The Guitar Break That Became Legendary Inside a Song Its Own Writer Barely Respected
The Guitar Break That Became Legendary Inside a Song Its Own Writer Barely Respected
Two Songwriters Who Never Quite Fit Rock and Roll
Los Angeles, 1972.
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had finally reached the point where somebody was willing to let them make a record of their own.
Getting there had not been easy.
The two had met years earlier at Bard College in New York, bonding over jazz, unusual harmony, literature and a sense of humor considerably darker than the optimism surrounding much of late-1960s popular culture.
After college, they tried selling songs to other artists.
Most of the industry showed little interest.
Eventually producer Gary Katz brought them west, where they worked as staff songwriters for ABC Records.
That arrangement did not exactly become a spectacular success either.
But it gave Becker and Fagen another opportunity.
Instead of trying to convince other performers to record their strange songs, they could build a band and record them themselves.
Steely Dan was born.
Their first album would be called Can’t Buy a Thrill.
And buried inside those sessions was a bitter relationship song whose most unforgettable moment would come from a guitarist who was not even a regular member of the band.
A Happy Sound Carrying a Bitter Goodbye
“Reelin’ in the Years” presents an interesting contradiction from its opening moments.
The music moves with enormous energy.
The guitars seem almost celebratory.
The chorus is immediately memorable.
But the voice at the center of the song is anything but happy.
Fagen and Becker created a narrator looking backward at a relationship with frustration and contempt.
Memories that might sound sentimental in another songwriter’s hands become ammunition.
The narrator questions what his former lover valued.
He looks at disappearing youth.
He remembers wasted experiences.
There is heartbreak in the song, but very little pleading.
Instead, the pain comes wrapped in sarcasm.
That combination would become one of Steely Dan’s signatures.
Bright music.
Dark characters.
Beautiful craftsmanship surrounding people who often seem disappointed with themselves, one another or the world.
But something else was needed to make this particular recording unforgettable.
A guitar.
Elliott Randall Walked Into the Story
Elliott Randall was already connected with Becker and Fagen when the first Steely Dan album was being made.
He was not being introduced as the permanent guitar hero of the new group.
He was a highly skilled player brought into the recording environment because Becker, Fagen and producer Gary Katz knew what he could do.
Randall approached guitar solos differently from players who carefully constructed every note before recording.
He has explained that he generally did not plan solos in advance.
He responded.
He listened.
Then he played.
That instinctive approach became crucial.
When Randall played lead on “Reelin’ in the Years,” the guitar did not merely decorate the song.
It seemed to answer the attitude in Fagen’s vocal.
The notes were fast without becoming empty technique.
They sounded reckless and controlled at the same time.
Suddenly the sarcastic breakup song had another voice inside it.
And that voice did not need lyrics.
The Guest Player Became Impossible to Forget
Randall’s guitar work became one of the defining elements of the recording.
That outcome was somewhat ironic.
Steely Dan would eventually become famous for using extraordinary studio musicians whenever Becker and Fagen believed a particular player could deliver exactly what a song required.
Musicians might enter for a session, leave again and still become permanently associated with a few minutes of music.
Randall became an early example of that philosophy.
He was not required to be the face of the band.
He simply needed to give the record something nobody else had given it.
He did.
The guitar became so important that decades later, discussions of the song often focus as intensely on Randall’s lead work as on the composition itself.
For a new band making its first album, that session helped establish another principle that would define Steely Dan:
the best person for a particular musical moment was the person they wanted in the studio.
Membership mattered less than the finished recording.
The Band Wasn't Supposed to Be Conventional
Can’t Buy a Thrill appeared in November 1972.
Steely Dan did not resemble a typical rock band intellectually or musically.
Fagen and Becker loved jazz.
Their chord changes could move in unexpected directions.
Their lyrics frequently refused to explain themselves clearly.
They could sound cynical even while constructing extremely attractive pop melodies.
Yet somehow the strange combination worked.
The album began finding an audience.
The apparently cerebral outsiders were discovering that sophisticated musical ideas could still travel through mainstream radio.
“Reelin’ in the Years” became part of that breakthrough.
Released as a single in 1973, it climbed to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The outsiders had a genuine hit.
Success Created an Awkward Problem
There was only one problem with becoming a successful rock band.
Fagen and Becker did not particularly enjoy behaving like one.
Touring held little romance for them.
Fagen especially became uncomfortable with the culture surrounding life on the road.
Over the next few years, Steely Dan gradually moved away from functioning as a conventional touring group and deeper into the recording studio.
There, Becker and Fagen could obsess over details.
They could change musicians.
They could repeat takes.
They could search for sounds until the result matched what they heard in their heads.
That later reputation for studio perfection makes the raw energy of “Reelin’ in the Years” especially interesting.
It comes from an earlier version of Steely Dan.
A real band still existed around Becker and Fagen.
The music had not yet disappeared completely into meticulous studio construction.
And Elliott Randall’s guitar sounds as though someone opened a door and let electricity into the room.
Then Donald Fagen Looked Back
Decades passed.
The song never disappeared.
Classic-rock radio kept playing it.
New listeners discovered the opening guitar.
Steely Dan’s catalogue became increasingly respected for its sophistication.
And then Donald Fagen offered his own evaluation of one of the songs that had helped introduce the band to millions.
He called it “dumb but effective.”
Walter Becker was hardly more sentimental.
Asked about the track alongside Fagen in 2009, Becker simply remarked that it was “no fun.”
For many artists, such comments about a beloved early hit might sound shocking.
For Steely Dan, they somehow sounded perfectly appropriate.
These were two musicians famous for skepticism, perfectionism and refusing to treat their own mythology with excessive reverence.
The audience could adore the song.
Its creators did not have to pretend they felt the same way.
The Irony Became Part of the Legacy
That contradiction makes the recording even more fascinating.
One of Steely Dan’s best-known early songs became famous partly because of a guitar performance supplied by a guest musician.
Its creators became increasingly sophisticated as composers and producers after making it.
And one of those creators would eventually dismiss the song itself with a phrase that sounded almost like another Steely Dan lyric.
Dumb.
But effective.
The second half of that judgment is impossible to argue with.
The record worked.
It helped establish Steely Dan commercially.
Its guitar work became celebrated.
Its combination of musical brightness and lyrical bitterness introduced listeners to the strange emotional territory Becker and Fagen would explore much further in the years ahead.
A Song They Outgrew That Never Outgrew Them
Artists often become prisoners of their earliest success.
The audience freezes a moment.
The artist keeps moving.
Steely Dan moved farther than most.
Their later records became increasingly intricate, jazz-influenced and obsessed with studio detail.
Compared with that work, an early rock song from their debut could easily have seemed crude to Fagen and Becker.
But listeners never had to judge the recording from inside its creators’ heads.
They only had to hear it.
And when Elliott Randall’s guitar enters, the record still carries the same restless energy that made people notice it more than half a century ago.
That is the strange legacy of “Reelin’ in the Years.”
The musicians who wrote it could move on.
They could criticize it.
They could create records they considered more sophisticated.
But they could never rewrite what the audience had already decided.
Sometimes an artist’s least cherished creation becomes someone else’s permanent memory.
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And sometimes the performance that makes it immortal comes from a man who simply walked into the studio, picked up a guitar and played.
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