“Show Biz Kids”—first song, side two of Countdown to Ecstasy (1973)

After a break, for no reason and lots of reasons, I decided to get back to writing about Steely Dan songs, picking what to write about using a random system, but now including their later records, and Fagen and Becker solo records. As luck would have it, the first song I landed on was “Show Biz Kids,” which at one time I considered my favorite of all Steely Dan songs. As an exercise, a few years back, I ranked all songs in order—and while I’ve abandoned trying to do that, I still consider this song one of my very favorites. It’s from their second LP, when they seemed very much like a band, didn’t have as many guest musicians, but weren’t yet the most Steely Dan version of Steely Dan. Either you know what I’m talking about or you don’t, and if you don’t I’d like to try to explain over coffee, sometime.

There is a very notable guest musician on this song, Rick Derringer, who had, and as I write this still has, a long career as a rock’n’roll guitarist. He’s a guitar maniac from Ohio, and I always thought of him as “Joe Walsh from the other side of the tracks” (even though Joe Walsh is already from the other side of the tracks—but there’s a lot tracks, you know?) He had some hit songs, like “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” that gets under your skin like an untreatable parasite. I’m going to guess he’s a swell guy, too—until someone tells me otherwise—I’m not picking on him. I’m guessing Skunk Baxter could have played the slide guitar on this song (that guy can play anything)—but maybe not—maybe you needed to grow up where there’s meth in your water supply. Anyway, it’s the thing you hear first and foremost on this song (at least until the “bad word” in the third verse). Maybe, for some people, it’s all you hear, that guitar. This being Steely Dan, though, of course, the more you listen, the deeper you can go, and the deeper you go, the weirder it gets.

This might qualify for strangest SD song ever. It’s experimental, it’s punk, it’s weird. I went several decades not having a clue what the backup singers were singing throughout the song, and why it otherwise is so odd, but finally they invented the internet and I read some things which might or might not be true, but I’ll go with it. Apparently, they are repeating the line: “Go to Lost Wages,” which is allegedly from a Lenny Bruce joke referring to Las Vegas as “Lost Wages.” Then, I also read that this song is built on a tape loop, which is why it sounds contemporary, in a way. But this was back when you had to actually make the loop with audio tape and get it to run through the machine. Since it was a physical loop, it was long, and they had to run it out of the studio, down the stairs, into the deli, and around the meat slicer. I’m exaggerating, but barely—also, I was not there—but listen to it. It’s got a crazy sound.

There is a bit of self-referential nonsense (“Steely Dan T-shirt”)—and this was back before “merch” became one of pop culture’s 10 Most Annoying Words. My favorite part of the song is after the guitar break, essentially the third verse, and the guitar drops out, and the tambourine doubles, and the verse is only one line: “Show business kids making movies of themselves you know they don’t give a f— about anybody else.” It doesn’t really clear up all the obscure references earlier in the song, but it makes everything make sense, somehow. It makes the song. And it’s not like they try to obscure the “f-word”—it’s spit in your face with angry confrontation. And this was the first single from the record! What the fuck were they thinking? It’s like anti-payola. And then… the end of the song piles up the percussion, the guitar melts down, there’s tape loops of voices, conversation, harmonica—it sounds like a traffic jam at rush hour on the first day of the apocalypse.

—Randy Russell 9.2.20