Doing It Again

Steely Dan has distinct advantages over other ‘70s pop warhorses trying to justify their existence a generation beyond their hit-making prime: When mainstays Walter Becker and Donald Fagen go onstage with whatever assortment of ace players and singers they’ve assembled to flesh out their band-in-concept, they aren’t competing with fans’ fond memories of any concert exploits from their youth.

Out of distaste for the rigors of touring and the compromises of translating their intricate recorded arrangements and audiophile sensibility in real time, Becker and Fagen quit the road in 1974, before Steely Dan had hit its commercial prime.

That now looks like one of the canniest business moves a pop group ever made. By devoting their energies strictly to writing and recording from ’75 through ‘80, when they split up, Becker and Fagen generated a string of hit records with lasting appeal. Now, in the ‘90s, when a hit act can really make a buck on the road, the reunited Steely Dan duo is an attractive product for which there is pent-up demand among a target audience of graying boomers carrying the fattened wallet of its earnings prime.

Steely Dan, which played to a nearly filled house Friday night at the 15,416-capacity Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, has an artistic advantage as well. Becker and Fagen’s music doesn’t geyser forth from the passionate turbulence of youth. Most Steely Dan songs are the observations of a coolly ironic intellect surveying a strange, corrupt world of seedy deals, sexual betrayals, egotistical pretensions and warping obsessions. Human nature being what it is, a band with subject matter like that is in little danger of sounding dated.

The dour, astringent wit and literary qualities of Steely Dan are coupled with Becker-Fagen’s crowd-pleasing gift for catchy melodies, funky, good-time rhythms and crisp, Latin- and jazz-inflected arrangements.

The music’s groove-along and hummability factors are plenty for fans who may not have explored all the subtle ironies and oblique references in the lyrics (“Josie,” for example, translates pagan fertility myths to a modern street milieu without a pinch of pretentiousness).

On their third tour since their 1993 comeback, Becker and Fagen arrived with a nine-member backing ensemble and some fresh ambitions: They’re at work on the first new Steely Dan material since their initial run. The two new songs they played, “Jack of Speed” and “Cash Only Island,” signaled no new departures and, on first listening, no recapturing of their genius for indelible pop. In terms of finding new creative inspiration equal to its peak, Steely Dan is in the same difficult boat as all other midlife rockers attempting comebacks.

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Mainly, the two-hour show kept the nuggets coming, slackening a bit after intermission with a stretch of new or less-familiar numbers that created some restlessness in an otherwise adoring crowd. With Fagen lightly admitting the band’s nostalgic obligations, the hit parade soon marched on through a home stretch of bankable favorites.

This wasn’t an ideal night to hear most of those nuggets, as an under-the-weather Fagen came up sounding chesty and burry. He wasn’t able to muster the high, sharp tone that’s a big part of Steely Dan’s melodic appeal and ironic bite.

Becker also sounded rough and wobbly on his occasional vocal leads. Two female backing singers cushioned the roughness and helped with the payoff of many a famous chorus in a set that included such favorites as “Do It Again,” “Bad Sneakers,” “Josie,” “Hey Nineteen,” ’FM,” “Midnight Cruiser” and “Kid Charlemagne.”

Despite his difficulties, Fagen had a fine moment with “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” It’s one of the few songs in the Steely Dan repertoire that allows for much warmth, and he extracted the most from it by improvising bluesy, forlorn phrasings on the verses.

Becker’s chief contribution was his surprisingly prolific guitar playing, a stream of fluid yet meaty-toned solo runs that combined a sense of elegance with a firm blues grounding. His co-guitarist, Wayne Krantz, was a mixed bag, guilty of empty shows of fusion-y speed and technique--during “Peg,” for example--but also capable of good, angular twists and unexpected rhythmic cadences that helped fend off staleness in the familiar arrangements.

The dark-suited, scruffy-bearded, shades-wearing Fagen came off like a traditional, old-line jazz or R&B; bandleader, leaving his electric piano from time to time to wave his arms and bop a bit in a conductor’s stance.

He permitted himself just a bit of drollery--”one of those jolly old psycho songs from the ‘70s; we like it,” he noted after the band finished “Don’t Take Me Alive,” the monologue of a crazed, bomb-toting desperado. Fagen kept calling Irvine Meadows “Blockbuster,” apparently a simple mistake rather than an oblique stab at dramatizing the sense of disorientation and displacement that afflicts many a Steely Dan song character.

In his tie and thin-framed spectacles, Becker looked as smooth and prim as an ambitious young scholar from a think tank. Had he been any dryer in his greetings and band intros, a sinkhole would have opened up and swallowed him.

Ironic pop doesn’t have to be as distanced as Steely Dan makes it. Fagen sings from outside the band’s characters, usually taking a superior, detached, authorial stance even when the song takes the form of a dramatic monologue.

It’s hard not to respect the intelligence and attention to quality of the enterprise, and it’s easy to bask in the ear-pleasing appeal that carries it. But there is ultimately little emotional payoff for listeners who want pop music to provide some warming embers of comfort, commiseration or fellow-feeling. Personally, I put a lot more value in the work of Randy Newman and the Kinks’ Ray Davies, pop ironists and satirists who get inside their characters and, rather than skewering them, allow some respect and recognition for their flawed humanity.

But writers who can come up with as subtle, cutting and deceptive a character dissection as “Deacon Blues” (not included in the Irvine show, the song drips with contempt disguised as sympathy as the “deacon,” an ineffectual artistic wannabe, mewls, “I cried when I wrote this song/Sue me if I play too long”) might just be steely enough to defy the odds against a ‘70s band returning with a sharp edge in a new era ripe with ironic possibilities.