Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Arguably at some point in time you will have heard a Steely Dan track and caught yourself appreciating the artistry involved; even if you never sought them out again, if your curiosity was not pricked by the sound and rather utopian grift of lyric which had at its centre a kick of deliverance to the dramatic, then the one track will surely have stayed with you…an earworm that would not let go.
The thing is, that early sound has aged terrifically well, and even if the band and the fans had never dreamed of hearing the debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, in a way that had been obsessively cleaned, restored, and dare it be said even improved upon, then the original copy in its fiftieth year would sound fresh and exciting.
In an age though where the technology exists to dive deeply into the process of reintroducing music of absolute flavour and top notch song writing, the restoration of Steely Dan’s debut recording is a must, not just for the fans, but for those who seek to address the beginning of the 70s in new light, that whilst we may have thought of the decade as one dominated by sentiment and then excess and anger, what it really was, what it entailed with graphic intention, was an urge to push the latter half of the previous decade’s ethos even further, to make the art truly speak to the soul and not return to a period where blandness and beige were top billing and lauded for being undemonstrative of the feelings deep in the heart of progress.
Can’t Buy A Thrill was indeed progress, the mix of jazz, soft rock and even folk influences were a step up from what had gone before, and whilst it wasn’t categorised as progressive, it certainly found an unlikely companion in the genre, kissing cousins drenched in mutual respect perhaps, and as the album flows, the sound becomes enticing, fierce, and most of all philosophical, in the same way that the Eagles would find within their own experiences, so Steely Dan opened Pandora’s Box and found cryptic writings to be powerful and without damnation.
Comparing like with like is its own curse, but even if you embrace the differences in Time, then Can’t Buy A Thrill, with tracks such as the excellent Dirty Work, Midnite Cruiser, Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me), Turn That Heartbeat Over Again, and the sensational Reelin’ In The Years, with its sumptuous guitar by session player Elliot Randall and vocals of sincere and majestic sarcasm by Donald Fagan, all portray a new sense of the Americana to come, one not dragged down by past heroics from its country stand point, but one ready to unleash the one thing the title insisted couldn’t be done, namely that you could buy a thrill, that the thrill would be long, unrepentant, and continual.
This was music for the new decade, and one that fifty years later is rightly revisited and stamped with approval. Can’t buy a thrill? You can certainly feel possessed by one.
Ian D. Hall