Sunday Music – Reelin’ In The Years

Posted on Sun 10/25/2009 by TonyfromOz

Today’s music video is ‘Reelin’ In The Years’ from Steely Dan.

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This video was posted to You Tube by Valhalla70s

Steely Dan has been a loose coalition of many musicians grouped around the two main originators of the band Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Before they formed Steely Dan, they actually had a former band with Chevy Chase on drums. They became huge throughout the whole 70’s decade. As was typical of the wry, somewhat sarcastic and sometimes cutting nature of their vocals, the actual name of the band itself stemmed from that same wry outlook, naming the band Steely Dan after a sex toy from a book by William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch.

Their debut album, ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’ was a very popular album and two Top Ten Hits came from that album. The second album ‘Countdown To Ecstasy’ was not as commercially accepted, but the band came back with a vengeance with a series of albums stretching to the end of the decade, ‘Pretzel Logic’, ‘Katy Lied’, ‘The Royal Scam’, ‘Aja’, and then ‘Gaucho’.

During that time, the line up changes were frequent as band members came and went. This was mainly due to the fact the Becker and Fagen were more intent on studio work than live performances while other band members wanted to go ‘on the road’. Both Becker and Fagen did a lot of the singing on the studio albums, but rarely sang in live performances. Each song tells its own short story, with complex vocal structures and tight harmonies.

There was a hiatus for a while after ‘Gaucho’, and in 2000, Becker and Fagen again went into the studio and brought out the album ‘Two Against Nature’, proving they had lost absolutely nothing. That album was the surprise of 2000 and it earned them 4 Grammy Awards, including the most prestigious Grammy of all, Album Of The Year. The band was also inducted into the Rock Hall Of Fame, and overall, they have racked up sales of more than 30 million albums Worldwide.

Today’s song is ‘Reelin’ In The Years’ from Steely Dan’s first album, ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’. This 1973 clip of the song is from Bert Sugarman’s TV show ‘The Midnight Special’, and just have a look at the guy doing the introduction, at a time when even the men had ‘big hair’.