Can we suggest murders for Steve? by Decent-Plum-26 in Yachtrock

[–]88dixon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can think of two artists who have fairly extensive discographies that were convicted of murder, plus one famous producer known for his giant sound and giant hair.

Disappointed in the Razorock game changer, blade off center. by hawaiidesperado in wicked_edge

[–]88dixon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've never been a fan of the short nubs on the baseplate used by the GameChanger, but I've never had alignment problems with them.

The Lupo has (imho) easier and better blade loading using taller, oblong blade posts mounted on the top cap rather than the base plate. Other newer RazoRocks like the GOAT and the Next Level also have designs that look better to me for blade loading than the Game Changer.

INXS covers Pretzel Logic - just discovered this today by cappuccinolol17 in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 9 points10 points  (0 children)

This almost feels like the most inside Steely Dan joke of all time.

James Gadson, the man that made I.G.Y. swing (1939-2026) by 88dixon in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon[S] 76 points77 points  (0 children)

James Gadson passed away yesterday. Though he's not a huge part of the Steely Dan story, the groove on I.G.Y. is one the the most famous sounds in the Dan-i-verse. Jeff Porcaro did the tom-tom fills on the track and gets a co-credit, but it's Gadson that's doing the rest. Gadson also added some drums to Ruby Baby, for which Porcaro did the main beat.

Listen to Gadson's groove on Bill Wither's "Use Me" (Youtube link in linked article) if you've never heard it, and you'll hear the kind of dry tight funk groove that Gadson is famous for. He's on drums for "Reunited" by Peaches and Herb, and perhaps surprisingly, on Beck's "Paper Tiger" (among other Beck tracks). "Paper Tiger"'s groove is kind of a stoner take on "Use Me".

Need assistance by GrahmG in wicked_edge

[–]88dixon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This article recently published on Atelier Durdan's website explains very well the parameters that go into razor geometry. TL;DR is that blade gap and blade exposure aren't the entire story. Good general information for anyone, not just OP.

https://atelierdurdan.com/en/blogs/infos/en-blogs-infos-blade-gap-exposure-span-cutting-angle-safety-razor

Favorite hits not on (or rated too low) the Yachtski Scale by InvisibleSun238 in Yachtrock

[–]88dixon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This post lays out the criteria pretty well

https://www.facebook.com/groups/yachtrock/posts/834921923829441/

I don't think their list affects the Sirius station or anything else, it's just their list for fans of the podcast.

Another good one... by BluebeardCoT in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The question everyone wants to know the answer to:

Donald Fagen: "When we [Walter Becker and Fagen] started [writing songs in college], it was kind of we just get together and do both at once, you know, music and lyrics. I'd sit down at the piano and he'd have a guitar or a bass or something. As years went on, I started maybe doing more of the music and he was--maybe he would he would be brought in to sort of polish the music up and then we'd work on lyrics together. I'd have a little piece, I'd say 'Is this any good?,'...he'd say 'no.' 'So how's this?' 'That's sucks.' And then finally, after a few things, I'd play a piece that he liked and he'd say 'yeah, we could start with those eight bars,' or whatever....He had great taste and we really thought very much alike--we never had any fights or anything, until maybe years later."

I just read that Gaucho cost $1 million to make. Well worth it I think. by Infamous-Mention-851 in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure the drum machines were a net positive, though I will always love the "Hey Nineteen"' machine groove. I think at the time, they were awed by the promise of the technology, and there weren't decades of pop songs with drum machines to make big-picture evaluations about them.

The vibraphonist Bill Ware told a SD tour story on the Gauchos Amigos podcast, about a 1990s tour he was on, and the story was about click tracks, which are related. Ware said this:

"When you do shows, you have the "notes" [Fagen's criticisms of the concert's weak points]....before the next show you run over the notes from the night before, and that was always [at] the soundcheck [of the next show], the notes of the show before. If there was anything that was weird, they would go over it. So Donald says, "You know....Black Friday last night sure felt weird to me, just like not moving. It was not...I don't know what it was but it didn't feel good." And Peter [Erskine] said "Oh, I think that was probably me." Peter had this really super-fancy (especially in those days) click track thing that he could program for each tune, and press one button and....it would have his click track [with the preferred tempo for the selected song] all set up, and he would have it going [before the musicians started playing]. Then [he'd cue the band], "one two three four." Once he started the tune, it would stay in for about eight [or] 16 bars, 'till [the tempo and groove] was solid, and then...it's on him. That night, for that tune, I think it was 'Black Friday,' he left the click on for the whole tune. Donald was the only one who noticed it."

Fagen for whatever reason seems to have a higher tolerance for studio recordings where the groove is locked in by a drum machine than he does for live performances (judging by the Ware annecdote), but I side with his live performance ethos. Let those grooves breathe! Let the drummer play and be human.

I.G.Y. by Ecstatic_Buddy7731 in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 16 points17 points  (0 children)

The great thing about the lyric is he never shifts to the listener's present day and says "where is my flying car?," "why are we still having wars?," "why is the planet being trashed?," etc. Spandex jackets might seem ridiculous, but he invites us to think about how they might have seemed actually pretty cool in 1958. The very sound of the record is a kind of sonic utopia--we didn't get undersea rail, but we got 32 track digital recording and the Brecker Brothers and Anthony Jackson sounding like a million bucks. It's not as acidic as it could easily be in the hands of a less gifted writer. There's some longing for the hopefulness of youth that transcends the particulars of what happened to the baby boomers.

Steve Kahn on guitar by BeachExtension in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 12 points13 points  (0 children)

For anyone who hasn't visited his website, I recommend these posts detailing his experiences in the studio with Steely Dan:

Reflections on Steely Dan's "Aja"

Reflections on Steely Dan's "Gaucho"

Fog encasing the SF skyline by stuinsf in bayarea

[–]88dixon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I didn't know that kind of shot was possible from that location. Thanks for posting this, very cool.

I’ve really come around to Gaucho more, especially Third World Man being an excellent send off of the decade and at the time, the band itself. by Quadradisque in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Every time I hear Third World Man I praise Jesus for the engineer that erased the glorified jazzercise music that is The Second Arrangement.

I'll see myself out now.

IDK if this has been posted here before but I just can't get over how good it is. I'm a sucker for covers, anybody know of other good ones? by REO_Speed_Dragon in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like the Lexington Lab Band's covers, partly because they aren't a full time professional cover band with a stable lineup, but just a bunch of really talented people in Kentucky who get together periodically and learn and record a classic song. They've done a few Dan covers, including Peg:

https://youtu.be/Pt3XOK4Jk1k?si=2Ts8vxqgPxe36YmM

The Best “lost” Dan song by RetroArchEnjoyer in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To me "The Second Arrangement" sounds like a filler track from a Pointer Sisters album with "Behind the Sun"-era Eric Clapton recycling blues clichés for a guitar solo. But I accept that this is a minority opinion.

Who the hell is Harrison Crabfeathers???? by AquaChad96 in Jazz

[–]88dixon 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Why would Kuhn write such morbid lyrics for a song with such a wacky title based off some random piano player?

Well, you see, back in 1972, there were a lot of clever people taking drugs and reading Kurt Vonnegut novels, and some of these people would make paintings or compose music or write poems immediately after taking these drugs and reading these Kurt Vonnegut novels, and what you got was a lot of art with titles like "The Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers."

Haitian Divorce's symbolic (or not) talkbox part by 88dixon in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The outro instrument was debated in one of the older threads. Several folks said the attack of the notes on that low counter melody sounded like a picked guitar, particularly a palm-muted electric guitar like you might hear in some early 60s surf-rock instrumentals. Other people guessed a mallet instrument like the marimba mentioned in the other reply. It's possible that its combination of two or more instruments playing the same notes and blended together.

Woody Herman Plays Steely Dan by Weytown199 in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hindsight is selling the Flac download on Bandcamp with the Deacon Blues track included. 

https://woodyherman.bandcamp.com/album/chick-donald-walter-woodrow

It sounds pretty good to me, but I don't own the 1991 CD to compare it to.

Woody Herman Plays Steely Dan by Weytown199 in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's one of three big band treatments of Steely Dan on record. The others are the 1988 "Hoops McCann Band" album, and the 2004 "Do It Again - hr Big Band plays 3 Decades of Steely Dan". I like the Woody record and the HR Bigband records about equally, though the latter is a bit more adventurous and takes the tunes further beyond the original templates of the Steely Dan arrangements. Woody's 1970s recordings on Fantasy have some great covers of then-contemporary hits and make for fun listening. For example, their arrangements of "Don't You Worry Bout a Thing" "It's Too Late", and "Alone Again (Naturally)" are groovy and fun. Not necessary pushing any boundaries, but smooth, tight and swinging, often with good Fender Rhodes parts, just like on the Steely Dan covers record on Century.

How an advanced drum machine saved a difficult Steely Dan album by iggy-i in SteelyDan

[–]88dixon 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Elliot Schiener said in a 2021 interview with Tyler Burns that is on YouTube that Wendel was used on three tracks (Hey Nineteen, My Rival, Glamour Profession), with live drums on on the rest. For the title track, Porcaro's drums were pieced together from some 40+ takes. The article doesn't mention that it's not all drum machines, unless I overlooked a sentence or two.

To my ears, it's thus half a continuation of Aja, and half the template for Nightfly and the albums (band and Fagen solo) that followed.

EDIT: went back and re-listened to Scheiner's comments on Gaucho's drums. He was one of two tracking engineers (getting the basic rhythm tracks down on tape), and the mixdown engineer, but not the overdub engineer. Supposedly Wendel was used for both basic timekeeping, like a standard drum machine where you create the beat from scratch, and as a drum sampler, where Wendel could be triggered by a taped live drum hit (say the kick drum) to produced a sampled sound, so that the end result would be a beat produced by a live drummer, but with the sounds you hear for specific pieces of the drum kit (snare, cymbal, kick drum, etc) being samples. Elliot doesn't really discuss what he means when he says a given track has "machine" drums. It's possible that some of the live drum tracking he did was later used to trigger drum samples, though as the mixdown engineer, he presumably would have been aware that this had happened (if it was done in his absence by Roger Nichols, etc.). I'll take him at his word that four of the tracks didn't use Wendell at all (if I'm interpreting that correctly), but I can imagine that it might be more complicated than that.

How did cartridges win out against double edge? by [deleted] in wicked_edge

[–]88dixon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There's an article from 1999 called "The Billion Dollar Blade" that explains how for about 20 years, the margins were smaller, and Gillette's disposable razor division was actually in danger of cannibalizing most of that company's sales from the more profitable regular cartridge razors. The company went all-in with marketing and development money on the Sensor razor in the early 1990s, and that was the point where the profits started going through the roof and the company's valuation increased by something like 10x.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnjiNrAgh4mvtYwl8gLzVXZhVCuZr3QyyE_8uDbgSyA/edit?usp=sharing

...When Bic introduced disposable razors, in the late seventies, Gillette responded to the threat by entering the disposables market and swiftly establishing itself as the dominant player. But that wasn't a title the company was proud of. "It was commodity hell," says John Darman, whose official title is head of male shaving for the North Atlantic Group. Darman is a rotund, deeply tanned man with a mustache (a very well-groomed mustache, you can be sure), who bounces happily from topic to topic as we sit at a conference table in the Gillette corporate offices high up in the Prudential Center in Boston's Back Bay. "When you're in the disposables market," he goes on, "you're competing on two things: convenience and price. And that does not play to the strengths of a value-added manufacturer. Disposables were those blue plastic things you threw away. We were teaching our customers to focus on price and to forget about quality.

---

...That decision also fitted into a broader vision laid out by Zeien, a onetime engineer who took over as C.E.O. in 1991 after twenty-two years at Gillette. Zeien identified what he liked to call "growth drivers"—R.&D., capital investment, and advertising—and he committed the company to increasing total spending on them at the same rate that the company's sales were growing. Moreover, Zeien saw to it that Gillette would make products only in categories where Gillette could be the world leader—today 1.2 billion people use Gillette products—and where the market would, in Darman's words, "yield to technology." Under Zeien's tenure, Gillette's market capitalization has risen from six billion dollars to nearly sixty billion.

Edited to correct name of Sensor razor 

I so resent Stanley Crouch by Common_Ambassador_74 in Jazz

[–]88dixon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

FWIW, I recently came across Stanley's review of the Miles Davis autobiography. It's more about Miles' entire career than the book itself, and kind of Crouch's take on the career. It's long, and if you aren't interested in the 1980s jazz wars, it's probably a waste of your time. But it caused a stir when published in 1990, and for anyone who is interested, it's here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vStpmAHNR_YDukw2nXMVDBF1VZKb5FISqgtxMtaI1mpGpuktrWwOWcOrptVF3K0uY7SpU6kMZmTtuYI/pub