Don't Take Me Alive Josie Any Major Dude Will Tell You Hey Nineteen Steely Dan

Don't Take Me Alive Album: The Royal Scam (1976)
Josie Album: Aja (1977)
Any Major Dude Will Tell You Album: Pretzel Logic (1974)
Hey Nineteen Album: Gaucho (1980)
by Steely Dan

"Don't Take Me Alive" is the third track from the fifth Steely Dan album the Royal Scam. Co-fronties Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are the writers of same, naturally.

Leaving no mystery to the lyrics, "Don't Take Me Alive" is about a violent criminal holed up with "a case of dynamite" telling the cops to shoot him, in the tradition of playing "suicide by cop." He also appears to have committed patricide. That's our Steely Dan - the darkest lyrics sung to the most cheerful tunes in rock 'n' roll!
Long before O. J. Simpson led police on a slow-speed chase through its streets, Los Angeles had been host to a number of unusual crimes and high-profile apprehensions - flipping on the TV in LA, you can often see a crime unfolding in real time.

Natives of the city are used to it, but Becker and Fagen were transplants from New York, so to them it was really bizarre. In writing this song, they drew on some of these stories that inundated the city.

That's Larry Carlton doing the guitar solo on Don't Take Me Alive. He's usually content to be a session musician, but he took his day in the limelight winning a Grammy (Best Pop Instrumental Performance) for playing on the theme to the hit TV series Hill Street Blues. See, you've loved him all your life and never knew it.

While their next album, Aja, was their most successful, the true hardcore Steelies usually agree that The Royal Scam is the point where Steely Dan really distilled themselves into their perfect form.

Steely Dan got its name from Naked Lunch, a novel by William S. Burroughs. Both Becker and Fagen were beat-generation literature fans. However, "Steely Dan" is not a character in that book. It is a strap-on dildo, whose full name is "Steely Dan III from Yokohama." If that shocked you, well, you should have seen that coming when you saw the title Naked Lunch.

This song tells the story of a very popular girl, Josie, who's the desire of all the young men in a blue-collar neighborhood. She creates quite a stir any time she returns.

Timothy B. Schmit, who also appeared on the Steely Dan albums Pretzel Logic and The Royal Scam, sang backup on Josie; he later joined the Eagles as bass player and vocalist (that's him singing lead on "I Can't Tell You Why"). Other musicians on "Josie" were:

Bass: Chuck Rainey
Guitar: Dean Parks, Larry Carlton
Drums, Percussion: Jim Keltner
Electric Piano: Victor Feldman
Guitar Solo: Walter Becker
Lead Vocals, Backing Vocals, Synthesizer: Donald Fagen

Released as the B-side to "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," this fairly obscure song has become a crowd favorite. In an interview with Rolling Stone during Steely Dan's 2009 tour, Donald Fagen talked about Any Major Dude Will Tell You: "When we moved out to LA, people called each other 'dude,' which we found funny. We were trying to speak their language."

Regarding the lyrics in Any Major Dude Will Tell You, "Have you ever seen a Squonk's tears," a Squonk is a mythical woodland creature who has the ability to dissolve in its own tears. Steely Dan came across the word in a book by Jorge Luis Borges. Genesis also makes mention of this animal in their song "Squonk," from their 1976 album A Trick of the Tail.

In Hey Nineteen, an older man is seducing a 19-year-old girl. He's a bit conflicted, as her inexperience frustrates him when she doesn't even remember Aretha Franklin. However, on this particular night and with the help of some Cuervo Gold tequila, everything is wonderful.

Steely Dan used a variety of musicians on their albums. On Hey Nineteen, Hugh McCracken played guitar, Rick Marotta was on drums, and Victor Feldman and Steve Gadd added percussion. Walter Becker also added guitar, and Donald Fagen played the Fender Rhodes electric piano and the synthesizer.

Roger Nichols, who was one of the engineers on the Gaucho sessions, fashioned a drum machine they used on Hey Nineteen. Dubbed "Wendel," it was one of the first of its kind, and it allowed them to record Rick Marotta's drum parts and play them back with perfect precision.

The LM-1, which was the first programable drum machine sold to the public that sampled real instruments, was introduced in 1980, the year Gaucho was released, so many assumed that's what Steely Dan used. They didn't, but there was a connection. Roger Linn, who created the LM-1, told Songfacts: "By coincidence, Roger and I had both bought our first computers in around 1975 at a place called Computer Power and Light in Studio City, an area of Los Angeles. Wendel used that same computer and a early but high-quality digital audio interface, running a program he had written to enter simple looping beats on the screen. A very creative and talented guy."

You do indeed get a full, rich, listening experience when playing this song on a good system. Bose uses it to tune car audio systems. Mark Armitage, an acoustical engineer at the company, says it has "a lot of detail and sharp, clean hits that show how well the music's temporal alignment is coming to you. With each speaker a different distance from the listener, tuning a system involves making sure all sounds arrive to ears at the same time to sound clear and natural."

"Hey Nineteen" was the last big hit for Steely Dan. They released their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill, in 1972 and put out an album a year until 1977, landing hits along the way with songs like "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," "Do It Again" and "Peg." They took some time off before releasing "Hey Nineteen" on the Gaucho album in 1980, then called it quits a year later when they felt creatively drained. They reunited in 1993 but didn't put out another album until 2000, Two Against Nature. It won the Grammy for Album Of The Year, baffling even the band.