Walter Becker

Downloaded new hi-res FLACs of Kamakiriad, and I have to say: one, I am not sure when I last listened to this album, and two, I am sure I have never heard it sound as good as it does on the current system. If I have not mentioned it lately — I love the system I put together.

“Snowbound” is so alive, so three-dimensional. God, it sounds lovely. I thought I had heard this song before.

I had. Back near the end of my PhD I was seeing someone — loosely, and we both understood it that way, since I would be moving to Macon in a few months. One night we were playing tunes on my Adcom/Paradigm system and she wanted me to hear one of her favourites, which turned out to be The Cure’s “Love Cats,” a super-annoying song, I am sure you will agree. I said yeah, I like it, and she was not convinced. Later it was my turn to be stabbed: I put on “Snowbound,” and within thirty seconds she was scowling and shaking her head in disgust and disbelief. I think that is the moment I knew it was over. You don’t fuck with the Fagen.

“Florida Room” is like taking a walk in the Keys. Everything is weird and wonderful on the walk, like they are on a drug that makes everything look like life in a Florida room. And the horn run. Perfect. It may be blasphemy, but I may like this album a tad more than The Nightfly. Is that nuts? “I keep drifting back to your Florida room.” To your Florida room — your perspective, perhaps, or something more intimate.

Is this album a journey through a life? Is the Florida room retirement — older people chasing the warmth of their youthful summers? You get some warmth, but it is going to be a bit freaky. Then you end up “On the Dunes,” decidedly melancholy and maudlin, the retiree feeling sorry for himself. But it sounds beautiful. He is still in one of the most beautiful places in the world; “pretty rough,” he might say, sarcastically, which would not be atypical. And then we watch the sun set into the ocean for the last three minutes. Glorious. This poor lonely guy. He is the same guy in “The Things I Miss the Most.”

Fortunately there is a party around the bend, down the road, near the love shack: “Teahouse on the Tracks.” A final destination, a place we will all meet at the end of the street — though not for everyone, just the hipsters, or those who enjoy the journey. And how cool is a song with a trombone solo?

Back in grad school I taught a contemporary lit course when a lot of people were experimenting with multimodal texts. I thought about teaching Kamakiriad as a work of fiction. That would have been fun, though I wonder whether I would have got some looks for it.

Side one, and the cereal has to settle before anything can be judged. (That’s my word for crackle-and-pops now — get it?) Once it does, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” comes up sounding good. It has never been my favorite Steely Dan song, but it’s a good opener and it does the job.

By the start of “Night by Night” the cereal has mostly stood down, though the occasional pop still lands. What doesn’t stand down is the engineering: muffled, like a softer image through a vintage lens. Good soundstage — wide, properly placed — but not the treble sparkle I want.

“Any Major Dude Will Tell You” [“SD” throughout the original; expanded here for the reader’s benefit —Ed.] is one of my all-time favorite SD songs, and it does sound livelier here. Still missing something up top, though. Thick, and a little smeared.

Well, that sucks. Maybe this record has just been played a lot. That’s the thing about a used pressing: you can’t tell whether you’re hearing 1974, the plant that stamped it, or forty years of somebody else’s stylus. Whatever the cause, this copy doesn’t do what Gaucho does, and that’s the same band six years on.