steve wrote:My point is that the effort spent "perfecting" a record by retards is evidence of a substandard foundational idea -- good ideas need much less attention from retards to be palatable.
Since I'm interested in the ideas behind the music at least as much as the mere sound coming out of the speakers, I allow myself to remain unimpressed by the tits and eyebrows of the presentation.
I've been resisting a reply to Steve's posts because I don't want to be misconstrued as defending Steely Dan--they suck.
I agree with Steve that no amount of studio tomfoolery can mask "a substandard foundational idea." But I don't think that this means that the reverse is always true. Just because someone favors a more elaborate production (or "presentation"), it doesn't necessarily mean that it's some kind of attempt to overcompensate for a paucity of ideas. Led Zeppelin's records are pretty slickly produced at times, but that does not obscure the fact that they were a great band entirely capable of delivering the goods in a more stripped-down setting (as documents like How the West Was Won exhibit). They just wanted to make another kind of record.
I guess I'm thinking about this from my own point of view. I worked really hard to write what I thought were great songs, and to learn to sing and play them to the best of my ability. The more I worked on them, the more parts I started to hear in my head. When I finally got a chance to record them, I saw no reason not to bring in as many people as possible in an attempt to approximate how I envisioned these songs sounding. I might add that, by this time, the songs had been played live with numerous players, and that many of these parts originated with the players themselves, though they were sometimes prescribed. After a while, things got kind of crazy in the studio, not because I was some coke-addled megalomaniac, but because it was fun working with lots of different people and bringing together interesting singers and players who'd never worked together before. I was drunk on the possibilities, and I didn't want it to end. And guess what: the record just kept getting better.
Now, it may well be that this whole endeavor was an elaborate attempt to hide from the world the fact that I can't sing, but really I just think it's interesting to layer a song the same way I would revise a poem or a piece of fiction. And the records that made a deep impression on me early on--Queen, Elton John, Thin Lizzy--featured complicated presentations, as did the early 70's country records I love so much.
I understand one's preferring a more stripped down, primitivist aesthetic--I prefer it, too, in some cases. But those aren't the kinds of records I'm interested in making. That, as I see it, is what live performances are for. Besides, there are plenty of people out there doing the purist lo-fi thing; surely there's room for another approach to record-making.
Let me reiterate that my music sounds nothing like Steely Dan.