Marshall got his start in San Francisco, shooting the beat poets and jazz musicians of the North Beach coffee houses, he eventually gained the kind of access to the lives of musicians that photographers these days could only dream of. He lived alongside them, was one of them, and because of that, he was trusted by his subjects, from the burgeoning music scene in early ’60s New York City to the San Francisco hippie counterculture scene that developed thereafter, Marshall was always at the right place at the right time.

[R.I.P. Legendary Rock Photographer Jim Marshall is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Written by David McFadden, 8/11/2009, for Crawdaddy!

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 must have 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.”

Read the rest of this article at Crawdaddy!

[You Go to Lost Wages: “Show Biz Kids” is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]