#Steely Dan #jazz rock #pop rock #album rock #classic rock #The Midnight Special #music video
Earlier this month, rare footage of Steely Dan playing Reelin' In The Years and Do It Again on The Midnight Special appeared on the show's official YouTube channel. The footage came from a show broadcast in February 1973, but the band returned to the show in August the same year and played three more songs. They revisited Reelin' in the Years and added My Old School, alongside a sensational Show Biz Kids, and the latter is the latest video to make its way online. And it is sensational. Donald Fagen, famously nervous about singing live, shows absolutely no sign of being so. Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter plays Rick Derringer's original slide guitar part with an exuberance bordering on maniacal. And the two backing singers, Gloria 'Porky' Granola and Jenny 'Bucky' Soule, have more fun with the famous "You go to Lost Wages, Lost Wages," lines than you can possibly imagine. Impressively, it appears that the band refused to self-censor the "You know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" line – later used as the basis for the song The Man Don't Give a Fuck by Welsh psychedelia enthusiasts Super Furry Animals – forcing the show's producers to punch in a brief moment of family-friendly silence during the edit. From: https://www.loudersound.com/news/steely-dan-show-biz-kids-the-midnight-special
This is a song which disparages a certain class of L.A. residents - wealthy offspring of entertainment moguls - show biz kids who don’t give a fuck about anybody else. Steely Dan were New Yorkers who had relocated to L.A. for work. Later they moved back to NYC but at this point much of their lyrical content outlined their dissatisfaction with many of the sleazier things about the West Coast. They kept writing about it even after they returned to the East Coast, for example in 1980’s “Babylon Sisters” from ‘Gaucho’, and also 2000’s “West of Hollywood” from ‘Two Against Nature’. From: https://genius.com/Steely-dan-show-biz-kids-lyrics
"Show Biz Kids" was such an utterly bizarre choice for the first single from Countdown to Ecstasy that one has to assume that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker chose it deliberately as a veiled affront to ABC Records and anyone who expected "Do It Again" redux. Although the song features a stellar slide guitar solo (by guest Rick Derringer instead of group members Denny Dias and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, the first example of the studio musician ethos that would soon become Steely Dan's stock in trade) and a funky piano-led groove, "Show Biz Kids" is eccentrically structured, without a bridge or middle eight, giving it an endless, plodding quality that suits the bitter lyrics about cliquishness and hedonism in the group's adopted hometown of Los Angeles. It also seems unlikely that a song whose payoff line is "Show business kids making movies 'bout themselves/You know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" was likely to top the charts in 1973. Incidentally, that repetitive chant of the female backing vocalists is "You go to Lost Wages," a Rat Pack-era joke name for Vegas. From: https://www.allmusic.com/song/show-biz-kids-mt0000372379
