'Do it again': Me and Steely Dan

Twenty-five years ago I stayed out past 2 a.m., playing Steely Dan's hypnotic, compelling song, "Do it Again," all night, over and over on the jukebox at Dirty Frank's, that funky downtown Philly hipster bar where, legend has it, movie star Peter Boyle drank, driven there in a chauffeured limousine.

Me, I walked. I lived down the street.

Dirty Frank's, the no-nonsense, no-sign joint at the corner of 13th and Pine, was an alluringly dingy dive with cheap drinks, a sawdust floor, the best jukebox in the city, certainly a few of the sexiest bartenders (all named Bill), an active dart-board, pickled eggs, and an endless array of anonymous listeners on either side of my barstool.

That one particular "Steely Dan" night, I was lovelorn for the musician dude who would someday become my husband. A bewildering incident involving my attempted delivery of a home-made chocolate cake at midnight, someone else's bra, and my boyfriend's temporarily guilty conscience, had conspired to rip me askew. All I knew was I had to hear that song of Steely Dan's, and only that song, again and again, with its rather oblique chorus of "You go back Jack do it again/ Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round/ You go back Jack do it again."

TRENDING: Is this what you voted for, America?

Evocative, ain't it?

Coincidentally, my engineer friend Werner declared yesterday that's the song he wants played at his funeral! If he was going to have a funeral. Which he isn't. But still.
Do it again!

The song simply obsessed me. Who knows what it meant. Maybe it was just about a hamster. Or maybe I was addicted to its dissonance. The nasal whine. The odd guitar chords. But it was like calming electrodes sunk into my brain. Now it amuses and even astounds me that suddenly, "overnight," the group Steely Dan, actually a duo consisting of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, dramatically garners multiple Grammy Awards for its music, seizing control of the American ear this year with the album "Two Against Nature" the way Santana did last year with "Supernatural." And yet "Do it Again," that song I couldn't live without -- and still can't -- came from the group's 1972 album, "Can't Buy a Thrill," released nearly 30 years back, which still gets major radio play!

What I remember of that time in Dirty Frank's, though, besides some kindly, patient restaurant guy named Mark offering his total attention to my mawkish post-adolescent tale of woe -- or was it whoa? -- was the music. Without Steely Dan's music, that interminable and decidedly unenchanted evening, I'd have been inconsolable.

Inconsolable, something like the time Stacey the barmaid gave a really nice guy, Javier, her former squeeze, a white plastic bag filled with dozens and dozens of cookies she had made early that morning, and a card saying how she still feels about him -- so what if it's hopeless; she'll never give up, no matter that he walked in on her and somebody else and was skeeved out about it.

The white plastic bag was like I'd use, except to camouflage a serious gift, which reminds me of living around the corner from my boyfriend Beau when we were both 22 long ago. How one Monday evening I was so overcome with love for him I actually baked a chocolate cake, Duncan Hines, I think, three whole eggs and double-rich icing. Though, unlike Stacey, I didn't cook much, I had that special feeling about Beau; he was so, so wonderful.

And then I bring the cake over to his apartment building where he had his cute $55-a-month studio apartment with the fold-down Murphy bed in the wall, and I ring the bell, and he comes down and answers the door in his undershirt showing his muscles, his healed broken collarbone, and the chest-hair he had in the shape of a fir-tree. But I can't understand why he's all flustered and nervous; see, if he's so crazy about chocolate cake, and me, then why wouldn't he let me come up?

Well, Stacey, can't you guess the reason? He had company upstairs -- girl company. Someone he knew from high school, someone he was hot for ever since they were teen-agers. And me coming over with that exquisitely sinful double-rich chocolate cake at midnight and ringing the bell startled the heck out of him -- yes, just starting to take off her bra, which he later reported to me was lacy and black and fine. And he was very embarrassed and sheepish, and made her leave right away, though he didn't tell me that until the next week.

Back then I didn't make a fuss about such things. I could hold my questions inside with an unexpressed grace. And, yes, Stacey, we did get married, and soon, but you know it didn't last, how could it? And the lesson of this incident could keep a person busy for years, but I wasn't built that way, Stacey, and I'm still not.

Music is like that. And listening to the music of Steely Dan is even more so, when it comes to bringing these things back to mind. Their music is an aide-memoire, the Proustian teacake-equivalent triggering an entire universe of memories, dreams, reflections. And nobody's dissed in a Steely Dan song. The lyrics are part Symbolist poetry, part incantation, part message-in-a-bottle. No guns. No curses. No incitement to violence. No rapes. No bitches. No hos. No wonder last June, Becker and Fagen were honored as "The Most Significant Songwriters of the Century" by an Illinois high school music program. They were cited "For Their Outstanding Contribution To Popular Music As Masterful Lyricists, Exemplary Composers, And Musical Storytellers." I concur.

"Like ourselves," the duo writes on their website, "our fans have lived through a lot, including (depending on their age) most if not all of the following: The Sixties; Bossa Nova; The death of jazz; The New Thing; The end of the Sixties; One and one-half Nixon administrations; The War; The Disco Inferno; The Jonestown Massacre; The Rise and Fall of Soul Music; the Death of Underground Radio/advent of the Gordon Liddy talk show; Eight years of Bedtime For Bonzo; The rise of MTV; All those books with the word "Postmodern" in the title; The Drug Wars; The New Wave; More MTV; The War; More drugs; The Mt. Hood Jazz Festival; The Apotheosis of Pro Wrestling; The Fall of '92; Wynton Marsalis; and you know the rest."

Loving the music of Steely Dan as I have, lo, these many years, I had no idea they would ever become so ... trendy, so in. But I am still crazy about them anyhow, and I wouldn't even trade them to you for five Billy Joels or three Paul Simons, so there!