“Gaucho”—first song, side two of Gaucho (1980)

I've only just started to try to come around to the Gaucho LP, but at this point it feels sad, sleazy, and mostly about drugs and saying goodbye. It was, in some respects, the last Steely Dan album, after an amazing streak of great music—but to put things in perspective, Walter Becker, at the time, was half the age I am now—which is kind of weird—seeing how they always seemed old, and I've always felt young. This song seems to be about drug addiction tearing apart a relationship. Trying to interpret songs and stories, people get confused because something can be both autobiographical and fiction at the same time—in fact, most everything is, to one degree or another. I've always felt like this record, and this song in particular, sounded like a vapid TV show, but now that I'm focusing on the lyrics, I'm hearing the aching melancholy in it, which is what might help me come around to it. Supposedly, Becker was using heroin around this time, not real surprising for a successful 30 year old NYC/LA musician who worshiped Charlie Parker and named his band after a William S. Burroughs reference. I guess for many of us, heroin has had a stigma—it's the drug on the other side of the street—and even to this day I'm sure many garden-variety chocaholic, porn-addicts still think of the heroin addict as a scab-covered, hollow-eyed ghost—when in reality, theres a good chance that your some of your friends, your neighbor, the person in the next cubicle are addicted to some kind of opiates or opioids. Anyway, The Gaucho is heroin, the obvious, cheap lover who becomes the unwelcome house-guest of this remarkably successful (six fine LPs in six years) marriage. This is what you write about if you're Steely Dan; honestly, this is what any of us would write about. So what's the Custerdome? It's essentially a MacGuffin, and you can come up with your own interpretation (though, I'd be the most skeptical about any interview answer from Becker or Fagen). In a general sense, I feel like it's love—and maybe this is the purest expression of love of any Steely Dan song. But then, in its most literal (and thus meaningless) sense, I'm guessing the Custerdome is simply Walter Becker's head.

—Randy Russell 3.1.20