Steely Dan
“Time Out of Mind”
from Gaucho
MCA, 1980
You know something very un-Dan is going on with this song when you hear its first verse: “Son, you better be ready for love / On this glory day / This is your chance to believe / What I’ve got to say.” Wait–this is from the record that also contains “Hey Nineteen,” right? What’s more, Donald Fagen actually sings them with something approaching, dare I say it, conviction: “You better be ready for loooooove…This is your chance to belieeeeeeeve.” This over a relatively stark instrumental backing–drums (possibly programmed), a little electric piano and bass doing basically the same thing at the same time, a tee-tiny bit of Mark Knopfler guitar–so smooth that I heard Skunk Baxter recommended it to the Defense Department as a coating for surface-to-air missiles. This song is a more or less unreconstructed good time, something to dance and have fun to, which appearances to the contrary Steely Dan did very, very rarely. I think the most direct comparison can be made with “Josie,” the song that closed out Aja and represented to the band in particular what that album represented to them in general: their artistic high point. I know they’re less keen on Gaucho but this thing’s a marvel of production as well: the beat is so crisp, and any song that all but subliminally introduces the vocals of Michael McDonald until finally you’re like “Hey, where did he come from?” is alright by me. And like “Josie,” “Time Out of Mind” sings of having a tear-the-roof-off-the-sucker good time. But my favorite thing about both songs is that Fagen and Becker can’t quite bring themselves to sing about such fun in the present or even past tense. Awesome shit’s gonna go down “when Josie comes home,” whenever that might be. In “Time Out of Mind”‘s case, good stuff is gonna happen tonight: “Tonight when I chase the dragon / The water may change to cherry wine / And the silver will turn to gold.” Various online dictionaries assure me that “chase the dragon” does not necessarily mean smoking drugs, although clearly this is far from outside the realm of possibility where the Dan is concerned, but okay, fine; what’s more interesting to me is the way Fagen appears to psych himself up into believing he’s going to catch that dragon after all. “The water may change to cherry wine”–who knows? But then “The silver will turn to gold.” Tonight for sure!