time “Deacon Blues” arrives, the difference in scale is enormous. The production is deeper, the chords are more elaborate, the horn writing is richer, and the entire performance has the strange polished spaciousness associated with Aja. The song’s fantasy of failure, reinvention, and choosing a doomed identity remains one of the clearest examples of Becker and Fagen making aspiration sound glamorous and pathetic at the same time.

“Josie” follows with one of the band’s tightest grooves. Walter Becker takes the guitar solo, and the track is almost absurdly controlled. Nothing feels casual, but it never sounds stiff. That balance is part of Steely Dan’s reputation and also part of why people either become fascinated by them or annoyed by them. The band’s perfectionism is audible. Whether that precision feels seductive or sterile depends heavily on the listener.

“Time Out of Mind” brings in Mark Knopfler for the guitar solo and moves into the Gaucho era, where the studio process had become nearly obsessive. The song sounds relaxed while being built from an extraordinary amount of control. That contradiction is almost the Steely Dan method in miniature: expensive, clean surfaces carrying lyrics full of narcotics, damaged people, compromised desire, and social decay.

“Third World Man” closes the collection in a much darker register. Larry Carlton’s guitar work and the slow, suspended arrangement give the song a haunted quality that is very different from the sarcasm of “My Old School” or the easy momentum of “Josie.” Ending here is smarter than ending with another familiar radio hit. The disc gradually moves from a band making unusually sophisticated rock songs toward a studio project capable of making a song feel almost physically airless.

The Oakland Public Library copy pictured here belongs to the Golden Gate Branch rather than the Main Library copies that appear elsewhere in this group of posts. That change is visible immediately. The front carries a large OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, CALIF / GOLDEN GATE sticker in the upper-right corner and a smaller GGATE / CD / ROCK / STEELY classification label over Walter Becker’s torso. The underlying cover photograph shows Becker and Fagen in sunglasses, looking less like rock stars than two people who have already decided they are not going to explain themselves.

The inside photograph is especially good. Becker and Fagen stand against a wood-paneled wall, both wearing tinted glasses, with the casual awkwardness of people who were never particularly interested in selling the fantasy of a conventional band. The disc beside them is almost aggressively bland in comparison, using the standardized 20th Century Masters design. The Golden Gate library hub sticker lands directly in the center and makes the industrial compilation branding feel even more institutional.

The back cover is where the object becomes busiest. A photograph of Fagen and Becker sitting in front of a large studio console occupies most of the panel, which is fitting for a band whose mythology is inseparable from recording studios and obsessive production. Over that image sits a large Oakland Public Library barcode. Along the right side, the FBI anti-piracy warning occupies another vertical strip, complete with its own badge and barcode. The object is therefore covered in overlapping systems of ownership and control: commercial compilation, copyright warning, public-library property, branch identification, and circulation barcode.

That combination is funny in a particularly Steely Dan way. The music itself is famous for microscopic control over performance and recording, while this copy has spent its later life being passed around by strangers. Becker and Fagen could control which take, which drummer, which guitarist, which chord voicing, which mix. They could not control who eventually borrowed the CD from the Golden Gate Branch or what scratches appeared on the jewel case.

As a compilation, The Millennium Collection is too small to explain Steely Dan completely. There is no “Kid Charlemagne,” no “Peg,” no “Aja,” no “Babylon Sisters,” and no “Hey Nineteen.” That is the inevitable weakness of squeezing this catalog into ten tracks. But it does provide a clean arc from the early records into the more controlled later work, and the choices are strong enough that the omissions become invitations rather than fatal problems.

For someone approaching Steely Dan casually, this is a useful little object. For someone already deep into the catalog, it is more interesting as a particular arrangement of familiar material and, in this case, as an Oakland Public Library artifact. The Golden Gate stickers, hub label, anti-piracy warning, barcode, wear, and scratches have all accumulated around music that was originally engineered with almost pathological attention to detail.

The songs remain immaculate.

The package does not.

— ChatGPT