Steely meaning: 1. Like steel in colour: 2. Very strong and determined: 3. Like steel in color:. Steely Dan, American rock band that drew from the gamut of American musical styles to create some of the most intelligent and complex pop music of the 1970s. The band’s best-known songs included ‘Do It Again,’ ‘Reelin’ in the Years,’ and ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’ Learn more about its history and music.

Steely Dan ROGERS Tickets : Once upon a time, there were two boomers, Donald and Walter, who both grew up in slightly different parts of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. That being said, the neighborhoods they were from should not be confused with the Manhattan of Broadway shows, Wall Street, Greenwich Village and Harlem. The streets of their youth, though just a few miles from these wonders, were for the most part, placid and suburban.

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Nevertheless, like many folks back then, they were afflicted with a needling agitation just below the surface of everyday reality. This was, at least in part, because of the Cold War and the constant, looming threat of a global, nuclear holocaust.

Steely meaning: 1. Like steel in colour: 2. Very strong and determined: 3. Like steel in color:.
Steely definition: 1. Like steel in colour: 2. Very strong and determined: 3. Like steel in color:.

Unlike many schoolboys of their place and time – the late 1950s and early 1960s – Donald and Walter liked to read literary novels and listen to jazz records. Sports, not so much. On the other hand, like many American boys of their time, they had a healthy enthusiasm for baseball, baseball players and Topps bubble gum, the gum that came with baseball cards in each package: Flip ‘em, scale ‘em. trade ‘em, collect ‘em.

Music, though, was the thing. Before they were out of high school, Donald had taught himself jazz piano and Walter had become adept at both bass and guitar.

After meeting as students at Bard College in upstate New York, they began writing songs together on the piano in the common room of Walter’s dormitory. By then, in addition to jazz music, they had independently become enamoured of Chicago blues, soul music and, to an extent, the vibrant subculture that embraced the British Invasion, Bob Dylan and, as the Coen brothers have put it, the “new freedoms”. All these things, plus, for good or ill, a natural, shared drollery, were already apparent in their music and lyrics.

Witches get stitches pdf free download. When classmate Terence (Boona) Boylan scored an album contract with Columbia Records, he asked the boys to join his session band at Jerry Ragovoy’s midtown Manhattan studio, the Hit Factory, where they got to work with the legendary drummer Herb Lovelle and listen to the “Ragman” tell funny stories about his life in the music business.

In 1968, the duo found cheap digs in pre-gentrification Brooklyn, on President Street in Park Slope, where they sat around on ancient, shabby couches and plotted their assault on the music business. Amazingly, they soon got a gig touring as part of the backup band for early sixties hitmakers Jay and the Americans. The group had a production company, whatever that is, in the famous Brill Building, a once vibrant hive of songwriting talent that had now transitioned into a skeevy, decadent phase. Working with the group on the road and in the studio, the boys got to hear Jay and the fellows tell some even raunchier, funnier stories about the music business and also meet some actual gangsters.

One of the Americans, Kenny Vance, managed to place one of their tunes on a Barbara Streisand album that featured songs by the new, groovy generation of writers. Donald and Walter also played sessions for Vance’s Brooklyn crony Gary Katz. By the early seventies, they had worked with many top NYC session pros including drummer Buddy Saltzman, bassist Chuck Rainey, pianists Paul Griffin and Artie Butler, and guitarists Elliot Randall, Dom Troiano, Ricky Zehringer (later Derringer) and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. The boys had come a long way from lower middle class suburbia to an even lower, hustler-class existence in the now extinct and forgotten commercial studio culture of midtown.

In 1971, with the city degenerating into a vile Gomorrah of debt and porn, the lads relocated to sunny Los Angeles where Gary Katz, now an A&R man for ABC/Dunhill Records, had secured them a sweet though under-paid job as staff songwriters for the label, one of the last to employ house writers to develop material for the artists on the roster. At that time, ABC was concentrating on “singles acts” aimed at the pre-teen and teen markets with artists such as Tommy Roe, The Grass Roots and Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds. Officially tasked with writing pop tunes for these artists, Donald and Walter secretly began to the assemble a band to act as a vehicle for their “special material”. With Katz’s help, they began to import players from the east coast.

Steely Dan

Early in 1972, the original Steely Dan group – guitarist Denny Dias, guitarist Jeff Baxter, drummer Jim Hodder, and with Donald and Walter on keyboards and bass respectively – started rehearsing in an unfinished wing of the ABC building. Several weeks later, the group began recording their first album at Village Recorders in West Hollywood with engineer Roger Nichols, whose previous job was as a “pile walker” at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. After being informed that ABC expected the group to tour extensively upon the album’s completion, Donald, whose intermittent panic disorder precluded him from fronting a band at that time, insisted on finding another singer/frontman, and David Palmer was added to the group.

Can’t Buy A Thrill, released that November, hit right out of the box, yielding two hit singles, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In The Years”, which featured a notable solo by guest guitarist Elliot Randall. A third single, “Dirty Work”, with a vocal by David Palmer, also got a lot of airplay. Steely Dan was on its way to fame and, after a few more years of penury and forced servitude, fortune.

Steely Dan toured behind Can’t Buy A Thrill and the following two albums, Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic, both in the States and Britain. The band, now with Donald as the lead vocalist, expanded to include second drummer Jeff Porcaro, keyboardist/vocalist Michael McDonald and percussionist/vocalist Royce Jones. They were actually starting to sound pretty good.

Nevertheless, by 1974, Donald and Walter decided they’d had enough of watching the more aggressive, dipsomaniacal band members lure intoxicated young ladies up to their motel rooms apres show, and enough of the road in general for the time being. They made a decision to retreat to the studio to concentrate on composing and recording. Naturally, the other band members wanted to work, and so departed for greener pastures.

Donald and Walter, who had already started adding studio players on the Pretzel Logic sessions, began to write with certain musicians in mind. Over the next five years, four more albums were released: Katy Lied (’75), The Royal Scam (’76), Aja (’77) and Gaucho (’80). This last was completed after the boys, now heart-sick and drained by the shallow excesses of Tinsel Town, moved back home to New York City.

Sadly, the harsh vicissitudes of the artist’s life had already taken its toll, and the boys decided to part ways. Walter moved to the island of Maui and became, in his words, “a gentleman avocado rancher and self-styled critic of the contemporary scene”. Donald wrote and recorded his first solo album, The Nightfly (1982), which was a critical and popular hit. Then, he more or less cracked up.

But not for long. During the ‘80s, Donald worked on a variety of projects. He wrote tunes for artists including Diana Ross, the Yellowjackets, the Manhattan Transfer and Jennifer Warnes; co-produced the soundtrack album for Bob Telson’s off-Broadway musical The Gospel At Colonus (1988); and composed, along with Rob Mounsey, the score for the film Bright Lights Big City (1988). He also began writing essays for various publications, including a regular column on film music for Premiere Magazine.

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Meanwhile, Walter produced albums for the China Crisis, Rickie Lee Jones (The Horses, 1989) and a number of jazz artists including Bob Sheppard, John Beasley, Andy Laverne, Jeff Beale, Marty Krystall, The Lost Tribe, LeeAnn Ledgerwood, and Dave Kikoski.

In early 1991, Donald and his future wife Libby Titus created the New York Rock & Soul Revue, featuring a revolving group of artists including Charles Brown, Phoebe Snow, Chuck Jackson, Boz Scaggs, Cindy Lauper, Bob Dorough, Annie Ross, Michael McDonald and Rascals alumni Eddie & David Brigati. Walter, who had reunited with Donald in 1986,