Katy Lied is the fourth studio album by American rock band Steely Dan, released by ABC Records in March 1975; reissues have been released by MCA Records since ABC Records was acquired by MCA in 1979. It was the first album the group made after they stopped touring, as well as their first to feature backing vocals by Michael McDonald.
The album was the first one recorded by Steely Dan after guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder left the group as a result of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's decision to stop touring and focus solely on recording with various studio musicians. Guitarist Denny Dias, a founding member of Steely Dan, contributed to the album as a session musician, as did vocalist Michael McDonald and drummer Jeff Porcaro, who were both members of Steely Dan's final touring band. Then only 20 years old, Porcaro played drums on every track on the album except "Any World (That I'm Welcome To)", which features session drummer Hal Blaine. Larry Carlton, who became a regular collaborator of the group, made his first appearance on a Steely Dan album playing guitar on "Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More".
Band leaders Becker & Fagen said they were dissatisfied with the album's sound quality because of an equipment malfunction with the then-new dbxnoise reduction system. The damage was mostly repaired after consulting with the engineers at dbx, but Becker & Fagen still refused to listen to the completed album.[citation needed]
Lyrics
"Black Friday", which features Michael Omartian on piano and David Paich on Hohnerelectric piano and was released as the first single from the album, relates the story of a crooked speculator who makes his fortune and absconds to Muswellbrook, New South Wales, Australia, as, according to Fagen, "It was the place most far away from LA we could think of". The town also "fit[s] the metre of the song and rhyme[s] with 'book'",[4] though Fagen did not realise that locals pronounce it "Musselbrook" (omitting the "w"), which makes the song grating for Australian fans. [5]
Title and packaging
The album's title comes from the lyrics of "Doctor Wu" ("Katy lies / You can see it in her eyes"), and the album cover is a picture of a katydid, a "singing" (stridulating) insect related to crickets and grasshoppers, as a pun on the title. Walter Becker told Rolling Stone, during the band's 2009 tour: "It's about that uneasy relationship between the patient and doctor. People put faith in doctors, yet they abuse their power and become dangerous."[6] The back cover photograph of Donald Fagen (in reindeer sweater) and Denny Dias (in overalls and sombrero and holding a tank of helium) was taken by Becker during the session (sometime in 1972-73) for their Schlitz beer jingle.[7]
Reviewing the album in 1975 for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau said that, while Katy Lied might be Steely Dan's "biggest" album to that point, he found it "slightly disappointing" on a musical level, citing the loss of lead guitarist Baxter and what he perceived as "cool, cerebral, one-dimensional" jazz guitar influences. Nonetheless, Christgau admitted that he played the album frequently,[18] and he voted it the third-best album of the year on his ballot for the 1975 Pazz & Jop critics poll,[19] on which it placed sixth.[20]John Mendelsohn was more critical in Rolling Stone, writing that "however immaculately tasteful and intelligent" Steely Dan's music may be in theory, it did not register with him emotionally and remained "exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock". Mendelsohn found the lyrics interesting, but inscrutable, the musicianship tasteful and well-performed, but not stimulating, and Fagen's singing unique-sounding, but seemingly passionless.[21] In a review in Rolling Stone from 1977, Cameron Crowe called the album "anonymous, absolutely impeccable swing-pop" with "no cheap displays of human emotion".[22]
Retrospectively, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic described the album as "a smoother version of Pretzel Logic" and "another excellent record" by Steely Dan.[8]Travis Elborough wrote in his 2008 book The Long-Player Goodbye: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again that Katy Lied, while not on par with Pretzel Logic (1974) or Aja (1977), was still "up there as jazz rock staples go".[23] In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Rob Sheffield said the album completed a trilogy of Steely Dan albums (the other parts being Countdown to Ecstasy (1973) and Pretzel Logic) that is "a rock version of Chinatown, a film noir tour of L.A.'s decadent losers, showbiz kids, and razor boys".[15] Jazz historian Ted Gioia cited the album as an example of Steely Dan "proving that pop-rock could equally benefit from a healthy dose of jazz" during their initial tenure, which coincided with a period when rock musicians frequently experimented with jazz idioms and techniques.[24]
Of lead single "Black Friday", Cash Box said that it contains elements that made earlier Steely Dan singles successful, such as "hot fender rhodes piano tracks, lead guitar work, rhythm that won't stop cooking and identifiable vocals and mix that lets you know Gary Katz has been hard at work on the knobs."[25]
^Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992: 23 years of hit singles & albums from the top 100 charts. St Ives, N.S.W, Australia: Australian Chart Book. p. 292. ISBN0-646-11917-6.
