The Steely Dan came to Durham's shiny new music hall, last night, on their "Rent Party" tour - and at $120 a seat (first balcony), they should be all set for rent ! I kid, I kid.

What did we get out of it? Well, we got 90 minutes of 30 year old songs from Becker, Fagan and their eleven accomplices. The set started with a completely reworked version of "Reelin In The Years" - the only similarity to the original was the lyrics. Unfortunately, the music was generic late-era-Dan adult-contemporary smooth-jazz groove thing. I didn't dig it. If they'd done that to any of their C-list songs, I wouldn't have cared - but that one? So sad.

Besides that, they played the rest of the songs pretty much straight-up.

It wasn't totally a note-for-note duplication of the originals, though. For example, the-non-Becker guitar player played his solos in the style of the originals, which was a bit disorienting; ex., he started the first solo in "Peg" (one of my all-time favorite solos from anyone- all hail Jay Graydon), but only played a couple of bars of the original, then went off on him own for a bit, then played something from the original, then back to his own, etc.. And he did this for all of his solos. While I certainly dig a player who does his own thing, the effect of mixing new and old like that was to repeatedly raise, and then dash, my expectations - "He's gonna do this one! Nope. Ok, he was just ducking that tricky section, now he's back on it! Nope. Now I don't know what he's doing - did he just flub that section or was that intentional?" Imagine someone sing a song you've known as long as you've been alive; you want to sing along in your head, but they're changing every other line - you're right there with them, and then you're lost, then you're back, then lost again. I realize this sounds like I'm pining for things to be exactly like the record; but really, that's not it - it's just confusing to do it half-way.

And speaking of changing the words... Fagan's voice is not quite what it used to be, and neither is his memory - he missed many lines, even skipped the first half of the 2^nd verse in "Kid Charlemagne". And in many songs he rushed through the lyrics completely out of time with the music - I got the feeling he just doesn't have the breath these days to do it at the speed of the originals. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. He was having fun, though. So, that helped. Instrumentally, he split his time between sitting at keyboards and walking around with his melodica.

Becker sang one song ("Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More") and did a little spoken word break in the middle of "Hey Nineteen", but otherwise he avoided the spotlight - literally; if a spotlight came on near him, he would step away from it. He didn't even have a low-intensity spot on him (as everyone else did - just so you could see them). Aside from his two trips to the mic, he was either lit from the back or from directly overhead - never from the front. It made him look like he was absorbing light, as if he's 50% black hole. Sometimes he stuck the neck of his guitar into a spotlight, if he was doing a solo; once, his foot - by accident, I assume. Good guitar player though!

That's Becker in the middle. Fagan is in front of the drummer, with his back to us, and is pointing skyward, with both hands.

Still, I don't mean to sound like I didn't enjoy it. It was a good show and I'd recommend it to any 'Dan fan. They played a wide range of stuff, not just their hits. Sure, they did "Peg", "Josie", "Hey Nineteen" and "My Old School" (no "Deacon Blues", "Haitian Divorce" or "Don't Take Me Alive" (my favorite 'Dan song)). But they also did "Aja" and "Parker's Band" and "My Rival", etc.. A good mix. The band was really good (especially the drummer!) , and they opened (sans Becker and Fagan) with a version of Miles Davis' "All Blues".

Funniest part of the show: during "Hey Nineteen", there's a line:

She thinks I'm crazy
But I'm just growing old

Unprompted, nearly everyone in the audience sang that second line in full voice. The crowd was, unsurprisingly, mostly 40+, mostly +. There were a lot of Hawaiian shirts.

Here's "Bad Sneakers":

Also: Blu Seafood, in Durham, was quite good.