For the mouseover the Lab Band have also covered songs by Billy Squier, JD Crowe, Aerosmith, U2, The Cars, Merle Haggard, The Doobie Brothers & Journey.
As a Dan Fan for many years I had always considered them to be pretty much inimitable but the LLB make a good fist of it with covers of five Dan songs namely Peg, Josie, Black Friday, Kid Charlemagne and, my particular favourite, My Old School.
I’m curious to know what others who rate Steely Dan think of these covers. All are locatable on YouTube.
Vocals sufficiently different in tone to give you pause but the rest of the band plays pretty close to the record. If I was driving and that came on the radio, it’d probably pass without thought or ‘oh Steely Dan recorded live somewhere. Nice.’
Have they taken the songs and made them their own or brought out something previously hidden, beyond enunciating vocals? Not that I was able to spot so far.
I thought the rhythm section was a bit weak sometimes. The songs would stumble along with an uneven grove that tended to come back together when the horns piped in or at a strong change. Props to the bass player for doing the slapping part (well, you only catch a glimpse, but he’s slapping with the thumb, grabbing up with a finger, so close I guess) in the chorus of Peg; most players don’t have the balls for that.
The guitars came off a bit muddy (especially the guy with the black guitar doing the My Old School solos) with sloppy timing (especially the other guy) during the solos.
Vocals were quite good. I can’t judge a horn section, but they seemed spot-on, very good. Keys too (they seemed to be shouldering a lot of the rhythm propulsion at times, which I think saved some sections).
C+/B-. If they can get their groove on better - sell it, guys! - and nail the solos better and clearer, the grade would go up.
Here, try these guys. Different song, still Steely. Skip the interview blah blah, song begins at 1:55. Now listen to the groove, how tight it is; it’s not perfect and they’re obviously amateurs, but the song just holds together and drives so well because the band, especially the bass and drums, is pushing on that groove so well. This piece is almost sparse at times, and the sparseness works so well because the groove fits together.
Pretty tight, although I did find the lead vocal quite distracting (and also missed the male-ness of the Michael McDonald vamp at the end of Kid Charlemagne). The overall sound mix could have been better, or at least more balanced if the intention was a note-for-note recreation - the lead vocal was too high for many of the chorus segments and the brass and rhythm felt undermiked at times. Lead guitar guy isn’t 100% there, probably in the 93% range.
But! Very nicely done and I bet it was fun as hell to record.
Just watched again, and… huh. The first solo (2:15) starts out just fine, and I’m sure he’s doing all the right moves. But there’s no chemistry with the larger band. That solo’s notes should nail all the stuff behind what he’s playing, and it’s a big thud. Thumbs up (90%)on the solo, thumbs down on what the band he’s playing against. Maybe it was a bad day, but they’re missing all their marks rhythmically, so the solo falls a little flat because the larger band is phoning it in.
Agree about the bass & drums - superior to the LLB and I also like the horns on this one. There are other covers by Naked Lunch available on YouTube which I’m not so sure about though.
Just to remind ourselves, here are the masters in action with a contemporary version of Do It Again featuring a proper guitarist in Denny Dias. We can also have a look at Reelin In The Years with both Dias & defence consultant Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter on guitar.
Agree; everything else they have up on the net is crap recordings in bars or similar, pretty awful. Shame.
Heh, yeah it’s really weird to see Steely Dan when they were actually a band rather than Fagen and Becker and whoever they hired that week. And David Palmer’s performance here just doesn’t cut it with me; I’d never call Fagen an outstanding singer, but his odd, quirky style/cadence works so well in SD songs in ways that Palmer’s just can’t (although Palmer did a creditable job singing Dirty Work, but at the same time that doesn’t even sound like an SD song to me when it’s just Palmer singing).
I suppose. But can’t say I find this interesting at all. If you cover someone, bring something new to it. Sure, a bar band sounding as close to the original as they can get is all right. And maybe a “real” band playing live wants to give some love to a song they love, sure, play it straight. Otherwise, if you’re doing a cover, make it interesting.
The Flaming Lips doing Sgt. Peppers may not work for everyone, but at least they aren’t doing it by the numbers.
Pretty much, yeah. The Steely cover I listened to was just, “Yeah, good cover, and…?” OTOH I do love the Fab Faux’s in-studio recreation of the Abbey Road medley. Their love of the music is palpable, and transitioning from one song to the next is impressive.
To be fair, Faux Four (and that was an awesome video, Baal Houtham) are professional musicians who decided to do a tribute, so of course they sound amazing.
The Steely cover bands discussed here are utter amateurs as far as I can tell, with little or no professional credentials. I agree with the larger point: why bother recreating something like this or that material exactly? Take it somewhere new! Yes, agree. The only reason I follow some of these types of efforts is a) a love of the source material, and b) in some cases even recreating the source material is exceedingly difficult so it’s cool when someone does well.
To point b): Steely Dan is pretty damned hard to do for most small efforts. You need a fairly huge band, able to work well together on fairly challenging material. I count 10 people in Naked Lunch, obviously less than in LLB (15? Not sure), so that’s the minimum people you need at most rehearsals, which is a high bar. It’s tough to get that many people (amateurs!) getting a good groove on (hello LLB?) that sounds good, setting aside good vocals and guitar solos and anything else. It’s a ridiculously high bar for a group of amateurs. So it’s cool to see when someone takes it on and it does well.
Also, I’ve been thinking about how someone takes a Steely tune a new direction. It could be cool, but my imagination is coming up dry. Punk Boddisahtva? Grunge Peg? I’m just not seeing it, but I couldn’t have predicted Cake doing Aretha so perhaps I have no imagination. Steely seems like a bit of a cul de sac to me, a really worthy one, but I’m not sure how to evolve it some new direction.
