The Royal Dutch Scam is as much about Steely Dan as it is about our own lives.
We love music. We live music. We love Steely Dan. We love playing music together.
Above all, we love performing in front of other people who love this gorgeous music as much as we do.
Basically, we are just music lovers who happen to be very fortunate to play together and have survived the music industry.
Hey, we make people happy playing great music. What’s not to like?
The music of Steely Dan brings so much depth, joy and other random subjective abstract qualities to our lives and work, that we just can’t stop.
We consume it, we relisten it, we play.
It is only fair to say that Steely Dan plays us.
We have conversations about piano versus guitar voicings.
We buy elevator shoes, hoping to fit in, hoping to re-impersonate the perfect rock ‘n roll image (after being totally desoriented in the landscape of hero identifcation, after the unmasking of our anti-heroes at the Grammy’s in 2000).
We consume, we rattle about it, we jive, we are willing to put our relations and star imagos at stake to get it right.
In fact, one or two divorces may have been directly or indirectly caused by the brain damage we suffer trying to deal with Dan’s mysteries.
Who will ever verify our theories about the final destination of the Technicolor Motorhome?
At the end of the day, exhausted of analyzing all the story angles and subcharacters of the personae — and their metaphors — that appear on the catwalk of Glamour Profession.
We laugh, we hug and we drink. What else can we do?
As for Steely Dan, we will never get it and damn Fagen and Becker, they must have known that, the bastards.
So here we are, ten lost souls looking for other souls to collectively drown ourselves in self-pity. At least we’ll have some wonderful music to float on.