Way back when Steely Dan Sunday was a weekly thing, we followed the track-by-track examination of Walter Becker’s 11 Tracks of Whack with a critique of a handful of recordings from those sessions that Becker deemed not up to snuff for inclusion on the album. One of those castoffs was a lover’s lament song titled “Lies I Can Believe.”
In the two-plus years since Becker has left us, his estate has put into the public realm many more demos from that era of varying recording and artistic quality, but all revealing at least a shard or two of that Walter Becker genius. The latest demo foisted on us today is a previously unknown, earlier take of “Lies I Can Believe” from during when the working title was “Love in the 4th,” a song that Becker co-wrote with long-time Steely Dan session guitar ace Dean Parks.
Bob Sheppard’s sax breaks between verses has that Pete Christlieb sentiment and the second time around he’s trailed by a short, sweet bass solo … no, wait, that’s Parks playing a low-tuned fretless guitar(!). In all of Parks’ countless sideman appearances, I’ve never heard him do anything like that. Neil Stubenhaus’ true bass lines forms a tight groove with John Keane’s snare drum, a contrast to the synth bass used in the later version. Sheppard’s sax was good enough for an encore on the outro, a little bit like “West of Hollywood” but it saunters, not sizzles.
It’s a long tune, running seven minutes; Becker wrote a whole lot of lyrics for this song and he repeats almost no lines. Yet, there were a couple more stanzas added for the later, 11TOW outtake.
The quality of this demo is a few notches higher than most of the other rough drafts we’ve heard from this time frame, and the relative slickness of it goes to the heart of today’s story. When Becker first set out to make 11 Tracks of Whack, he was laying down takes in a studio in Los Angeles. Before long the show got moved to his home studio in Maui and when the crew ditched LA, they also jettisoned the pristine LA studio ways of making a record. 11 Tracks of Whack initially shocks in its production values that was a universe apart from the perfection and grace of Gaucho, but that was precisely Walter Becker’s point. He sought to make a clean break from the band he had co-led with all its standard-setting sophistication, so he made his own Plastic Ono Band or McCartney.
Still and all, “Love in the 4th” is a tantalizing suggestion of what his debut album might have sounded like if he made his own The Nightfly instead. And I hear there might be more where that came from, too. More, please.
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