Bad Sneakers

Alright Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has got the turntable spinning "Bad Sneakers" off Steely Dan's 1975 album Katy Lied, and that jazzy groove with its sharp edges is cutting through the air just right. This one sits as the second track, a fan favorite that packs a punch with those piano riffs from Michael Omartian and the biting lyrics that paint a picture of someone chasing kicks while feeling completely lost. Producer Gary Katz later said he regretted not pushing this as the lead single instead of "Black Friday," figuring the layered sound and that razor-sharp guitar bridge from Walter Becker would have pulled in even more listeners. Becker's solo on here runs about thirty seconds of pure emotional cry, the kind that feels plaintive and lonely, matching a protagonist who is stomping around with bad sneakers, a piña colada, a transistor radio, and a wad of cash near Radio City, all while laughing at the frozen rain and wondering when they will send him home.

The lyrics stay cryptic as they always do with these cats, talking about five names hard to stand, a fearsome excavation on Magnolia Boulevard, and a ditch out in the valley dug just for the narrator. In one old trivia bit, those five names point back to the original Steely Dan lineup including Denny Dias, Jeff Baxter, Jim Hodder, Becker, Fagen, and David Palmer. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker once described the tune during a Storytellers set as a nostalgia piece about New York City, written while they were out in Los Angeles feeling that homesickness creep in. Michael McDonald adds some of his earliest backing vocals for the band here, giving the chorus that soulful lift that fans still rave about years later. The whole Katy Lied sessions had their own drama too, with the dbx noise reduction system messing up the mixes so the finished album never quite sounded as bright and alive as the original takes, which Katz swore were better than anything else the Dan had done up to that point, even Aja. Denny Dias recalled how the units just would not decode the tapes properly, leaving everything dull no matter how carefully they aligned the gear. Still, the track got covered later by The Push Stars for a movie soundtrack, showing how that groove keeps traveling.

Speaking of how these two got rolling in the first place, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker crossed paths as students at Bard College up in Annandale-on-Hudson back in 1967. Fagen was walking past the Red Balloon café one day and heard Becker practicing electric guitar with this professional bluesy touch and vibrato that stopped him cold. They shared a taste for jazz, Chicago blues, soul, and that British Invasion stuff, plus a love for black humor and books like Nabokov. They started writing songs together on the piano in Becker's dorm common room, then played in pickup bands including one called the Leather Canary that had a young Chevy Chase on drums. After Fagen graduated and Becker left school, they moved to Brooklyn, knocking on doors in the Brill Building to pitch their odd tunes until Kenny Vance from Jay and the Americans signed them to a publishing deal and put them in the backup band. They toured under fake names like Gustav Mahler and Tristan Fabriani, even getting a song called "I Mean to Shine" onto a Barbra Streisand album. By 1971 they had relocated to Los Angeles as staff songwriters for ABC/Dunhill Records under producer Gary Katz, secretly assembling their own group in an unfinished wing of the building with Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter on guitars plus Jim Hodder on drums. They named the outfit after a steam-powered dildo from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, figuring it was an inside joke that would last a few months at most. The first album, Can't Buy a Thrill, dropped in late 1972 and hit with singles like "Do It Again" and "Reelin' in the Years," and the rest is that polished, snarky history the Zoo Freaks keep coming back to.

Those early years of scraping by in New York then hitting the coast shaped everything that followed, from the studio-only approach after they quit the road in 1974 right through the Grammy-winning comeback albums decades later. Fans can dig deeper into all of it over at the official Steely Dan site at steelydan.com, where the discography still lists Katy Lied right alongside the rest. The official Facebook page keeps the updates flowing at Steely Dan on Facebook, the Instagram account at @steelydan_official posts the classic shots and stories, and the official X account is over at Steely Dan on X. For the longtime devotees, the big active Facebook group at Steely Dan Fans group has tens of thousands of members trading stories and spins, while the fan archive over at The Steely Dan Reader holds decades of interviews and reviews that dig into tracks like this one from Katy Lied. Keep it locked right here on THE ZOO for more of those deep cuts and the stories behind them, because the Crew is always ready to drop the needle on the next one that hits just right.