Steely Dan - Gaucho (1980) (LP) - €10,00

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Gaucho is the seventh studio album by the American rock band Steely Dan, released on November 21, 1980, by MCA Records. The sessions for Gaucho represent the band's typical penchant for studio perfectionism and obsessive recording technique. 

To record the album, the band used at least 42 different musicians, spent over a year in the studio, and far exceeded the original monetary advance given by the record label. 

In 1981, the album won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording and received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.

Even the melody of “Gaucho” just throws the singer’s questions back at him, jumping up the scale as his intonation rises, swooping down as his voice trails off in bewilderment, echoing and exaggerating his phrasing. Naturally, the guy gets a little hysterical as the game goes on, but not so much so that he can’t remember details — such as everything that freaky gaucho was wearing. To Steely Dan’s constantly talking heads, surfaces seem very clear. It’s only people who are indistinct: shadow figures, possibly hallucinations, always unknown quantities.

But sometimes that’s a godsend. In “Hey Nineteen,” the satire is straightforward enough. Between a thirty-five-year-old’s nostalgia and a nineteen-year-old’s nonchalance, there’s not a lot of rapport (“No we can’t talk at all”). Yet the composition ends in a blessedly fuzzy epiphany, with the generation gap bridged by Cuervo Gold and fine Columbian. The labels are important — Steely Dan’s characters seem to know the world exclusively through brand names. These characters are the true “heads”: solitarily confined intelligences who’ve had to order all their experience from a catalog. But oh, with the right blurring agents, not knowing can be a beautiful thing.

It’s always been a problem with Steely Dan to figure out who’s being ironic about whom: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s cynicism blasts pretty indiscriminately. In the past, the saxophone used to give you a clue. On Katy Lied, it played the warm substance to Dr. Wu’s sinister shadow. On Aja, it was Deacon Blue’s salvation, and the LP’s as well. But the horns on Gaucho don’t cut loose — they lick at the melody.

There is no release. Potentially passionate outbursts, like the guitars at the end of “Third World Man,” are damped down fast by cool, muted choruses. And whenever something wholly satisfying and seemingly spontaneous does slip out — e.g., the line about the Santa Ana winds in “Babylon Sisters” — you wait almost forever for it to be repeated.

After years of hibernation in the studio, the metamorphosis that began with The Royal Scam is complete. Steely Dan have perfected the aesthetic of the tease. Their sound is as slippery as their irony. Are those the trumpets of angels near the end of the title tune? Could that slouching gaucho, the one denied a room in the singer’s high-rise inn, be the new messiah? On Gaucho, the melodies are questions, too — long-winded, probing, unresolved.

There are people who will tell you that that’s not enough. That Steely Dan have fallen into the dread imitative fallacy, making a record as desolate as the self-absorbed paranoids they describe. But I don’t think so. For all their sneering sendups of the superficial, the current and the hip — their name-dropping characters, those Szechuan dumplings at Mr. Chow’s — they take a sensualist’s delight in names and surfaces. Donald Fagen’s tongue slithers over a phrase like “Brut and charisma,” tasting the syllables, appreciating the copywriter’s wit in the civilized machismo of the continental spelling. That appreciation of, and absorption in, detail lends substance to Steely Dan’s obsession with surfaces. And, accuracy being satire’s cutting edge, it also makes their songs funnier than their characters realize.

Side one

1.  Babylon Sisters - 5:51

2.  Hey Nineteen - 5:04

3.  Glamour Profession - 7:28

Side two

1.  Gaucho - 5:32

2.  Time Out Of Mind - 4:10

3.  My Rival - 4:30

4.  Third World Man - 5:14

Steely Dan

• Donald Fagen – lead vocals, backing vocals, synthesizer (2–6), electric piano (2–5), organ (6)
• Walter Becker – bass (2, 4, 5), guitar (2, 5), guitar solo (4

Additional musicians

• Randy Brecker – trumpet (1, 4, 5), flugelhorn (1, 6)
• Wayne Andre – trombone (6)
• Tom Scott – alto saxophone, clarinet (1); tenor saxophone (1, 3, 4, 6); Lyricon (3, 6), horn arrangement (3, 4, 6)
• David Sanborn – alto saxophone (5)
• Michael Brecker – tenor saxophone (3, 5, 6)
• Dave Tofani – tenor saxophone (5)
• Ronnie Cuber – baritone saxophone (5)
• Walter Kane – clarinet (1)
• George Marge – clarinet
• Rob Mounsey – piano (3–5), synthesizer (7), horn arrangement (1, 5)
• Don Grolnick – electric piano, Clavinet (1)
• Bill Tobin – electric piano (3)
• Pat Rebillot – electric piano (6)
• Joe Sample – electric piano (7)
• Hiram Bullock – guitar (6)
• Larry Carlton – lead guitar (7)
• Rick Derringer – guitar (6)
• Steve Khan – guitar (1, 3, 4, 7), lead guitar (6)
• Mark Knopfler – lead guitar (5)
• Hugh McCracken – guitars (2, 5)
• Chuck Rainey – bass (1, 7)
• Steve Gadd – drums (3, 6, 7), percussion (2)
• Anthony Jackson – bass (3, 6)
• Rick Marotta – drums (2, 5)
• Jeff Porcaro – drums (4)
• Bernard Purdie – drums (1)
• Errol "Crusher" Bennett – percussion (1, 4)
• Victor Feldman – percussion (2)
• Ralph MacDonald – percussion (3, 6)
• Nicholas Marrero – percussion (6)
• Michael McDonald (5), Patti Austin (1, 4, 5), Valerie Simpson (3–6), Frank Floyd (2, 3, 6), Diva Gray (1), Gordon Grody (1), Lani Groves (1), Lesley Miller (1, 3–5), Zachary Sanders (2, 3, 6), Toni Wine (1) – backing vocals

Production

• Producer: Gary Katz
• Executive producers: Paul Bishow, Roger Nichols
• Executive engineer: Roger Nichols
• Assistant engineers: John "Doc" Daugherty, Gerry Gabinelli, Craig Goetsch, Tom Greto, Barbara Isaak, Georgia Offrell, John Potoker, Linda Randazzo, Marti Robertson, Carla Bandini
• Production coordination: Jeff Fura, Margaret Goldfarb, Shannon Steckloff
• Mixing: Elliot Scheiner
• Coordination: Michael Etchart
• Sequencing: Roger Nichols, Wendel
• Tracking: Elliot Scheiner, Bill Schnee
• Mastering: Bob Ludwig
• Overdubs: Jerry Garszva, Roger Nichols
• Surround mix: Elliot Scheiner
• Rhythm arrangements: Paul Griffin, Don Grolnick, Rob Mounsey, Steely Dan
• Horn arrangements: Rob Mounsey, Tom Scott
• Piano technician: Don Farrar
• Special effects: Roger Nichols, Wendel
• Consultant: Daniel Levitin
• Art direction: Vartan, Suzanne Walsh
• Design: Michael Diehl, Suzanne Walsh
• Design assistant: John Tom Cohoe
• Photography: Rene Burri
• Photo research: Ryan Null
• Liner notes: Walter Becker, Donald Fagen, Frank Kafka (actually Franz Kafka)
• Liner note translation: Victor Di Suvero

Notes

Release:  1980

Format:  LP

Genre:  Jazz-fusion, Yacht rock

Label:  MCA Records

Catalog#   203192

Vinyl:  Excellent

Cover:  Excellent

Prijs: €10,00