Tampa Calling

This weekend, I determined that the quality of your back-up singers determines the cheese factor of your show. Steely Dan’s were a trio of lovely ladies straight out of 1989, whose vocals were overshadowed by bad hair and fashion, and badly choreographed dance hands. Yes, I said it — dance hands, those theatric gestures all the drama club kids make when singing in musicals, the ones that don’t really express anything but keep your arms from hanging down at your sides like wet noodles. So, yes, I was distracted by the trio, but I was also just not that into the music, either. (Photos by Phil Bardi taken from the soundboard.)

Full disclosure: I am not among the loyal legion of Dan fans. I can understand and appreciate the influence of the progressive jazz-rockers, and I like some songs from their catalog, although they are guilty of recording one of my least favorite songs, ever, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” (I’m a hater on “Deacon Blues,” too.) There’s just something about the Steely Dan sound — its slick production quality, Donald Fagen’s vocal tone — that rubs me wrong. But my mind has been changed by greater things and music is oftentimes different when consumed in a live setting, and since my husband is a devotee and has never seen them live, and since I’ve never seen them perform live, either, I took us both to the show at Ruth Eckerd Hall this past Friday, June 12. The Florida leg of the “Rent Party ‘09″ tour was a sort of warm-up for the upcoming series of special bigger-city bills where the band will play one of each of their classic albums in its entirety at each show.

The support band warmed up the crowd with lively jazz — a fourtet of horns, drums, bass, keys, guitar. Then co-brains/core members, guitarist Walter Becker and vocalist/keyboardist/frontman Fagen, made their “entrance” with back-up singers in tow. Fagen, in sunglasses, a rumpled white sports coat, and dark pants and tee, sauntered onstage with his personality on high, melodica in hand, and when he wasn’t singing, or singing and playing keys, he was blowing on that dinky piano horn thing like nobody’s business. (No, I couldn’t take the dude seriously, but then, I don’t really think he took himself seriously, either.)

The band was tight, the horn players on cue, but the music still had that slick quality, the back-up singers were good enough but more a distraction than a worthy embellishment, and the audience of mostly older folks who seemed to be digging the show big time, enough to stand up and applaud at various key points, never went so far as to do any dancing, aside from a few people on the sidelines where the ushers were most lenient.

This is not to say I didn’t enjoy myself. The “Hey 19″ break where Becker told a story about the good old days of Scientology — when you could go to a Scientology dance and pick up a nice Scientologist girl and get invited in for a nightcap of “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian …,” and the sing-along that followed — was particularly amusing. Discovering and appreciating “Aja” (from the album of the same name) was a nice surprise, the song progressive, more instrumental and mostly free of the back-up singing that riddled the rest of the Dan fare that night. And the one moment where I thought the back-up singers actually fit, “Babylon Sisters” — that was nice, too. But I started checking the time less than an hour into the show and I walked out generally feeling like I could probably not see Steely Dan ever again and be okay with it.

My husband had a good time, at least, though he had the same complaints as me about the crowd’s lacklusterness.

(The setlist for those looking, courtesy of Radio Dupree):

Time Out of Mind
Godwhacker
Reelin’ In the Years
Bad Sneakers
Two Against Nature
Black Friday
Aja
Sign In Stranger
Hey Nineteen
Parker’s Band
Babylon Sisters
Daddy Don’t Live in That NYC No More (Becker vocal)
Here at the Western World
Band intros by Walter while the choir sings The Supremes’ Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart
Black Cow
Peg
Kid Charlemagne

Encore:
Josie
My Old School

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