The longest title on a Steely Dan song ever, “Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More” is another SD song set in the environs of the duo’s youth, and probably written when they still lived there.
This is first appearance of famed session guitarist Larry Carlton on a Steely Dan recording, and his wiggly lines bring out both the blues footing of the song and the hokey, colorful but doomed old boozer of the story’s main character. But more on Carlton later.
For now, it’s good enough to enjoy Becker and Fagen again take the blues form and re-harmonize it in their own way, singing about some drunken old fool driving his Eldorado out to Hackensack. Daddy don’t need no fine cigar, but we know you’re smoking wherever you are …
A drive-by observer of the jazz scene S. Victor Aaron was a long-time SQL demon for a Fortune 100 company by day before advancing to popcorn factory laborer. His musings are strewn across the interwebs on jazz.com, AllAboutJazz.com, a football discussion board and some inchoate Amazon customer reviews of records from the late 1990s under a pseudonym that will never be revealed. Follow him on Twitter: @SVictorAaron. Contact Something Else! at [email protected].
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having followed Steely Dan extremely closely for decades, I’ve never heard that this song was written in New York City. Where did you get that information? Where can I find out more and read where they said that?