Turntable Tuesday! Steely Dan’s “Gaucho”

It’s Turntable Tuesday because life is too short not to listen to great music! Turn that TV off! Sometimes you need the musical try at perfection to brighten your day. Sometimes you need the best vinyl to try out new speakers. Maybe you just need a shot of Quervo gold to mellow your long day at the office but whatever your need this Turntable Tuesday edition can help! Your Rx is on the way.

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It was late fall in the deep south and still fairly warm. I would like to start this blog post with a date but one doesn’t come to me. I have been a fan of Steely Dan since they made that first TV appearance on a Friday night when I was in probably 5th grade. I remember that grade because of the town I was living in which was Meridian, Mississippi. I was watching the program Don Kirchner’s “Rock Concert” at a neighbor’s house down the street. Steely Dan comes on with “Reeling in the Years” and I was hooked until this day. I always will be. As time passed and I bought every album Steely Dan would release I would record my vinyl to cassette and wear the tapes out on my road trips when I started driving. I was always waiting for the next album and usually would buy them on the first day they released. I can even remember the day I bought the Steely Dan masterpiece “Aja” which came out in 1977. By the time 1980 came around I was living in North Carolina and back in college again for what was a seemingly endless journey where I enjoyed the workload. I was working enough outside of school to buy some audio gear and of course I had to take a Steely Dan vinyl to audition any gear I bought. I remember very well taking a new copy of ‘Gaucho” which is the one on the piano stool to an audio store to try out a pair of Bose 301 speakers in 1981. I bought the speakers and the record was incredible when cranked up on the Bose 301 product. As a side note I wore those speakers out and after well over 30 years the only thing not really functioning was the “grill cloth” as we called it or the foam that was degrading from age. I called Bose and asked for replacement foam! The guy on the other end of the phone up in Framingham, Massachusetts was very nice and he said sorry we don’t stock that foam anymore BUT we will take your speakers in on trade and sell you a replacement pair at a substantial discount. Not only was that a major deal they also sent me a box and paid shipping back! So now I have new Bose 301s to replace my decades old models and I am guessing they have mine in the museum up there. Bose has taken care of me on several occasions with headphones and other things. They are a great company and I encourage you to try them out if you haven’t. They understand backing their great products. They are a great company.

1980. “Gaucho” is released and I buy my copy on vinyl and cd. There are seven tracks of amazing music in this collection. When you dig into the background of what was going on at this time given the recording technology you can seriously shake your head and wonder how this product sounds like it does in 2021. I am going to dig into the details of the endless amount of work that went into these tracks and all about the 42 or so musicians as well as a long list of engineers that toiled on this project to deliver the goods. An interesting bit of trivia on this album is the $150,000 “new at that time” drum machine that took many lines of 8085 machine language code to produce even a cymbal sound! I am not going to repeat a bunch of easily found background from the internet and use my personal take on this album from living with it for 40 years or so. I also want to add in some flavor to the conversation by telling you some of the things I have experienced at Steely Dan tours for many years. I went to every Steely Dan tour I could once they resumed touring in the last two decades. The sound on stage was always amazing and the music delivers. I will tell you a quick story from the very first time I went to see Steely Dan and although I could go did through my catalog of ticket stubs I will spare that detail. I can tell you this. There was a well known ticket scalper working with Ticketmaster 20 years ago in Austin, Texas. I developed a relationship with them and they kept my credit card on file with my drivers license. I can tell you that when certain shows came to the state I was in my favorite seat usually in Charlotte in the fourth row center on the aisle. Scalping was illegal in North Carolina but not in Texas…One phone call, a Federal Express shipment, and bingo… I saw many Steely Dan shows there as well as the Raleigh area with some of the recent ones at Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh and The Music Factory Amphitheater in Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. I hope I can get back to see the band play again even if Walter is gone now the music is still living on and I think about him even as I write these words tonight. There was nothing like hearing that predictable Walter Becker rant as he stepped out of the shadows of the stage to take a rare microphone for the night to introduce a song that comes from the album “Gaucho” called “Hey Nineteen.”

Join me on the podcast for this weeks episode as I talk all about the “Gaucho” album, many details, and maybe a stray personal live music story or two along the way. Until next time I’ll see you, down the road.