Review Summary: "It's perfection and grace. It's the smile on my face"
Gaucho is a miserable album. No one involved it its creation enjoyed being a part of it. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s perfectionist tendencies were pushed to the absolute breaking point, making their session musicians perform countless takes of their songs, much more than they have on previous releases. Fagen especially, considering Becker had been struck by a cab late in the album’s production and couldn’t be in the studio. At one point, a song known as “The Second Arrangement” was accidentally deleted by an assistant engineer. In fact, a lot of songs that were recorded during these sessions did not show up on the final cut of
Gaucho. The songs that did make the album are dreary and stillborn, especially compared to the songs that didn’t make the cut.
Gaucho is by far Steely Dan’s most lifeless album. Yet despite the album’s hollowness, or perhaps because of it,
Gaucho is one of the most captivating accomplishments in their entire career.
The tone is set with the turgid “Babylon Sisters,” with drummer Bernard Purdie’s iconic Purdie Shuffle toned down to a limp instead of the energetic boogie he conjured on previous Steely Dan albums. This song in particular was labored over in the studio, with Donald Fagen producing over 270 versions of the track until it perfect in his eyes, with over 50 of them dedicated to getting the fade out just right. The next song is “Hey Nineteen,” a song about an older gentleman dating a much younger woman to take advantage of her inexperience with sexual relationships; a type of guy most women are awfully familiar with. Don’t worry, because all his attempts to schmooze her backfire due to their generational gap. His one chance at feeling young again done in by his plan’s own premise. Despite their previous album,
Aja, being their most critically and commercially successful release, you could sense that Becker and Fagen related to these last gasps of vitality.
The characters that inhabit Steely Dan songs are often cynical and repulsive, yet always have a glimmer of relatability that make them captivating despite themselves. The drug dealer in “Glamour Profession,” however, is the one character in Steely Dan’s discography that could be considered enviable. The song details the many adventures the dealer experience with their celebrity clients. They take more pleasure in getting glimpses of fame rather than live a life in the spotlight. It is fitting that “Glamour Profession” is by far the most buoyant song on the album, with Anthony Jackson’s rollicking bass line giving the song a steady yet restless momentum that contrasts nicely compared to the rest of the album’s glum apathy. Much like the dealer observing the luxurious life of people on the verge of having a
Gaucho moment, “Glamour Profession” overlooks the misery that encompasses
Gaucho from a distance. It serves as a beacon of light amongst a foggy coast. The one moment where anyone on
Gaucho, from the written characters to the real-life musicians, were enjoying themselves at all.
Side B begins with the title track, which details a gay man’s jealousy over his boyfriend flirting with a foolish, finger-snapping hustler. The song’s luscious instrumentation and production distract from how much of an insecure dork the narrator is, worried that his friends will look down upon him for mingling with a low-class sex worker. Considering how eager the boyfriend is to mess around with the hustler as opposed to his partner, you can sense that their relationship before this spat was held together by strained wires. You can’t feel too bad for the narrator, as his solution for dealing with the hustler is to dump him by the freeway, cavalier to the fact that he is homeless. A bodacious cowboy kicked out of the Custerdome yet again. The track is smooth, acidic, sarcastic, resentful, humorous, and somber all at the same time. In other words, it’s the ultimate Steely Dan song.
If the first half of
Gaucho is Steely Dan disintegrating at the seams, then the second half is their death crawl to the end. “Time Out of Mind” depicts a night of debauchery with a heroin addict, which is about as vivacious as you would expect. The music grooves at this static staccato that decrepitly struts around the room; when backup singer Michael McDonald pops in at the third pre-chorus it feels like an exasperated sigh. “Time Out of Mind” must’ve been a sore spot for the late Walter Becker, as his then girlfriend overdosed on heroin during the making of
Gaucho. That’s not the only behind-the-scenes story to this song; Dire Straits guitarist and bandleader Mark Knopfler recorded over 10 hours of music with the group, but only less than a minute of it was used for the song’s outro. “My Rival” is about a feud that has lasted to the point where both parties are elderly, and only one party is interested in maintaining the feud. Becker and Fagen treat it as the pathetic spectacle it is, with creaky guitars undermining whatever urgency this spat could have had. At last, we get to “Third World Man,” a song that is just begging to be put out of its misery. This is by far the most inaccessible track on the album, it just wallows in its own demise without any rhythmic pulse to latch onto while Fagen’s vocals sound like they’re getting pulled through his teeth. It’s a fitting end to
Gaucho, the last wheeze of life getting sucked out before decaying into a husk of itself.
Looking back on this review, it reads far more negatively than what my score imply. Yes, the album is frigid and dismal, but could it have gone any other way? No album has ever been more a product of its environment than
Gaucho, the sonic distillation of a group imploding on itself due to their own ambitions. These are some of the most three-dimensional songs in Steely Dan’s entire career, a vivid portrait of characters who have lived a full life and have learned nothing from the experience. It’s fitting that the dreariest songs from the sessions made the final cut, it’s as if Becker and Fagen did this intentionally to best represent their turmoil.
Gaucho is the inevitable conclusion for a duo who took great pride in hiring the most virtuosic session musicians and utilizing the most advanced recording equipment of the time in the service of a project named after a dildo. Almost a decade of restlessly pursuing perfection has amounted to nothing more than a spasm.
