“Fire in the Hole”—second song, side two of Can't Buy a Thrill (1972)

This is just one of my favorite Steely Dan songs of all, one I totally overlooked in the Seventies when I bought their first album (probably the third of their records I obtained)—it's subtle, doesn't jump out like the hits, and is pretty mellow and jazzy. After all those decades, when I came back to SD, this is one the songs that killed me. On the back of the album cover there are minimal clues and credits about each song (including who sang it, since there were three singers on this record). This one says: “Steel guitar by the Skunk.” It's some fine playing, understated and beautiful—I'm not sure when I became a huge fan of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter—but at first it probably had to do with his name, look, and persona, before I realized he's the guy you want playing on your record. It's mainly a piano song, very much jazz sounding, like one that would be more prominent a few records later. It's a very simple song, two verses and a chorus, with a nice piano solo in the middle, and then a lovely steel guitar solo at the end. Lyrically, you can just kind of let it go and be satisfied, in that it sounds at once very personal and also totally ambiguous. Of course, I can't just let it go, seeing how pretty much every SD song intrigues me. I remember the expression, “fire in the hole” from Apocalypse Now (1979), I think when a live shell goes into a boat cabin, something like that... it's a military phrase, I guess, probably in every war movie ever made. Here, as a metaphor, it sounds like it's about the point in a relationship where things have gone bad, from the point of view of the man who doesn't have the courage to end things, even though he knows that's the right, and inevitable, conclusion. Another happy one! The best couple lines are: “With a cough, I shake it off, and work around my yellow stripe. Should I hide, and eat my pride, or wait until it's good and ripe?” That's just an inspired bit of lyric writing—and it only took me 45 years to notice it.

—Randy Russell 12.15.19