Steely Dan - Aja

Somewhere around the time dinosaurs walked the earth and Prince Charles started wearing Lady Diana’s clothes, I spent a summer working in radio. Those were odd days — or nights rather — plugging in commercials in the middle of the night to avoid the radio tax shows we were running (aka ‘ratings juggernaut’), and I used to take chances, mostly to keep myself awake beyond the darkness. Occasionally, that meant thumbing through a reservoir of old LPs from the station’s previous incarnation as an Album Oriented Rock enclave. Among those ruins lay the quirky sheen of Steely Dan, and from there on, my wee hours took to Fagen and Becker’s brand of jazz-rock urban dystopia. This week’s show featured a fog machine, a giant Godspell canvas, dissection of the differences between jazz and what’s “jazzy,” and a steady drumbeat of vitriol from one of us (Shane cough cough Shane). In between, we talk about the band construct that was Bow Wow Wow (and how young that singer was…her mother was not pleased), and Shane leaves us on “An Island.” Tune in to find out what that means.