O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEWS : ...

When you’re 16, newly equipped with a driver’s license, and your older brother hands you the keys to his prized silver Olds Cutlass Supreme, you’re likely to become a fan of whatever is in his glove box stack of tapes. Back in Boston in 1977, Steely Dan’s “Aja” was the eight-track on top of the pile.

Songs like “Josie” and “Deacon Blues” amazed me then, maybe because they were the first songs to make me pay attention to actual craftsmanship. Steely Dan’s music was a peculiar blend of jazz and rock flavors, with crisp instrumental sounds that charged out from the mix. The lyrics seemed hip, intelligent, inspired, worth paying attention to even if I had no idea what they meant (and, for the most part, still don’t).

Delving further into the Steely Dan catalogue I discovered “Reeling in the Years,” “My Old School,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” more songs unlike any I’d heard.

This wasn’t my father’s Oldsmobile.

A friend once noted that “stuff painstakingly crafted as Steely Dan’s almost always ends up sounding too polished and hollow. But the Dan manages to lift the best aspects of craftsmanship and to use them in the service of really adventuresome musical and lyrical explorations. A pretty song about a serial killer can be much weirder than one that rocks.”

If the Dan merely were pretentious, if--as its critics charge--its music is processed and cold, I sure didn’t hear that back in the late ‘70s, when the albums had to stand alone because the group had stopped touring.

But by intermission of its show at Irvine Meadows on Friday night, I had a better understanding of those criticisms.

Though the first set featured a pile of Dan favorites--”Reeling In the Years,” “Josie,” “Hey Nineteen” and “Peg” among them--it never hit a groove that went anywhere even mildly interesting. The songs just lay there, delivered competently enough by Donald Fagen, Walter Becker and their 11-piece band, but unable to connect with the audience or with any real emotion.

Add other assorted uninspired noodlings--including Becker’s “Down In the Bottom,” a song from his upcoming “11 Tracks of Whack” album that sent fans streaming up the aisles to the restrooms and concession booths--and you had the makings of a pretty unimpressive evening. It was time to think that maybe the cynics were right.

But the second set, though a bit slow to build, rescued things.

Kicking off with two instrumental numbers and the thick, jazz-flavored “Green Earrings” from the “Royal Scam” album, it didn’t offer a rocker much to grab onto at first. Then “Bodhisattva” provided a much-needed shot of raw energy, to which several in the crowd responded with a standing ovation, and “Deacon Blues” injected a quietly assertive measure of class.

The show really took off with “Chain Lightning,” a swinging selection from the “Katy Lied” album. Saxophonists Chris Potter, Bob Sheppard and Cornelius Bumpus and guitarist George Wadenius each took a solo, producing fat, sexy riffs. Fagen and his trio of female backup singers added tight vocal harmonies.

The pretty power ballad “Third World Man” followed, and a raucous version of the funky “Kid Charlemagne” closed out the set. Encores of “My Old School” and “FM (No Static At All)” had folks dancing in the aisles.

This wasn’t soulless music at all. It was crisp, creative and smart, just the way I remembered it. All of which proved to me that Steely Dan always was more than the sum of its calculated technical parts.

Eight-tracks didn’t lie.