Gaucho (1980)
Artist: Steely Dan
Label: MCA
Format: Hi-Res FLAC (24/192)
Year: 1980
Equipment
- DAC
- PS Audio PerfectWave DirectStream
- Streamer
- PS Audio AirLens
- Software
- Roon
- Amp
- Rogue Audio Cronus Magnum III
- Speakers
- DeVore Fidelity O/96
- Sub
- REL T/5x SE Powered Subwoofer
- Interconnects
- Morrow MA3
- Speaker Cables
- Tellurium Q Black II
I first really listened to Gaucho in the early nineties, when I was working at the Olive Garden and my friend Mark, one of the managers, decided to educate me in the ways of Steely Dan. Mark was a bit older, liked to get high, and loved nothing more than putting on a Dan record and just sinking into it. Gaucho was one of his favorites, and it became mine, too. At the time, I didn’t know this was their swan song—at least for a good while. It’s funny to think of it now, because Gaucho feels so final: sleek, flawless, and a little bit untouchable, like the band itself was disappearing behind a pane of smoked glass.
This was 1980, and Steely Dan had just come off the shimmering, expansive Aja. Becker and Fagen were deep in their perfectionist phase—layering overdubs, cycling through session players, chasing the perfect take like it was the Holy Grail. They were already a studio-only band by then, but Gaucho took the obsession to extremes. It’s jazz-rock-fusion pared down to a diamond’s edge, each note placed with surgical precision—causing some critics to call it a bit cold and over-engineered. It’s also the last we’d hear from them for twenty years. Part of that was exhaustion. Part of it was personal: Becker’s heroin habit, a nasty lawsuit over songwriting credits (with Keith Jarrett no less!), and, just to top it off, Becker being hit by a car in New York and breaking his leg.
What they left us with is an album that makes moral decay sound glorious. Every song on Gaucho is about seediness—affairs, drugs, hustles, and bad decisions in a sunny but jaded Los Angeles. It’s a gallery of characters who should know better but don’t care to.
The album opens with one of the most perfect songs they ever recorded. “Babylon Sisters” isn’t just a perfect groove—it’s a small, cryptic novella disguised as a pop song. From the first bars, Bernard Purdie’s shuffle says don’t rush this, the trouble will still be there when you arrive. Lyrically, the trouble has a name: Babylon. In the Bible, Babylon is the symbol of decadent, corrupt civilization—part pleasure palace, part cautionary tale. Steely Dan’s Babylon is Southern California, that shimmering mirage where everything you want is available, but everything has a price—perhaps a synecdouche for Gaucho.
Our narrator is a little older, a bit seasoned, maybe a little jaded. He knows “love’s not a game for three,” but he’s in the middle of one anyway—a love triangle he can’t or won’t step away from. The two women (the eponymous sisters) are trouble wrapped in charm, and he’s happy to follow them from one decadent setting to another.
The Santa Ana winds are another loaded reference: in Los Angeles lore, they’re hot, dry gusts from the desert, infamous for stoking wildfires and fraying tempers. Joan Didion described them as omens of chaos—so their arrival here suggests that emotional or moral wildfire is on the horizon. A “Sunday in T.J.” is almost certainly Tijuana, Mexico—a place with its own lore of vice, cheap thrills, and impulsive decisions made just south of the border. In the song, it’s an indulgent detour: one day you’re on Sunset, the next you’re in Baja, and the moral compass isn’t exactly spinning north. “Sunset” has to be the Sunset Strip, that fabled boulevard of rock clubs, after-hours spots, and celebrity mischief. “San Francisco show and tell” could be a euphemism for any number of adult entertainments—the Dan never did spell it out—but it reinforces that this triangle plays out in two decadent cities, the road trip forming its own kind of illicit ritual.
By the time the refrain “Babylon sisters shake it” rolls around, it’s hard to tell whether it’s encouragement to keep dancing or a admonition to shake off the dangerous allure. That ambiguity is pure Steely Dan—seduction and warning braided so tightly together you can’t tell which is which.
Musically, the track is flawless: Chuck Findley’s trumpet fits the mood, Hugh McCracken’s guitar is all sly understatement, and Purdie’s drumming makes the whole thing feel like it’s moving at exactly the speed it should. The sound is as glossy as the lifestyles it depicts, but underneath it is a storm brewing—both meteorological and emotional.
Enter the Wendel drum machine on “Hey Noneteen,” cool and clockwork. The narrator is a similar guy—or his close moral cousin—hooking up with a nineteen-year-old. It’s fun in the moment, but “we’ve got nothing in common,” he admits. The musicianship is ice-sculpture precise, with Walter Becker’s bass clean and dry, and Victor Feldman’s electric piano sliding in like silk. For me, this one’s personal—Autumn was 19 and I was 32 when we met—but unlike this narrator, we actually did have more in common than Cuervo Gold and the fine Colombian. Still, that outro groove is pure seduction, with Fagen sounding like he’s savoring every sordid second: “skate a little lower now.”
If Gaucho has a crime anthem, “Glamour Profession” is it: “illegal fun under the sun, boy.” Wendel keeps the beat here, too, giving it an unnervingly even pulse while Anthony Jackson’s bass plays it cool. Steve Khan’s guitar darts in and out like it’s part of the con. The whole thing feels like a bright Sunday in Beverly Hills, but under the perfect weather there’s something crooked going on. Like “Hey Nineteen,” it stretches out into a long outro jam that’s too good to cut short.
The title track is another favorite—a slow, deliberate waltz through jealousy and betrayal. “Gaucho” tells the story of yet another love triangle, though the details are strange: the narrator’s partner twice brings along an unwanted guest (“the gaucho”) to what sounds like an exclusive gathering. Is it a gay love triangle? Is “Custer Dome” a strip club or a more private kind of haunt? Whatever it is, the narrator is fed up, and the music gives the scene a languid, passive-aggressive elegance.
For “Time out of Mind,” Mark Knopfler drops in to lend his instantly recognizable guitar tone, and Michael McDonald adds those ethereal background harmonies (it was basically the law in the late ’70s). The track is bright and breezy on the surface, but the lyrics point to heroin use: a “time” outside memory, lost to the drug. Joe Sample’s electric piano keeps everything cool, almost too cool, like the narrator’s trying to make something ugly look pretty.
There’s another triangle in “My Rival,” but this one’s darker. The narrator sounds like a jilted lover—maybe a stalker—tracking a rival with barely veiled threats. The guitar work (Larry Carlton and Rick Derringer both contributed to the album) has a clipped, menacing tone that matches the mood. It’s one of the least ambiguous tracks on Gaucho—this guy’s out for blood, and the music knows it, but the narrator may not be as adept as he thinks he is.
“Third-World Man” closes the album, and it’s one of Steely Dan’s most plaintive songs. Larry Carlton’s guitar solos ache with restraint. The lyrics touch on paranoia and otherness—fear of the outsider, the immigrant, the poor. Unlike the elliptical wordplay in other tracks, here they come straight at the subject, and the result is haunting. It’s a curtain call with no encore. Do things ever change?
When I finished Gaucho, I couldn’t resist reaching for “True Companion” from the Steely Dan Gold collection. Technically a Donald Fagen solo track, it was recorded in that strange space between Gaucho and The Nightfly. It’s got a sci-fi shimmer and mythic undertones—like Homer’s Odyssey filtered through neon light and late-night FM radio. The harmonies are strange and gorgeous, like a chorus of multiple Fagens singing in unison from some other dimension. On my system, it’s an almost holographic experience.
Gaucho was the last Steely Dan album for twenty years, and you can feel that finality in its grooves. It’s music for the back room, the afterparty, the drive down Sunset when the streets are empty and you’re not sure if you’re chasing something or running away from it. Becker and Fagen made the sordid sound elegant, and on Gaucho, they were never more precise—or more dangerous.
