100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #45 Steely Dan – Do It Again

Released: 1972

Only – really, only – the nineteen seventies could’ve given an outfit like Steely Dan the sort of red carpet treatment which, make no mistake, their complex, unpredictable and intelligent subversion of pop deserved.

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met in the mid-sixties at Bard College in upstate New York; both serious jazz heads, they originally wanted to pursue a career as Brill Building writers-for-hire, but the chops for that evaded them as whilst their cynicism fit the ask, their discomforting lyrical sketches did not.

Reluctantly getting into the performance game they toured with Jay & the Americans – of which in later the pair were described by one former member as being like ‘librarians on acid’ – before after that door closed they eventually relocated to LA to work on their debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill with producer Gary Katz.

Do It Again would be their first hit and their biggest, a promise of illusory things to come and a track that neatly showcased their bone-dry word craft and featured solos from both a sitar and an organ. Too knowing for the sixties, too weird for the eighties, Steely Dan would go on from it to become a cultural phenomenon locked permanently into the temporal haze which spawned them.