Steely Dan: Gaucho (Original MCA Version - Made In USA) CD Track Listing

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Steely Dan Gaucho (Original MCA Version - Made In USA) (1980)
Gaucho (Original MCA Version - Made In USA)\n1984 MCA Records, Inc.\n(Mini LP CD Packaging)\nOriginally Released 1980\nGold CD Edition Released July 9, 1991\n"Citizen Steely Dan" Boxed Set Released December 14, 1993\nRemastered Edition Released October 10, 2000\nJapanese Mini LP Version Released February 21, 2001\n2000 Universal Victor, Inc. - Japan\n\nAlbum Details (Mini LP CD Packaging)\nDigitally remastered Japanese limited edition featuring a miniature LP style sleeve for initial pressing. Limited to 5000 copies only! \n\nAMG EXPERT REVIEW: Aja was cool, relaxed and controlled; it sounded deceptively easy. Its follow-up, Gaucho, while sonically similar, was its polar opposite: a precise and studied record, where all of the seams showed. Gaucho essentially replicates the smooth jazz-pop of Aja, but with none of that record's dark, seductive romance or elegant aura. Instead, it's meticulous and exacting; each performance has been rehearsed so many times that they no longer have any emotional resonance. Furthermore, Becker and Fagen's songs are generally labored, only occasionally reaching their past heights, like on the suave "Babylon Sisters," "Time Out of Mind" and "Hey Nineteen." Still, those three songs are barely enough to make the remainder of the album's glossy, meandering fusion worthwhile. -- Stephen Thomas Erlewine\n\nAmazon.comEditorial Review\nThe multiplatinum success of Aja made Steely Dan, the musical conceit of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, a household name. But that prosperity came bundled with a fateful triple-whammy for rock's dyspeptic duo: unrealistic commercial expectations, a critical backlash spawned by punk's nascent mewling, and the long-simmering meltdown of their artistic partnership. But the cool, perfect sheen of 1980's Gaucho tipped its hand to none of it. Ironically, those fashion victims who sniffed up their sleeves at Don and Walt's decadence-tinged Me Decade manifesto couldn't have had a clue that just maybe Gaucho's typically oblique protagonists had uncomfortably blurred from the third-person to the first this time 'round. At least that's what Becker and Fagen hint at in their smart-assed notes to this digitally remastered, definitive edition (all original artwork and printed lyrics restored) of the final album before their 20-year hiatus. Pristine and sonically polished (three years and seven studios worth), time has served Gaucho well. Even its sense of laconic detachment now seems but a logical bridge to the two-decade removed Dan of Two Against Nature. To their credit, Becker and Fagen didn't trash the first half of Steely Dan's legacy on Gaucho, they simply burnished it to oblivion. -Jerry McCulley \n\nHalf.com Album Credits\nDavid Sanborn, Contributing Artist\nMark Knopfler, Contributing Artist\nMichael McDonald, Contributing Artist\nRick Derringer, Contributing Artist\nRoger Nichols, Engineer\n\nAlbum Notes\nSteely Dan: Donald Fagen (vocals, electric piano, synthesizer); Walter Becker (guitar, bass).\n\nAdditional personnel: Steve Khan, Hugh McCracken, Hiram Bullock, Larry Carlton (guitar); Tom Scott (alto & tenor clarinet, tenor saxophone, lyricon); George Marge, Walter Kane (bass clarinet); Michael Brecker, Dave Tofani (tenor saxophone); Ronny Cuber (baritone saxophone); Randy Brecker (trumpet, flugelhorn); Wayne Andre (trombone); Rob Mounsey (piano, synthesizer); Don Groinick (electric piano, clavinet); Patrick Rebillot, Joe Sample (electric piano); Chuck Rainey, Anthony Jackson (bass); Steve Gadd (drums, percussion); Bernard Purdie, Rick Marotta, Jeff Porcaro (drums); Nicholas Marrero (timbales); Crusher Bennett, Victor Feldman, Ralph McDonald (percussion); Leslie Miller, Patti Austin, Toni Wine, Lani Groves, Diva Gray, Gordon Grody, Frank Floyd, Zack Sanders, Valerie Simpson (background vocals).\n\nProducer: Gary Katz.\n\nReissue producer: Andy McKaie.\n\nRecorded at Soundworks, A & R Studios, Sigma Sound Studios and Automated Sound Studios, New York, New York; Village Recorder, West Los Angeles, California; Producers Workshop, Hollywood, California. Includes liner notes by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.\n\nDigitally remastered by Roger Nichols (Digital Atomics, Miami, Florida). \n\nProbably the most critically revered band of the 70s, Steely Dan's brand of slick pop with a dose of jazz/funk left a meagre but vital catalogue to cling on to. This was their last gasp at the onset of the 80s. Perhaps they were aware of the fact that they were too 70s for the 80s. This was their least accessible and most mature album (no criticism is intended), as the content washes over the listener like a warm shower. 'Hey Nineteen' is the hit single from this set, a radio-friendly nostalgic look at 1967, impeccable in production and with evocative lyrics. Lots of echoey Fender Rhodes and sensitive brass.\n\nAmazon.com Customer Review\nSing that Ghana Rondo: We will never see their kind again, November 9, 2000 \nReviewer: Gavin J Wilson from Thames Ditton UK \nAnd so we come to what I assume is the end of the Steely Dan remastering project. Aja was the last Dan album recorded in analogue (and apparently Fagen & Becker did consider recording Gaucho digitally).\n\nI was expecting this to be the Dan album that benefitted least from the re-mastering process -- as it was the most recent of the analogue albums -- but no, wrong again. So much new detail is revealed in the mix that it constantly battles for my 100% attention. In the past I could work quite happily with a Dan album playing in the background, but all these remastered versions just insist that I drop everything else and listen. It's almost like listening to an entirely new set of tunes.\n\nOnce again we have Becker and Fagen's elliptic sleeve notes. They contribute a vital perspective on what was going on at the time, without saying much about what was actually going on. There is no reference to the copyright lawsuit that Keith Jarrett pursued and won -- compare the opening to 'Gaucho' and then Jan Garbarek's sax opening on 'Long as You Know You're Living Yours' on the 'Belonging' album. What was such a talented songwriting team thinking of?\n\nAllegedly Becker and Fagen made extensive use of a drum machine for this album -- Fagen felt that no drummer could keep a perfect beat -- but a human drummer is given a credit on each track.\n\nSadly Denny Dias is not on this album. The track listings on the entire remastered series have made the fullest declaration yet of who played what on each track, and I have been astonished to find out this year how often Dias played some of my favourite 1970's guitar solos.\n\nLarry Carlton, one of the the Dan's most stalwart session guitarists, turns up for just the last track, "Third World Man", and boy, is that solo a goodie. Apparently the solo had been hanging around, unused, in the Dan vaults for a number of years, and Fagen finally wrote the song around the solo. It is a fantastic finale to the end of the first Dan era -- seven diamond-encrusted albums from what was the world's finest pop/rock/jazz/whatever band. We will not see the likes of them again. \n\nIn which Steely Dan finally gets the last laugh..., August 14, 2001 \nReviewer: fred (see more about me) from L.A. - "Here Come Those Santa Ana Winds Again!!!" \nWhen I was still a buck, yet music had already lost enough innocence to spawn the abominable "The Rolling Stone Guide to Rock And Roll," trees fell in vain over this album. The critical consensus was one star, with a call or two for the gas chamber. \n\nMan, how time has evened up the score! Although I like 'em, I'm not the biggest Steely Fan, which makes me all the more confident saying this is one of the most unfairly maligned albums I've ever heard. \n\nGenius? Naaah. Still, our hindsight (and their foresight) flings "Gaucho" as closely to its sweet edge as our boys ever got, conceptually and lyrically speaking. \n\nAlready famous for their powers of subversion ("Rikki Don't Lose That Number"; "I Got the News") and inscrutability (that damn "Josie" refrain!) D/W pulled off a more meaningful ruse with "Babylon Sisters" and "Hey Nineteen." \n\nEver feel the strikingly different impact of "19" on and off the album? As a Top-40 hit, "19" was a trifle whose obvious lesson exhausted most of its meaning and all of its welcome after a few spins. That's why this record became the soundtrack to your next root canal.\n\nBut when heard after "Babylon Sisters," the same recording is a jarring, real-time rumination on lechery and loneliness. It sets an ambitious agenda of introspection and denial that is fulfilled by the rest of the album (with more than the usual attention to drugs and the charms of ahem, young boys and young girls). \n\nSuddenly, those deceptively Prozack-y riffs and under-key vocal arrangements (which sound surprisingly rich on the remaster) drip with irony. \n\nOF COURSE it's easy listening, these guys are GETTING OLD...GET IT? Either critics didn't, or didn't want to.\n\nIn fact, after listening to this album again, it seems these boys were being extremely hard on themselves, and by proxy, critics who were also past prime. The 70's were over; so was the fun -now what? \n\nThe finality of it all rankled on levels many seemed unwilling to acknowledge, let alone accept. As tales of this project's excess and calamity got out - and especially after Donald Fagen released the crtically-praised "The Nightfly" two years later -it seemed Steely Dan was history, and that "Gaucho" was, atop its other sins, an ungracious middle finger of a breakup album. \n\nNot quite - but it would take years for that to become clear.\n\nMeanwhile, the White Male Oracles of Rock had game to hunt. They had finally slain Disco. They didn't dare discuss the self-destruction of punk (hard-wired and already well underway), for they had long championed that genre's traditional values of rock n' roll rebellion.\n\nThere really wasn't a lot to go after. But Steely Dan presented a juicy morsel. After all, they had reveled in disco's hedonism, albeit with two left feet (interestingly, several theoretically undanceable Steely Dan hits remain standards on the gay disco circuit). Face it: these dudes had leered for years at topics most critics didn't even want to think about yet, and were making mad money doing it. But this time, the fix was in...and Steely Dan apparently knew it before the first copy sold:\n\n"Turn that Jungle Music Down/Just Until We Get Out of Town," indeed.\n\nBut you know what? \n\nI'm 38 years old now, and offended not one bit, now that I'm the one talking to the 19 year-olds.* \n\nThey were absolutely right! So I think I'll crank it up on the way home tonight!\n\n*metaphorically speaking, heh, heh...
This rock cd contains 7 tracks and runs 38min 14sec.
Freedb: 5e08f407
Buy: from Amazon.com

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