by Pico
So a couple of years ago we saluted the national shopping holiday called Black Friday with some musings about a 1975 Steely Dan song of the same name. This time, we’re going to mark the occasion with another ditty by the Boys From Bard (Walter Becker and Donald Fagen), called “Everything Must Go.”
This, of course, is the title track from Steely Dan’s last album from seven years ago (hey guys, you’re due for another one). In the Field Guide to Steely Dan that I’ve written, edited and published 5 editions in my mind, Everything Must Go ranks as SD’s most underrated album and probably up in their top 3 or 4 albums overall. It’s the only one that’s somewhat thematic, full of acid wit observations about the dotcom bust America of the early 2000’s. In fact both the first and last songs are about shutting down a business, and the narrator-as-retail-store-pitchman on “The Last Mall” might be the more relevant topic on a day like today. But I gotta go with the album’s closer, “Everything Must Go.”
Musically, this fits the Grand Finale vibe: the bridge is previewed at the start as a free flowing sax expression from Walt Weiskopf, a la “Acknowledgement” from Trane’s A Love Supreme, after which the song proper kicks in at a slow but not quite ballad pace. The melody has a nostalgic, almost show tune kind of feel to it, like as if Becker and Fagen wrote this song for Frank Sinatra. The song trots along on a crisp groove and Fagen delivers the lyrics with a tinge of the soulfulness of his idol Ray Charles.
Lyrically, it’s about shutting down a failed business, but in signature Dan fashion, it’s done with sarcasm and dry humor. Though the casual listen might not pick it up, the protagonists who are shuttering the store aren’t really taking it all that hard, as they know that even running a business poorly had it perks (“I move to dissolve the corporation in a pool of margaritas,” “It was sweet up at the top/’Til that ill wind started blowing/Now it’s cozy down below,” “First-run movies — does anybody get lucky twice?/Wouldn’t it be nice…”). They just shrugged their shoulders at the realization that in the end, they never took the “famous road not taken” and were probably ready to start another business to, um, do it again.
Fast-forward ten years later, and those “hard times” seem even less so today. We’ve seen some big-name retailers going under lately and this Christmas shopping season could be the final push to avoid that fate for many others. It’s not even Economics 101, but Steely Dan had already looked at how businesses in the U.S.A. deal with adversity with a sharp eye and dry humor during the last downturn, and by and large it applies to this one as well. All set to some primo jazzy-rock music, no less.
A song that mixes melancholy with sarcasm….who else but Walter Becker and Donald Fagen would come up with a song like that? And pull it off convincingly?
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