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The Godfather II or Too Many Horses’ Heads?
Read part I
This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag
As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be
-Steely Dan, Deacon Blues
Part II:
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by Nelson Gary
After Fagen and Becker met in 1967-1968 at Bard College, the two of them were as fed up with flower power as the Velvet Underground, but with Chevy Chase, the comedian who got his start on Saturday Night Live, as their drummer, they probably laughed much more than Lou Reed and John Cale. Like Reed and Cale, they were hyper-intellectuals with their nerves turned inside out, making them not just acutely aware of the social, political, and, ultimately, spiritual problems of the world at large, but altogether painfully aware that the source of these conflicts had its genesis and nucleus between the head and heart of each individual as opposed to being at the hands of some group, institution, or more generalized power structure, even a counter-cultural one.
Unlike the Velvet Underground who sang, There are problems in these times/But none of them are mine, the two founding members of Steely Dan perceived the problems of the sixties as being manifestations of one of the primary universal dilemmas of the human condition, which in a nutshell, is the long-suffering struggle to strike a balance between the intellect and the passions, the heart and the head, by developing a mediator between the two: what Buddhists call mind and Kabbalist call wisdom. At this point...»»
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