If I’m ever going to achieve monumental success in the music business, it’s going to be to the tune of Steely Dan’s Gaucho, because somewhere down the road, that album stirred within me the desire to lead a lavish lifestyle. I sometimes fantasize about what that life would entail. A ranch in Laurel Canyon. A ’92 Saab 900s Turbo that has less than 100k miles on it. Spontaneous trips to Japan. A legitimate understanding of Zen Buddhism. After-parties. VIP rooms. A fully stocked liquor cabinet for entertaining foreign dignitaries, rock critics, and sophisticated art-women. Not to mention a seemingly endless creative spark to keep it all going.
The fantasy is, obviously, far from reach at this point, but listening to Gaucho keeps the fire alive; a daydream to keep me occupied at work, an escape from the harsh reality of post-academia (a stock’s-up-stock’s-down wasteland of non-jobs and non-careers).
Much like the lifestyle it hearkens back to though, Gaucho‘s tone is actually depressing when you get to the heart of it. On the surface, it’s a smooth, rhythmic romp through the annals of LA’s high society (a scandalous affair with two exotic women in “Babylon Sisters,” a tag-along tale of a basketball star and his cocaine dealer in “Glamour Profession,” for example), but the further you navigate through the slick guitar diddies, the more-machine-than-man grooves, and the pulsing wave of electric pianos and synthesizers, the more it becomes apparent that there’s something kind of sad at play here.
You revisit the world of expensive company and expensive drugs and suddenly those exotic women are high-priced escorts, that basketball star a junkie, and his dealer a delusional sociopath who assumes clients as friends.
I’m well aware of the cost: the loss of youth among the youthful and the dark side of drug-dependency, but I can’t help feeling a little intrigued. This is how my idea of LA has always been, even before the Dan factored into the equation. The ever-present anticipation that something big could happen at any moment, whether that be fulfilling the long-forgotten theory that California would someday drift off into the Pacific, or running into a childhood idol who just-so-happened to be interested in helping you make it to the “big time.”
There’s something about Steely Dan’s LA that beckons me, but it’s about as close to reality as me going to Japan and learning the language. So I’ll keep it in storage somewhere, for the head-conversations I’ll have when I’m at work.
