Steely Dan - VH-1 Storytellers, Sony Studios, New York City, 2-1-2000

Next up for the "VH-1 Storytellers" series is Steely Dan.

The band Steely Dan, basically a duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen plus supporting musicians, originally existed from 1971 to 1981. Even back then, they stopped touring by the end of 1974. But they reformed in 1993. At first, they just did some tours. But in 2000, they released their first studio album since 1980, "Two Against Nature." The last two songs here, "Cousin Dupree" and "What a Shame about Me," are from that album.

Everything here is officially unreleased. As usual for this series, I had to do a lot of editing, especially to get the applause at the ends of songs to flow naturally into the next track. As usual for this series, part of the first song, "FM (No Static at All)," was cut off. But unusually, most of another song, "Do It Again," was missing. This probably was the case on the TV show and not just the bootleg, since the total time for the episode was typical for the show. But I found alternate versions from other TV shows the band did in 2000, so now both of those can be heard in full. That's why those two have "[Edit]" in their titles (even though most of the rest of the tracks have at least minor edits too).

Becker and Fagen rarely talked much during their concerts, so it's especially welcome to see a lot of banter between songs here.

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 FM [No Static at All] [Edit] (Steely Dan)
02 talk (Steely Dan)
03 Peg (Steely Dan)
04 talk (Steely Dan)
05 Kid Charlemagne (Steely Dan)
06 talk (Steely Dan)
07 Bad Sneakers (Steely Dan)
08 talk (Steely Dan)
09 Josie (Steely Dan)
10 Do It Again [Edit] (Steely Dan)
11 talk (Steely Dan)
12 Cousin Dupree (Steely Dan)
13 talk (Steely Dan)
14 What a Shame about Me (Steely Dan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17168612/STELYDN2000StrytllrsSnyStdosNwYrkC__2-1-2000_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/K5uUjJWu

The cover is a screenshot of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (with keyboard) from this exact concert. I upgraded the image quality using the Krea AI program.

Steely Dan - The Bear (1980)

It's not often that I post true "lost" studio albums, but here is one. This Steely Dan is contains completely unreleased material (save for one song), has fantastic sound quality, and is arguably at the same level of musical quality as their other albums. I've been aware of this collection of material for years, but I was waiting for some final pieces to fall into place before posting it here. Now they've fallen. So if you're a Steely Dan fan, this is a must have.

Here's the story behind this music as I understand it. Steely Dan put out a series of acclaimed albums from 1972 to 1977. But when it came time for them to complete their next album, "Gaucho," they ran into some problems that caused delays. 

One issue had to do with their record company planning to charge an extra dollar for the album over the other new studio albums they were selling, something the band members opposed. Another issue was a conflict with the record company over just who had the rights to do certain things. Yet another issue was that the band was down to just a duo by this time, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who were the two main creative forces since the beginning. But the relationship between them was becoming increasingly strained, largely due to Becker's increasing drug use. (A year after the album was released, the band would break up for more than a decade.) To make matters worse, Becker got in a car accident and was immobilized for six months. Furthermore, both of them were musical perfectionists, but they took that to new extremes, sometimes recording dozens of takes for seemingly trivial reasons.

The long and short of all that is that it took from 1977 to 1980 for "Gaucho" to be released, while they had previously released six albums in six years. Before, there had been almost no unused songs. Often, they had resorted to going back to earlier unreleased songs written before their first album (of which there were many) to fill up their albums. But with three years passing for "Gaucho," they had a big surplus this time. And since they had such high levels of consistency and quality, even their outtakes were generally very good. 

None of these songs have been officially released in any form, with one key exception that I was discuss later. But different versions have leaked to the public over the years, with one key leak of a song taking place only last year (2023). However, many of the versions were incomplete, and/or suffered sound quality issues. But also, in recent years, audio editing technology has increased by leaps and bounds, using many of the same aspects of generative AI that has made the news, such as Chat GPT. Using these new tools, fans have created mixes of these songs fixing the sound quality issues. Some musically talented fans have even gone further and added in their own musical instrumentation to fill in missing pieces, especially since some of the songs were never completely finished. 

All the songs here use special mixes done by others, so all I have to do was collect them. For that, I mostly followed the recommendations of a YouTuber named AE Collins. Two of the songs here are "outfakes," which I define to mean they had added music not on the original recordings. Those two are "Kulee Baba" and "Talkin' Bout My Home." Both of them contain vocals from the original recordings, but have music by a very talented person named Michael Caplin. In the case of Kulee Baba, I believe he added in all the instrumentation! But if you listen, you would never know, because it's played in the exact style of Steely Dan. 

The only song here that has been officially released is "FM (No Static at All)." This didn't appear on any Steely Dan album at the time, but it was released both as a single and on the soundtrack to the movie "FM" in 1978. There actually were four different versions released in total, including a long 12 Inch single version. Some versions contain a guitar solo, and other versions contain a saxophone solo. Different fans have combined them to create a maximally long version with both the guitar and saxophone solos. I've used that. So while the song is a well known hit, this is a special edit that is unreleased. As far as I know, it seems to be the only other non-album track from this era. Most versions of the "Gaucho" outtakes albums don't include it, but I think it fits in great.

If there was an alternate universe in which this album really was released, it's hard to say when exactly that would have been. Perhaps it would have come out in 1979, which would make the inclusion of "FM" from 1978 more fitting. Or perhaps it would have come out after "Gaucho," in 1981 or thereabouts. I'm going with 1980, since that's when I figure all the recording for all of these ended. 

By the way, the last song, "Were You Blind That Day," is the only one that isn't a totally unique song that didn't make any of the band's studio albums. Eventually, it was reworked into the song "Third World Man," which made it to the "Gaucho" album. But while the music is basically the same, the lyrics are totally different, so I figured it merited inclusion.

You can find more information about this topic at the Wikipedia entry on the "Gaucho" album. There's a whole section just on the outtakes. Here's the link:

Gaucho (album) - Wikipedia

This album is 44 minutes long.

01 Kulee Baba [Michael Caplin Outfake] (Steely Dan)
02 I Can't Write Home about You [Jive Miguel Mix] (Steely Dan)
03 Kind Spirit [Bleu's Audio Archive Mix] (Steely Dan)
04 Stand by the Seawall [Jive Miguel Mix] [Instrumental] (Steely Dan)
05 F.M. [No Static at All] [Extended Mix] (Steely Dan)
06 The Bear [Jive Miguel Mix 2] (Steely Dan)
07 Talkin' Bout My Home [Michael Caplin Outfake] (Steely Dan)
08 The Second Arrangement [Andreas Mixes Mix] (Steely Dan)
09 Were You Blind That Day [Early Version of Third World Man] (Steely Dan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16509254/STELYDN1980ThBer_atse.zip.html

Different people have come up with different names for this album of outtakes, such as "Gaucho II." "The Bear" seems to be a particularly popular name, after one of the songs. I did a Google search for "Steely Dan" and "The Bear," and found the image I used for the cover included in a YouTube video. I couldn't figure out who made it or what it's from, but I think it's a great fit. My only change is that I cropped it differently.

The Dukes of September (Donald Fagen, Michael McDonald & Boz Scaggs) - The Greek Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, 9-29-2010

A few days ago, I didn't even know this group existed. I randomly stumbled on this recording while searching for something else. I was so impressed by the sound quality of this bootleg recording, as well as the performance, that I'm sharing it straight away.

The Dukes of September are mainly made up of Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, and Boz Scaggs from his long solo career. From time to time, some artists who were big in earlier decades have teamed up with others so they can still play larger concert venues. For instance, Bob Dylan shared a billing with Paul Simon for a tour so they could fill the largest stadiums. But this is different. This isn't just a case of one person doing a set of their hits, followed by someone else doing their hits, etc... Instead, all three stars stayed on stage the whole concert and played and/or sang on all the songs. For another, while they did do some of their best known hits, about half of the songs are covers that none of them had previously done on record.

You can read more about the Dukes of September at the Wikipedia entry here:

The Dukes of September - Wikipedia

My short summary is that these three stars went on tour together from 1989 to 1992, along with some other less famous stars, such as Phoebe Snow, Eddie Brigati of the Rascals, and blues legend Charles Brown, under the name The New York Rock and Soul Revue. They released a live album in 1991 entitled "Live at the Beacon." They revived their partnership with a new name and more concert tours from 2010 to 2012, though this time without the other stars. However, two female vocalists were included, Carolyn Escoffery and Catherine Russell, and they sing lead vocals on a few of the songs here.

Personally, based on this recording, I prefer the Dukes of September over the New York Rock and Soul Revue, and I much prefer this concert bootleg over that other band's live album. It helps that this one is a lot longer, at two hours and eight minutes compared to an hour and six minutes. But also, I think it works better with more of a focus on the three major stars instead of including a bunch of lesser stars. For instance, on "Live at the Beacon," Boz Scaggs only sang lead on one song, whereas here he sang a bunch.

Strangely, the Dukes of September never released any official album, live or studio. They closest they came is a performance recorded in New York City and played as part of "Great Performances" on PBS. It was later released as a DVD, but not in any audio format. About half of the songs on that are different than the ones here, so maybe I'll find enough material to post a different concert from this bunch someday.

It seems Donald Fagen of Steely Dan was the main impetus for this group. His wife was the producer for their tours and those of their earlier incarnation, and Fagen acted as an MC of sorts, doing most of the talking between songs.

As I mentioned above, the sound quality of this is absolutely fantastic. It's hard to believe it's only a bootleg, because it's recorded and mixed so well that it sounds better than many official live albums. I can only guess that this was professionally done with plans for a possible official album that never came to fruition. 

There's only one snag, and it's a rather big one, in my opinion: the soundboard recording was so very good that not much of the audience could be heard after each song. But there was enough there so that I was able to boost the volume until it more or less sounded like a typical cheering crowd.

If you're a fan of Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, and/or Boz Scaggs, you should check it out. As nice as their versions of their own songs are, I think it's even more interesting hearing this bunch do lots of unexpected cover songs. They played songs by Don Covay, the Grateful Dead, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, the Band, Mink DeVille, the O'Jays, the Beach Boys, Thunderclap Newman, and more. I think it's pretty clear they were having an especially good time playing songs other than their same old hits that probably bored them by this point in their careers.

01 Sookie Sookie (Dukes of September)
02 Heighty Hi (Dukes of September)
03 talk (Dukes of September)
04 Don’t Mess Up a Good Thing (Dukes of September)
05 talk (Dukes of September)
06 Shakedown Street (Dukes of September)
07 talk (Dukes of September)
08 You Never Can Tell (Dukes of September)
09 talk (Dukes of September)
10 I've Got News for You (Dukes of September)
11 Green Flower Street (Dukes of September)
12 talk (Dukes of September)
13 Miss Sun (Dukes of September)
14 talk (Dukes of September)
15 I Keep Forgettin' (Dukes of September)
16 talk (Dukes of September)
17 Rock Steady (Dukes of September)
18 talk (Dukes of September)
19 Rag Mama Rag (Dukes of September)
20 The Shape I'm In (Dukes of September)
21 Love TKO (Dukes of September)
22 talk (Dukes of September)
23 I Live the Life I Love (Dukes of September)
24 talk (Dukes of September)
25 Cadillac Walk (Dukes of September)
26 talk (Dukes of September)
27 What a Fool Believes (Dukes of September)
28 IGY [What a Beautiful World] (Dukes of September)
29 talk (Dukes of September)
30 Lowdown (Dukes of September)
31 Takin' It to the Streets (Dukes of September)
32 talk (Dukes of September)
33 Reelin' in the Years (Dukes of September)
34 Love Train (Dukes of September)
35 talk (Dukes of September)
36 Help Me Rhonda (Dukes of September)
37 Peg (Dukes of September)
38 talk (Dukes of September)
39 Something in the Air (Dukes of September)
40 talk (Dukes of September)
41 Sookie Sookie [Reprise] (Dukes of September) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/U4mwjDeH

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/785DIcJ4fei3QbL/file

The cover art shows, from left to right: Michael McDonald, Boz Scaggs, and Donald Fagen. It was taken in August 2010, but I don't know the location. In February 2025, I upgraded the image with the help of the Krea AI program.