#softrock

Hi all this is our newest release if you could check it out then that would be so awesome of you,

thanks - Chris

Track 01: Don't Say It's Goodbye (Ⅰ)

Experience the first track of RaRa_Team's 5th album. This version features a clean and emotional female vocal set against a soft rock and slowcore backdrop. A hauntingly beautiful melody that captures the essence of a lingering farewell. 🎻✨

The Studio

“Hey Nineteen” (1980) Steely Dan MCA Records (Written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen) Highest U.S. Billboard Chart Position – No. 10

"From noon till six we'd play the tune over and over and over again, nailing each part. We'd go to dinner and come back and start recording. They made everybody play like their life depended on it. But they weren't gonna keep anything anyone else played that night, no matter how tight it was. All they were going for was the drum track.”                                        - Jeff Porcaro, Musician

Like a python wrapping itself around the beating heart of Rock and roll more and more tightly, this was the last charting single for the last album in Steely Dan’s classic period (it would be 20 years until they would release another album, Two Against Nature, in 2000).  The stories of their recording methods reinforce this metaphor: what was once a real touring band of musicians had whittled itself down to just Becker and Fagen rehearsing the best artists in the world over and over and over again to achieve an exactness and fidelity that has never really been matched.  I remember “Hey Nineteen” charting in 1980; it was right there on the radio beside Blondie’s “Call Me” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic”, playing nice but certainly not fitting in.  They played it over and over again, a kind of spiritless meditation on something my teenage brain could never parse (The Cuervo Gold?  The Fine Columbian?).  Even today it is the kind of song one can never get to the center of, the smoothest track in the middle of the road: slick, perfect, and eternal. Like all of their hits it stuck around to sell a lot of copies but never really went to the top of the charts (one of the most successful bands ever to have never achieved a No. 1 anything).

Today some folks call this Yacht Rock (a term I mildly dislike as generic) which is ironic considering it is hard to imagine these two city slickers anywhere near a boat, or even in the wild.  I can only ever see them in the studio playing mad scientist with the idea of fidelity.  This much I know: I have a decent turntable setup and nothing touches Gaucho for sound quality—1979 is at the top of the top for the old idea of a great studio record.  The only vinyl record that may top it is Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk or Dan’s own Gaucho.  This is the result of all that squeezing: what starting out at a very high level with Can’t Buy a Thrill (their debut in 1972) only got more and more refined with every album.  By the time one gets to Gaucho (after the lush but boozy hangover and strung-out feeling of Aja) there is a kind of plateau-ing, a linear quality, to all of the rehearsing and perfecting and playing every note until it almost fails to exist.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a record I love—but at a distance, because it was constructed to keep you there.

There are so many legends surrounding the LP: that it was (up to that point) the most expensive ever made (over a million 1979 dollars); that it was heavily delayed by the band’s perfectionism (it took well over a year to record); that is was surrounded by tragedy and drug use (a terrible car accident for Becker, 6 months of hospitalization, his heroin addiction, and the death of his girlfriend).  The hyper focus of Fagen and Becker, rehearsing musicians to exhaustion to get every note perfect, included their famous engineer Roger Nichols (formerly a nuclear physicist!) who was given $150,000 of the budget to create a computer that could process the live drum sounds for them to manipulate exactingly (he named it Wendel and the RIAA bestowed the machine its own framed, platinum copy of Gaucho in acknowledgement).  There was the three-way legal battle between MCA, Warner Brothers and Steely Dan to actually release the thing (their original label, ABC Records, had been acquired by MCA).  Lastly there was the sign of the times in the new “Premium Pricing” by MCA, a hike in album prices from $8.98 to $9.98 for the more expensively-produced records (I guess) which included Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Hard Promises and the soundtrack for Xanadu, although I am not sure it ever went into effect after a lot of bad press.  One legend that seems plainly true is that this year was one of the last for huge, expensive, lavishly-produced studio records.  Like the old Hollywood system, it simply could not hold any more, and something leaner was right around the corner; if not inevitable, then necessary to move the art form forward.

Maybe this is the reason that “Hey Nineteen” sounded so anachronistic that year: it was by then a hologram from that ever-distant land of the 70s long player, richly produced, genre-defying, Empyrean, graceful.  Go on to an internet message board or read any history of Steely Dan and you will find there the endless jabber about their relative goodness or badness in the great cause of Rock Music, by jazzing it up, or slimming it down, or mellowing it out, or squeezing it too hard in rehearsals (Gaucho is deliciously given one star by Dave Marsh in The Rolling Stone Record Guide, 1983) but trust me: pay them no mind.  Just drop the needle, rejoice in the cleanest sound in stereo ever attempted by anyone anywhere, and spend time with some of the best musicians who have ever lived. 

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Roger Nichols, after being with the band as a peerless sound engineer for over 30 years (and on all of their 7 classic-period albums), was unceremoniously let go during the middle of recording of Everything Must Go, right after the disaster of 9-11.  His wife Connie described it as an “emotional dagger to his heart and soul” and him as heartbroken.  No definitive reason seems to be well known. Nichols sadly passed away in 2011 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 66.

Right before the pandemic Connie found a clear cassette in Nichols’ things marked “The Second Arr” in black Sharpie pen (she had never had the heart to throw away anything with his handwriting on it).  This turned out to be a copy of a very famous lost master track from Gaucho, “The Second Arrangement”, which after months of recording and $80,000 invested, and complete, was accidentally taped over by a second engineer (whew - poor guy).  This tape was from the night before that event.  Fagen and Becker considered re-recording it, but being absolute perfectionists, they realized it was hopeless and moved on.