“Haitian Divorce”—second song, side two of The Royal Scam (1976)

This is a straight up story song, about “Babs and Clean Willy” (introduced in the first four words) that follows the fairly logical progression of a breakup—I'm not going to paraphrase a plot summary here—you can listen to it and make out every line clear as day, because Donald Fagen annunciates like he's chiseling into marble. “She drinks the zombie from the cocoa shell”—wow. The story, somewhat convoluted as it is, is all there in black and white, so to speak. It's a very, very catchy quasi-reggae song that, as it progresses, is increasingly dominated by a strange instrumental noise that, if you had never heard it before, you might be concerned that some animal was harmed to produce. Since I was one of the four billion people who bought “Frampton Comes Alive!” in 1976, however, I recognized it as some kind of a “talk box”—so I resorted to the internet to see who was playing it. I don't usually go in for this kind of gimmick, but it actually works in this song—maybe because there's the mention of a “baby” and subliminally you might connect this sound to a pre-language form of expression. Anyway, interestingly, I read that the sound is a guitar, played by Dean Parks, then altered via “talk box” by Walter Becker. How, exactly, I don't know, but I'm sure there are stories. But what this made me think of, more than anything else, was that Speed Racer episode where somehow Speed goes blind, and Racer X fakes broken legs so that he can ride with Speed, providing visual instructions while Speed works the car's controls, and they're able to then defeat Snake Oiler (who kind of sounds like a Steely Dan song character). I hold up this animated cultural moment as the beginning of this “teamwork” nonsense we're now mired in. Whether Steely Dan was directly influenced by Speed Racer or not is a matter of conjecture, but I wanted to be the first one in the wide world web to suggest it.

—Randy Russell 5.10.20