Deacon Blues (1978)

Performer: Steely Dan                                           Writers: Donald Fagan & Walter Becker
Highest US Chart Position: #19                             Label: ABC Records
Musicians: Donald Fagan, Walter Becker, Lee Ritenour, Victor Feldman and Pete Christlieb

Steely Dan’s album Aja was of the few LPs where I actually liked and listened to the entire thing. I had only been buying music for a couple of years by 1977, and when I bought albums back then it was mostly because the artist had more than one single on it and I liked having them together on one disc instead of on individual 45s. And if all the hits were on one side of the LP I never even turned it over. But the moment I set the needle down on Aja I was captivated and it quickly became one of the formative musical experiences of my life. Apparently most Steely Dan fans were of a like mind because while none of the singles from the album were able to crack the top ten, the album reached number three in the LP charts. “Deacon Blues” was the second single released from the album in April of 1978. The song is probably the closest thing to autobiography that Donald Fagan and Walter Becker ever wrote, the dream of a suburban youth who is looking to emulate the lives of the great jazz musicians that he idolizes and thereby transcend his pedestrian existence. The B-side of the single is “Home at Last,” the duo’s piano-centered nod to Homer’s Odyssey.

The story of tenor saxophonist Pete Christlieb’s presence on this song is an interesting one. Ever on the hunt for great soloists, Becker and Fagin were watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson one night and as the show came back from a commercial they heard a great tenor sax solo. So they called up NBC to figure out who it was they had heard. One of the tenors in Doc Severinsen’s band was Ernie Watts, who did lots of session work for pop stars, so the network simply sent him over to record with them. But as soon as they heard him they knew it wasn’t the right guy. Back they went to the phones and eventually they managed to get Christlieb to the studio and he wound up delivering an impressively distinctive performance on his sax solo. Another interesting fact is that this was one of only two songs that drummer Bernard Purdie recorded on the album. He had been such a dominant presence on Steely Dan’s previous album, The Royal Scam, that they purposely looked for other drummers to work with on the Aja album. Guitarist Lee Ritenour makes his only appearance on a Steely Dan record, and is joined by band regular Larry Carlton and jazz great Victor Feldman on electric piano, while another regular, Tom Scott, provides the horn arrangements as well as playing all the parts.

The song begins with the bass, keyboards and guitars comping on one and three while Purdie works an intricate rhythm on the hi-hats. An ethereal guitar and piano ripple then transitions directly into the vocals, with the call-and-response of Tom Scott’s horn section answering each line in the second verse. The lyrics are the first-person musings of a suburban loner desperate to escape the dullness of his surroundings. He dreams of learning to work (play) the saxophone and approaching the (band) stand to play just what he feels. But it’s not artistic success that he is trying to achieve, it’s a persona, the lifestyle of playing jazz, drinking, and eventually dying behind the wheel. While the winners in life are given exalted names, like Alabama’s Crimson Tide, he wants a name when he loses, and wants to go by the moniker Deacon Blues. While Steely Dan’s songs were always jazz influenced, there is something more jazz-based here because of the subject matter and Pete Christlieb’s solo. The song is dark and meditative tonally, but snakes along “like a viper” for over seven and a half minutes on the LP and a minute less on the edited single release. At the end of the tune there is some nice vamping and delicate guitar work by Ritenour, followed by Christlieb soloing again on the fade out. Though the album was released in November of 1977, I didn’t buy it until the spring when “Deacon Blues” was released as a single and getting airplay, so for me the tune always has associations with the spring and summer of 1978 when I was listening to it repeatedly. “Deacon Blues” has always seemed to me the cut that most represents the album and a quintessential example of the cerebral yet accessible music that Steely Dan was known for.