ALBUM: Can’t Buy a Thrill (1975); Gold (1982)
MVC RATING: 4.5/$$$$,$; 4.5/$$$$
NOTE: Turns out I did have another Steely Dan lurking in my growing: Gold, a very nice, concise best of compilation.
Could it be possible I only have one album of this band?
This is their debut album and certainly one of the best — but all of their albums are ‘one of the best.’ Amazing musicians and songwriters Steely Dan (namely Don Fagan and Walter Becker) incorporated jazz, rock and Latino sounds with engimatic lyrics into a fusion that maintained commercial appeal.
The songs ‘Reeling in the Years,’ Do it Again’ and ‘Dirty Work, were hits for the group off of this album. Add to that their later hits, ‘Rikki Don’t Lose that Number,’ ‘Hey Nineteen,’ ‘Bodhisattva,’ ‘Dr. Wu’ and ‘Kid Charlemagne,’ and so on, and so on. Pretty soon we have a pretty good soundtrack of the 1970s and 1980s. They enjoyed critical claim all the while selling 40 million albums.
I only can find this one album in my collection, I think I have more because I have a 90-minute mixtape of the group that my broken cassette machine will no longer allow me to play. One of my favorites off ‘Can’t Buy a Thrill.’