The overly generous folks at Walter Becker Media just dropped yet another shard of unfinished work from the late, great Steely Dan cofounder, and “Lucy D” officially sees the light of day for the first time.
This song wasn’t close to being cake; Walter Becker left it behind still a soupy batter. But like a good baking recipe full of sugary stuff, it’s still fun to lick the spoon. Armed with nothing more than a Casio-like keyboard and a rhythm track that would re-emerge on “Down In The Bottom”, “Lucy D” is the ‘beatnik queen’ that appears to be the target for this song’s one night stand – but with Becker’s old school hip lyrics, one can never be certain.
Even the timeline for this single-tracked pre-demo isn’t given: that Casio and the computer-driven beat is what is making me guess “circa 1992” during preparations for 11 Tracks of Whack but I feel pretty good about that guess.
One little tidbit that is known is that Becker originally intended ‘Lucy’ to be ‘Chelsea’ but changed the name of the protagonist by the time he made this tape. However, he forgot about that for one of the choruses when he sings “I got trouble, big trouble with my Chelsea {sic} Lucy D.” Musically, it’s a funky little number, more in the realm of R’n’B than that urbane jazzy rock that he and Donald Fagan are famous for. In other words, it certainly would have fit right in on Whack, and the W-word is even thrown around here.
That wasn’t enough to make the cut on this or any Walter Becker record, and when you stop to think of the quality of tracks that did make it — and a few more that clearly should have — then it becomes somewhat understandable why “Lucy D” didn’t get in the oven to bake.
And yet, Becker’s chaff batter is better than most musician’s wheat cake.
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