Ah, Steely Dan, love ’em or hate ’em. The brainchild of jazzy rockers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Steely Dan was an experiment to bring rock and jazz together, an experiment that not everybody welcomed – and yet somehow, the group scored two massive hits with their 1972 debut, the slinky rocker “Do It Again” (whose lyrics allude somewhat nebulously to shady deeds going down) and the more upbeat and yet still lyrically cryptic “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”. And from there it was uphill in the charts, and downhill in the critics’ reviews, all the way.
Decade strings together Steely Dan’s most recognizable radio hits and a smattering of somewhat more obscure album tracks, all culled from the “band”‘s first ten years. And I put band in quotation marks because it really ceased to be that at some point – Becker and Fagen grew tired of the touring/promotional grind, disbanded the regular core members, and continued with Steely Dan as a studio-only entity. Granted, they had some of the best session players in the fields of rock and jazz by their side, and still scored on the charts, but the touring moratorium cost them more than a few fans.
As with most greatest hits albums, you can hardly critique the songs themselves – they aren’t new – but you can critique what’s included. That said, I’m glad that the theme song from the 1978 movie FM is the lead track on Decade – I’ve always loved the song (but not so much the movie) and didn’t want to bother with the double-disc FM soundtrack, so finally getting “FM” on a proper Steely Dan album is worth the admission charge in and of itself.
“Peg”, “Do It Again” and “Reeling In The Years” are some of my most enduring memories of ’70s radio – I mean, they did get played over and over, didn’t they? Unlike quite a few acts I could name from that era, though, Steely Dan’s output stands up to repeat listening. The bizarre melodic and harmonic twists that their songs throw at the listener are quite unlike anything we’ve heard before or since – even now that Becker and Fagen have forged some kind of truce and are playing (and, bizarrely enough, touring) together again. The new Steely Dan has nothing on the material from this era. It may be an unfair comparison to stack a new album up against a compilation of proven hits, but it’s almost like there are two different bands going by that name – the more recent incarnation having lost some of the nerve required to crash two very different flavors of music 
together over 30 years ago.
This is Steely Dan at its finest. I like their stuff, and I’ve even heard their full albums, but I think it’s safe to say that unless you’re an ardent fan, this album will cover your Steely Dan needs quite nicely. You just won’t need anything else.
- F.M. (4:50)
- Black Friday (3:33)
- Babylon Sisters (5:51)
- Deacon Blues (7:26)
- Bodhisattva (5:16)
- Hey Nineteen (5:06)
- Do It Again (5:56)
- Peg (3:58)
- Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number (4:30)
- Reeling In The Years (4:35)
- East St. Louis Toodle-oo (2:45)
- Kid Charlemagne (4:38)
- My Old School (4:46)
- Bad Sneakers (3:16)
Released by: MCA
Release date: 1985
Total running time: 66:26
