Pretzel Logic: Salty, Twisted Steely Dan

Come Meet the Squonk!

For a few decades, if you asked me what my favorite album was, I might have said, Pretzel Logic. This is Steely Dan that was born in its prime, stepping up into greatness. It lives in the past and the future at the same time, with two songs built from early Walter Becker and Donald Fagen songwriting demos. (They are: "Barrytown" and "Parker's Band").

There are foreshadowings of the elegant 1977 jazz mutant megaseller Aja, which more casual and uninformed listeners perceived as "smooth jazz," an understandable error made possible by such an obsession with audio perfection that Aja might have been recorded in a plush android warehouse. ("Android Warehouse" is the name of one of the early Becker-Fagen demo songs and the title of one of those off-label collections.)

Short (34 minutes), song-focused yet with some room to riff and solo, there are no false moves on Pretzel Logic. And what would Pretzel Logic mean? I've always thought: salty but twisted, like Steely Dan itself.  

It is not a jazz album, though it is often about jazz. The one cover song, a unicorn in the Steely Dan catalog, is Duke Ellington and Bubber Milley's "East St. Louis Toodle-oo." This early Ellington tune debuted in 1926. One might have thought that Fagen and Becker might have been more attracted to the flip side, "Hop Head," 1920s slang for a druggie. You get all hopped hop just listening Ellington's version. But Steely Dan's head music never gets too hopped up. If anything, my idea of the Steely Dan drug of choice, which has yet to be invented, would be called "3M" or "Three Em": a combo of morphine, marijuana, and mescaline, totally non-addictive, no come down. Walter, wherever he is, is probably working on the formula now.

I don't think of "East Louis Toodle-oo" as a jazz performance: I think of it as a rock band covering a jazz song, when jazz was the pop music of its time. The most accurate description of how Steely Dan's guitarists imitated the muted trumpet first played by Milley and the trombone solo of many versions recorded by Ellington bands is Becker playing guitar through a voice box (the trumpet) and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter doing the trombone part on pedal-steel guitar.

The album opens (after a few exploratory musical grunts) with Horace Silver's "Song for my Father". . . I mean, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," whose famed intro piano riff is poached from Silver's song, and turned into one of the great anxious love songs of the 1970s. It is Steely Dan's top-charting single, hitting No. 4 on the Billboard pop chart in June 1974.  On free-form or public radio, it was and is a no-brainer of a segue, in either direction.

But to me, the greater accomplishment is whatever degree of airplay was grabbed by "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," which may be their greatest individual song. In a year (1974) when singles still mattered, on a label (ABC-Dunhill) to which singles really mattered, it strikes me as lunacy that "Any Major Dude" was the B-side of the hit single "Rikki," when it should have been the follow-up.

It's possible the label, already crazed from Fagen and Becker's unwillingness to put conventional lyrics to can't-miss hit melodies, saw no hope selling radio on a song whose second verse begins: "Have you seen a squonk's tears, well look at mine/People on the street have all seen better times." Second part, no problem. But what was that music director in Indianapolis or Dallas going to make of the squonk reference?

And what's a major dude in a minor world? That part is easy. Think chords: Major chords and minor chords, and how they are deployed with or against those words when they are sung. At least that was always my theory, especially before I could really tell a minor chord (sad) from a major chord (happy). But in deep discussions at the time with some musician friends who bought willingly and happily into my proselytizing for Steely Dan, it made sense to them, so that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

I'm also sticking with where I think they got the idea for a "squonk's tears" in the first place. You could look it up in a dictionary, and read that it's a mythical creature said to inhabit forests in a part of Pennsylvania. But Fagen and Becker, being pop culture nuts and presumably au courant with the latest in Italian giallo and horror, they might have gotten the notion from maestro Mario Bava's 1971 Bay of Blood.

THE SQUONK

Bay of Blood is set in and around a decaying but valuable piece of property owned by a countess in a wheelchair, who is murdered in the first minutes of the movie. As is her killer. A crooked real estate agent Franco (Chris Avram) is summoned to try and scam title to the property. We see him post-coitus with his private secretary Laura (Anna Maria Rosati). A rain storm has just ended. She wants to cuddle, of course, but he shushes her.

Franco: "Can't you hear it calling?"

Laura: "What's that?"

Franco: "The squonk. You surprise me that a girl of your intelligence doesn't know what a squonk is. It's an animal covered with moles, which provides it with the perfect camouflage. I think it's exclusively female, but it's easy to find, because it it is very vain and never stops whining. And when it's captured, it dissolves into tears." In case it is unclear that Franco is referring to the lovely Laura, he continues. "Other characteristics of the squonk are sullenness, suspiciousness, and possessiveness. Very inconvenient qualities for a personal secretary." The guy is a real shit, but that's okay: almost nobody survives the bay of blood.

Again, the lyric might have been too challenging for 1974 pop radio. But I would have loved to have heard Nina Simone give it a try. I'll bet she would have nailed it for the ages. Where was Walter and Donald's song plugger when they needed one?

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And what about the title song? "Pretzel Logic" is another rare bird for Steely Dan: the verses are straight blues, though the lyrics typically absurdist: Verses are about wanting to tour the "Southland, in a traveling minstrel show"; wanting to meet Napoleon (not "Napoleon in rags"). But the oblique humor of Fagen and Becker is evident in the bridge to a big chorus that I suspect reflects their disdain for performing, and the freak show that was the state of rock staging.

I stepped up on the platform, the man gave me the news/He said you must be joking son, where did you get those shoes?

Get it? Platform shoes. All the rage back in 1973-1974. Could you see Fagen or Becker in platform shoes? Not alive, and not dead either. They got off the stage semi-permanently after this record.

There's more than a little nostalgia in this song, as well as in the impeccably redone demos, "Parker's Band" and "Barrytown." "Parker's Band" is also a rock song about a jazz group: His eminence of the Royal Roost bebop club, and later Birdland, Charlie "Bird" Parker.

Richard Carlin, the author of a fascinating biography of music business legendary wiseguy Morris Levy, describes a brochure about bebop handed out at the Roost, the first of many Manhattan clubs to feature the music, as depicted in the red-highlighted excerpt that appeared in All About Jazz. "If you feel something when you hear be-bop, you feel something because something is there. Dig?"­­­­­­­­­­ And: "The dominant, tonic, and the other diatonic chords in most cases are altered by adding the 6th, 9th, 11th and 13th. . ." Steely Dan's most dedicated (or more musically knowledgeable than I am) talk about whether these bop motifs appear in some form in "Parker's Band." I couldn't tell you, and it doesn't matter whether these "Easter eggs," as we call them now, exist in "Parker's Band." I just dig the tune.

Sweet "Barrytown," I'm afraid, is a return to Bard College country, a discussion we may have exhausted in many of the other Steely Dan essays and articles in the archives here. (I attended Bard for a year in captivity with Becker and Fagen, and that experience filtered my understanding and appreciation of some of the more oblique references in their earlier songs. There was a lot of material to work, with people and places, at that place and time.) Suffice to say that Barrytown is a hamlet in the town of Red Hook in Dutchess County, NY. Red Hook is the closest actual town with a commercial district closest to the Bard campus. As a hippie-looking kid I avoided it, except for the honest mechanics who fixed my parents cars when I borrowed and broke them. There was a war going on, and entitled hippie Bardians and blue collar townies didn't mix well. Now, many Bard grads are the Red Hook townies, and I'm sure there are book stores and good coffee shops. At least there were last time I was there, which happened a long time ago, oh no.

A few songs evoke more movies. "With a Gun" is a cautionary tale from a typical western. The robust "Night by Night" reminds me of the 1949 film Thieves' Highway directed by Jules Dassin, a kind of San Francisco mirror to his 1948 Naked City, classic New York noir. In Thieves' Highway, Richard Conte is a World War II vet whose farmer father was brutalized by the corrupt gangster played by Lee J. Cobb, who rules the San Francisco produce market as his own cruel fiefdom. "When the dawn patrol got to tell you twice/They're going to do it with a shotgun," makes me think of the beatings and betrayals Conte's character takes at the hands of Cobb's goons.

I no longer think that "Through with Buzz" was about me and one of two brief relationships I had during this period, one who called her temporary crushes her "buzz" of the moment, the other who used "buzz" as a noun, verb, or adjective, depending on the situation. Both the jumpy "Monkey in Your Soul" and "Charlie Freak," which close the album (in reverse order) seem to be about addiction. They can be particularly dangerous as earworms: The more they stick in your head, the louder they get.

"Charlie Freak" is about the guilt that goes with giving a junkie a few dollars for a fix that results in an overdose, feeling cursed after underpaying for the man's gold ring. "Monkey in Your Soul" seems about a woman with a monkey on her back ("I got one but you want four"), whose needs distract the songwriter from his business: "Won't you turn that bebop down, I can't hear my heartbeat/Where's that fatback chord I found?"

On Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan is still a band, but they've gleefully (read the album notes to the 1999 CD remaster) discovered the phrase of which they wrote, "were no grander words in the English language": Studio musician. The two drum punch of Jim Gordon and Jeff Porcaro propels "Parker's Band."

But for guys who were so specific about their needs from the studio musicians they fetishized, the credits for both my LP and CD version don't attribute their contributions track by track, only  as special thanks (Michael Omartian, David Paich, Chuck Rainey and others) at the end. What I want to know the most is what the Louisiana-born, veteran L.A. saxophone session man Plas Johnson played on. Johnson appeared on dozens of singles and albums through many decades beginning in the 1950s. But the thing I'm pretty sure I know about Plas Johnson is that he is the cat from outer space, who played rock 'n' roll horn through the hole in his head, in Sheb Wooley's "The Purple People Eater."

Wayne Robins has two essays in the anthology Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion edited by Barney Hoskyns (Rock’s Back Pages/Constable Books). They are from Creem (1974) and the Los Angeles Times (2000). Explore the Critical Conditions archives for more.