STEELY DAN A BITTER PILL AT THE HALLI

Review by Matt Jason Blowitz
January 19 2012

Steely Dan, a band that used to be good in the '70s, brought their nineteen-piece band of bored studio professionals to the Halliburton Amphitheater on Tuesday night and offered their obese, geriatric fans the standard mix of "jazzy" hits and "deep cuts". While Don Becker did his annoying Ray Charles routine behind the keyboard, his partner Wally Fagan, leaning on his amplifier throughout the show, played the occasional blues lick, leaving most of the guitar chores to crack session professional Jim Herringbone. 

In their heyday, the group (now needlessly swollen by three female backup singers and a horn section) were known as obsessive perfectionists who spent millions of dollars in the recording studio, famously torturing the many unfortunate guitarists who apparently weren't "yacht-smooth" enough to create the "perfect" solos on the composer's quirky, jazz-infected songs. 

If you connected electric wires to my testicles, I guess I'd have to confess that the "band" was pretty tight. On the other hand, Fagan and Beckman seemed to be just going through the motions in order to continue to support their expensive yuppie lifestyles while the rest of us are left to fight off Al-Qaeda terrorists and the federal government, to suffer the horrors of climate change, or just waste away in the wake of Obama's economy. 

Everyone in the audience had cause to be disappointed about something or other. Beck and Fogelberg refused to play the set list that each ticket buyer probably spent their entire life savings to hear, and instead slogged through too many, and yet, not enough of the old, pestilential radio hits. Casual fans spent the entire show running back and forth to the porta-potties to avoid hearing any music they hadn't heard thousands of times before, while hardcore fans were deprived of hearing the deep cuts the sadistic duo played just two nights before at the Raytheon Pavilion in Dustberg. 

As the crowd filed out, many dissatisfied concert goers were heard complaining about the sound, the venue, the weather, the tour routing plan and the fact that Beckstein and Fagin are still alive and working after more than forty years in the music business. And if anyone knows why the band played the theme from "Taxi Driver" at the end of the show, please clue me in.