Pretzel Logic poll

any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend, that Parker's Band is the best track here

Have to give it to Any Major Dude

One of the rare SDs too: vulnerable & optimistic

yeah it will probably win (or rikki)

Rikki

I can see by what you CARRY that you come from BARRYtown.

whyParker?
the opening solo guitar+the hooks+fagen's voice=rocks

I think "Rikki" is my favorite Steely Dan song period, so I voted for it. The pop on the drums, the guitar solo, the tone of Fagen's voice (in particular, on the last "and you could have a change of heart"---that one gets me right in the heart each time): this is a great song.

of the five Dan albums I own I think this is the one I listen to the least. Not quite sure why that is. Apart from Barrytown, Any Major Dude, and Rikki most of the songs have yet to leave an impression on me.

"this is the one I listen to the least"

i only listen to tracks 1-6 from this album,most times

charlie freak ftw

Night by Night fo Shiz

probably tied with Royal Scam for my least played (not counting '00 & '03 releases) as well. major dude, night by night, rikki, title track. decisions.

gotta be dude.

also real proud because i can kind of fake my way throught the acoustic gtr part on it

Gotta go with the title track, which is so underrated, especially considering that it was apparently the lead single from the album. Other than that, "Night By Night" is my favorite. This is probably the SD album I heard the most growing up, then rediscovered my dad's LP of it in high school when I got my first turntable, and would play a side of it before school a lot of mornings. Really one of my least favorite now, though possibly because it's the most familiar/boring to me now.

"East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" may not actually be the best thing on a generally great album, but it is unique, and very well-played, and as such my vote goes to that one.

we hear you're leading the poll, that's ok...

rikki, so strange, so beautiful, such an immensely perfect change from the verse into the chorus.

Pretzel Logic - the title track - is my favorite.

In particular, I love the juxtaposition of the bluesy verses with the glossy pop chorus. The dirty outro guitar is great too.

I don't really like anything else on Side 2 though.

The song Pretzel Logic is underrated, but I went for Parker's Band as somehow emblematic of SD as a whole

any major dude will fuck the world

I consider this the weakest of the Dan albums, I think, which for weird reasons (="through the eyes of the child I was seeing it on coffeetables in mid-seventies central California, it looked like it had to be incredible") makes me sad. It's got a good vibe, but they're transitioning between one thing and another. I like "any major dude," and "rikki"'s great of course. but "Barrytown" is really the only one on the record that really seems complete to me, and the venom of the lyric & vocal is - for the disc especially - exceptional.

"With a Gun".

Funny how for YEARS this was the consensus pick as their best album.

It's a very consistent album, the songs all sound of a piece with the possible exception of "East St Louis". That makes it hard to choose a stand-out.

Funny how for YEARS this was the consensus pick as their best album.

huh I was under the impression that the default rockist fave was Aja

Aja is not the rockist fave, it's just the best album ever

I think it's fair to say that Pretzel Logic was the consensus favorite up until Aja, highest P&J placing of their career and I think it might be the biggest seller of the first 5 albums, too.

that is just mystifying to me

countdown to ecstasy is many, many orders of magnitude better than PL

yeah, but "Rikki" was a much bigger single than "My Old School" (also there was no P&J the years the first 2 albums came out, so there's no telling where they would've placed).

"Rikki..." is their highest Top 40 hit (#4).

Not many orders of magnitude, but it is superior.

Christgau awarded PL an A+.

man, check out this alternate tracklist from wikipedia! I might have to listen to the album in this order, I think I like it better than the original LP running order:

Cassette version
Side 1
"Rikki Don't Lose That Number"
"Through With Buzz"
"Monkey In Your Soul"
"Any Major Dude Will Tell You"
"Parker's Band"
"Charlie Freak"

Side 2
"Barrytown"
"East St. Louis Toodle-Oo"
"With A Gun"
"Night By Night"
"Pretzel Logic"

yeah, this sounds much better with some of the shorter songs right up front and a more dramatic closer. I wonder if SD came up with that cassette running order or it was some random decision the label made.

The album is so front-loaded with steely goodness that the alternate running order is not a bad idea.

"Rikki" won my vote, with "Night by Night" in second and "Major Dude," "Barrytown" and "Pretzel" close behind.

theres something in the relative simplicity of PL, that makes it a weaker album than Ecstasy,Aja. less sophisticated and rich, more straightforward, no wonder it's their bigeest selling album. it's their most radio friendly one for sure.

"Dude"

actually, Aja is their biggest seller.

You people are crazy. PL is so full of hooks. Up there with Gaucho as my fave. I wanna vote for "Through with Buzz" cuz I'm afraid no-one else will.

I am shocked, shocked by the Pretzel Logic detractors. This is the best Steely Dan record.

Any Major Dude

My favourite is "Aja", but I love "Pretzel Logic" too.

there are a couple of songs here that come off like they're trying on a genre for size and not attempting to imbue it with the "dan" thing, which makes me think of them as slightly less interesting than most of their work, but still they're all good tracks and i can't really say this is my favorite or least favorite. like i said somewhere else, whichever SD album i'm listening to at the moment is usually my favorite SD album.

Barrytown

This is my fave SD album after the debut and for the same reasons Zeno lays out here (although the value judgment obv. differs):

theres something in the relative simplicity of PL, that makes it a weaker album than Ecstasy,Aja. less sophisticated and rich, more straightforward...it's their most radio friendly one for sure.

For me, Steely Dan songs are ostensibly about the varying levels of attention we lend to actual, on-the-radio popular music. As such, they necessarily work best when they're relatively simple, less sophisticated, more straightforward, and most radio friendly, i.e. here, on their most coldly pop long player.

I went with "Barrytown" because I feel so admonished when I pay close attention to it (that "we recall" in "in the beginning we recall that the world was hurled" is the Dan at their nastiest) and so airborne when I don't, floating on that absolutely gorgeous middle eight as it vaporizes into...

Have to give it to Any Major Dude

One of the rare SDs too: vulnerable & optimistic

But the "major dude" and "funky one" are soooooooo snarkalicious.

That alternate tracklist is fascinating. But it's a bit to Great Albumy. It NEEDS to end on something with a tossed-off feel like "Monkey In Your Soul" or "Through With Buzz."

a bit TOO

I remember when he stole my girl
Drug her all around the world

I think this is my least fave, as well. "night by night" is great, tho. voted for that.

yeah I've been like blasting "Night By Night" nonstop lately, the instrumental sections fucking cook.

I missed out on this, would have voted Any Major Dude so that settles that

i assumed "Hey Nineteen" would have been their biggest hit.

so did i. because it was on the radio EVERY MOTHERFUCKING 12 MINUTES in 1981.

So figure that "Rikki" got played every 11 minutes back in '74. (I remember hearing it quite regularly.)

I want to rep for "Pretzel Logic" because these lines are killing me right now:

"I have never met Napoleon, but I plan to find the time.
'Cause he looks so fine upon that hill;
They tell me he was lonely, he's lonely still.
Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago."

I was listening to this yesterday driving across the windswept steppe of central Kansas, on the freeway but totally fucking alone, and this line hits so hard, laying out human loneliness but mocking it too, both because the lonely person is just a statue, and because all your loneliness in the here and now is swept away too. I mean I get that this is a totally middlebrow sentiment put my inartful way, but in the song it's something a lot deeper.

Middlebrow at its best, then...like Amadeus. Lovely post.

The transition from the third to fourth line is a killer/

yes! It's that third to fourth line, in particular "still", suggesting ongoing loneliness, to "those days are gone forever". And now that I think about it a little more, the "I plan to find the time" in the first line is another mockery of the lonely ones whose time has passed.

"with a gun" is so undersung

easily "barrytown" here, though my dad would say "with a gun". my favorite of the dan records i'm very familiar with

your father knows best kev

ok listening to this on the way home with the pops and apparently he can't decide between "pretzel logic" and "with a gun"

this album is so fucking good.

"any major dude" is a key Dan song, one of the very best.

the chord change from "really will" to "tell you my friend" is like a big musical hug

i see the t shirt popping up all over the place these days. i gotta get me one.

http://www.oldskoolhooligans.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/h/o/hotpretzles_1.jpg

just as The Ramones retained the bare minimum for rock & roll, "Through With Buzz" is an attempt to determine the absolute bare essentials that would make a lush, relatively complex FM classic, e.g. verses and choruses of one line each. It's a fusion of AM and FM actually.

i think that makes "through with buzz" their guided by voices song actually. and i am very much in love with it.

Niiiiiiiiiiiight byyyyyyyyy niiiiiiiiiiiiight... badap-bap-ba-dap!

I don't know if I'd ever heard this album before, I don't remember most of the tracks anyway, but it's a weird one. It kicks off with what is possibly the most Steely Dan song ever but then there are lots of tracks which sound nothing like anything else they ever did, I mean, "Through With Buzz"?!? "Charlie Freak"? And the songs are so short and snappy. I like it!

I've never seen you looking so bad my funky one

xp Yeah, that's one reason why it may be my favorite Steely Dan album - those bits are hilariously strange and bizarre (and by design without ever feeling too self-conscious). They were always funny, but I don't think they ever came up with music that was a better match for that type of humor.

Probably should have gone with my original sentence for clarity, even though it's a bit wordy: I don't think they ever came up with music that was a better match than Pretzel Logic was for that type of humor.

OTM. They were at their peak "Dan" on this album.

This is my least favourite of the first four albums. Half of it is truly great, but "Night by Night", "With a Gun", "Parker's Band", "Through With Buzz" and "Monkey in Your Soul" are mawkish and confused.
They gave away two better songs, both of which could have fit the feel of the album very well, to Thomas Jefferson Kaye for his album First Grade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjiB2pEUHZ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S0Gc3oBDr8

"American Lovers" maybe but I don't know about "Jones," it feels like using that instead of "Monkey in Your Soul," "With a Gun," "Through with Buzz" etc. would be going for a soft CS&N type album. As much as I like "Rikki" and "Any Major Dude" (and they're probably my favorite tracks), as an album I like how Pretzel Logic is mostly the darker material exemplified by the title track.

Maybe if they arranged "Jones" differently, lyrically it's fine.

You don't find "Jones" dark? It's their most explicit addiction song. I suspect that Steely Dan would have darkened Kaye's arrangement, too.

...as you say!

This is my least favourite of the first four albums. Half of it is truly great, but "Night by Night", "With a Gun", "Parker's Band", "Through With Buzz" and "Monkey in Your Soul" are mawkish and confused.

Mawkish? "Through With Buzz"? In fact I don't think any of those songs are mawkish.

Song about spending the weekend smacked into a trance deemed mawkish by some

“night by night” is so dope

yeah wtf that song rules

the title track is my favorite these days

the chorus is dope xpost

mawkish

Sorry, wrong word! I think I meant "awkward". "Charlie Freak" is, in fact, mawkish, but I like it anyway.

"Night by Night" would be better with the Countdown to Ecstasy production, so much of their sound had been softened just one year later.

I balked at "mawkish" at first, but I just figured it was intended to mean something like unpleasant rather than sentimental.

"night by night" slick funkiness is part of the appeal, a smash radio hit from an alternate universe

The white funk is what I find oft-putting, a bit like "The Fez."

night by night is one of their best songs in the whole catalogue

i don't like "the fez," mostly because i prefer their smirking sex jokes to be a bit more subtle, and the groove is a bit more repetitive and sterile than usual

idk if i fully stand by my post in the c or d thread, but i'm still amused by it: Steely Dan C or D?

If you loved "Night By Night," check out The Royal Scam

yep precisely the problem

the opening of “night by night” with the fluttering horns is dazzling

"Throw Back the Little Ones" is a much better "let's be as weird as we can" song than "Through With Buzz".

... interesting that, I think, the only Dan songs with strings are the latter and "FM".

I used to have Pretzel Logic and Katy Lied back-to-back on the same CD. (Burned it from the old box set which had everything but divided up indifferently.) They don't sound like the same album but they complement each other really well - probably their most tuneful and song-oriented albums.

"throw back the little ones" is one of my very favorite dan songs

The only Dan songs with strings are "Through With Buzz" and "FM", and both of those string arrangements are arguably "in quotes": the first a silent-film melodrama pastiche, the other a nod to slick late-70s MOR.

“Through with Buzz” and “Monkey in Your Soul” are genuinely unsettling. Serial killer shit. But like in a New York shut-in kinda way. Like if Newman from Seinfeld were actually the Son of Sam. Or if “Taxi Driver” was a comedy. Great songs both.

Agreed.

Gawd “Night By Night” RULES

such an INTENSE song