Reeling in the Years

It occurs to me that I didn't talk much about the Steely Dan set list - heavy on Aja, being about the only album they dug any deeper than the singles. The only songs they didn't play off of Aja were 'Deacon Blues' and 'I Got the News.' Katy Lied, my favorite Steely Dan album, was criminally underrepresented, with 'Black Friday' and (oddly) 'Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More,' the latter sung by Walter Becker. Everything else was pretty much the hits, although they left out 'Rikki Don't Lose that Number,' for reasons known only to themselves.

As they left the stage the first time and the inevitability of the encore hung in the air, I said to Noah, 'Well, what's the big hole left in the set?' Figuring they'd do two or three songs for the encore, and wondering what of the few famous crowd-pleasers they had left in the bag. The aforementioned 'Rikki,' and also 'Reeling in the Years' occurred to me (although I was secretly hoping for 'Doctor Wu'), and Noah answered back 'My Old School.'

The band came back and did a two song encore: 'Reeling in the Years' and 'My Old School.' And the one song I walked around singing the next day back in Coventry was, of course, 'Rikki Don't Lose that Number,' as if its absence from the set made my brain DJ put it on heavy rotation.

As usual, a phenomenon that The Onion commented on brilliantly.

D.