It's funny how things happen sometimes. There was some ongoing work on restoring some of the surviving tapes of this song [1] which was already yielding some very listenable results; it'll be interesting to see how the release of these tapes changes things.
Yeah, those cds and tapes you could get remarkably cheap and they sounded like total s*it as far as sound quality, but at the same time those were some of my favorite performances. Like hearing Donald sing "Brooklyn" on piano.
This is one of the great examples of how true artists produce gold and then the real world sets in and the relatives (who were not there at the time) force a bunch of legal issues and fight over copyright.
Somewhere in Nirvana/Heaven/Whatever Steely Dan songs are available in all their forms. We will look back on this era and just do a facepalm....
I highly recommend Fagan's book "Eminent Hipsters."
I've always loved Steely Dan's music, but I'm not enough of a musicologist to understand Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's legendary pickiness in the studio. Were they just idiosyncratic? Or did they have objectively higher standards?
I know my question is a little vague, but it's coming from a place of admiration.
Listening to this song right now. What a banger! I love finding lost or cut things like this. I've been really vibing on the Daft Punk samples from RAM lately, as well.
