There is little, if anything, that colored my upbringing more than the music of Steely Dan. Wordsmiths and masterful jazz-rock composers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have been along on every car trip I can remember… and probably some trips before then. But if there is one thing that has been more of a fixture in my upbringing than the music of Steely Dan, it would be my dad’s blue Nordic sweater with the funky ’70s collar. It’s threadbare, sure, but it has outlasted two houses, three cars, and two dogs. Both Steely Dan and the sweater were present one night during the Winter of ’07 when the whole family was seated around my parents’ dining table—after dinner, before dessert, that dangerous lull during which many idle comments have become fighting words.

Steely Dan’s Countdown to Ecstasy was playing, and I commented on the vamp from “Show Biz Kids”, something along the lines of: “The loop where they say, ‘You go to Lost Wages,’ represents yet another instance of rock bands forging prototypical hip-hop techniques. The band couldn’t hold down the groove, so a 30-ft tape loop was strung up in the studio. See also: The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Strawberry’”…

“Wait,” said my dad. “Whaddayou mean ‘the vamp where they sing, “You go to Lost Wages”’?”

“You know, at the beginning of the song—”

“I know,” my dad paused, adjusting his glasses, “at the beginning of the song when they sing, ‘That’s the way it is.’” He sang the line with more conviction: “‘That’s the way it is.’”

Sure, what do I know? I wasn’t around when the record was released in 1973. And I wasn’t spinning records on the radio in the early ’70s like my dad, playing the album cut of “Show Biz Kids” in the early morning hours and blasting the profanity-laced refrain so that it reverberated against the thunderheads of Montana’s Big Sky.

I put the song back, dropped the needle in the groove.

“You go to Lost Wages / Lost Wages,” and my dad sang over the loop the second time, “That’s the way it is.”

But he didn’t convince my brother, who spat, “Are you kidding? That isn’t even the right number of syllables!”

“Yeah, dad,” I said, diplomatically. “It’s, ‘You go to Lost Wages.’”

“That is sick.” He adjusted his glasses again and leaned across the table. “That is per-verse.”

My assertion had shaken him to the core. Where I heard a mild pun, he heard his world crumbling down around him. He doesn’t take these things lightly. My father was blessedly out of the country, stomping grapes in Burgundy when the Dan’s sordid tome The Royal Scam was released. One listen to that creepy bugger in his early 20s and he might have quit listening to Steely Dan altogether (which, as stated, would have considerably changed my childhood). Even today, now familiar with The Royal Scam, every time the homicidal cuckold’s ballad “Everything You Did” plays with Reverend Mom in the car, dad valiantly offers to change it. So he wasn’t willing to let this “Lost Wages” revelation rewrite his memory without a fight.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “And I’ll bet you two dollars.”

This wouldn’t be a standard argument. My dad is an attorney, and he raised me with a cold, keen sense of rhetoric. As I was prosecuting the case, the burden of proof was on me, so I quickly assembled my exhibits.

Exhibit A, the audio track, had already been deemed unconvincing. And my would-be Exhibit B, the liner notes, didn’t include the vocal vamp on the lyric sheet. So I moved on to Exhibit C, an internet site that had compiled misheard Steely Dan lyrics. Among other mishearings of the lyric in question were “goldilocks wages,” “let them persuade us,” and “you know they’re outrageous.”

“They don’t even have your version on here, dad. But they have the original.”

“That is bunk.” He slammed his fist down for emphasis: “Pure. Bunk.”

“That’ll be two dollars, thanks.”

“This doesn’t prove anything.” He kicked back his chair and folded his hands behind his head in his go-to lawyer lean. “You don’t think I’m gonna trust some yokel on the internet, anyone could have posted that there.”

Indeed, the baby boomer was suspicious of The Internets. After all, he got burned with everyone else during the dot-com bust, and he wasn’t about to lose another two bucks based on the foolish advice of online witch doctors. So I reached out for some cold, hard text:

“Here it is, then, Exhibit D, Brian Sweet’s Reelin’ in the Years, the best Steely Dan bio to date.”

“I see. And who is this Brian Sweet?”

“The foremost Steely Dan scholar.”

“Mm-hmm.” He swept his hair to the side and peered over his glasses to get a better look. “And where did you find this document?”

“On your bedside table, where it’s been since I loaned it to you seven years ago. And if you’ll kindly turn to page 60 you might find some comfort in your mishearing.”

And right there on the page it said, “Strangely enough, critics and fans alike also had great difficulty figuring out the incessant vocal vamp beneath the song [‘Show Biz Kids’]. One ridiculous music press suggestion was ‘we’re gonna love sweeties.’ In fact, the girls were singing, ‘You go to Lost Wages,’ a Fagen/Becker pun on Las Vegas.”

My dad took a slug of his Manhattan and left the dining room, defeated. A minute later two one-dollar bills were slammed down on the table in front of me. It was the sourest two bucks I ever pocketed.

Until a year later, when, drinking the remnants of a flight of ’05 Burgundies in a Central Valley, California, bed-and-breakfast en route to a Steely Dan concert, my dad ventured: “I’m still not convinced.”

“What?”

“About the lyric. I’m not convinced. It’s, ‘That’s the way it is / That’s the way it is.’”

Everyone else in the room, the whole family, scoffed in unison.

The Dan played “Show Biz Kids” that night. And maybe it was that dad’s old records and cassette tapes had been worn to death—maybe that was it all along—but with the new vocalists, fresh arrangement, and state-of-the-art sound system, he heard it. He nudged me, pointed to his ear, and I knew that he heard it for the first time.

Listen: “Show Biz Kids” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Steely Dan, Show Biz Kids, Countdown to Ecstasy, misheard lyrics 

Read past installments of Lyrical Communique: 

Michael Jackson: “Billie Jean” 

Sugar Ray: “Mean Machine”

Elliott Smith: “Pitseleh”