Can't Buy A Thrill

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On the one hand, Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album is home to some of the most definitive and best-known songs in 1970s American rock; on the other, it’s barely a glimpse of where the band went next. Having bonded over Beat poetry and 1950s jazz—not to mention a shared sense of humor so dry and bitter, it stings more than a half-century later—college students Donald Fagen and Walter Becker tried their hand at selling pop songs to others before effectively realizing nobody was weird enough to play their music but them. The Steely Dan sound was too restrained to qualify as jazz, too sophisticated to count as rock, and too obscure to be categorized as pop. Yet on <i>Can’t Buy a Thrill</i>, Fagen and Becker managed to stretch the parameters of all three genres in ways that made the group seem totally (if quietly) radical compared to most of what was going on the radio at the time. As the duo put it in the album’s belated liner note, Fagen and Becker had arrived in California with a book of songs that had to be “adjusted and refined to take into account the new musical environment in which we found ourselves operating, and also to reflect our belated understanding of the aesthetic shortcomings of some of our less-than-accessible, more doggedly surrealist effort.” For the English speakers out there, that translates into such radio-dominating <i>Can’t Buy a Thrill</i> breakthroughs as “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ In the Year,” and “Dirty Work.” .

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