I haven’t for the life of me been able to muster up a good reason for this, but certain major labels in the seventies would release cassette and vinyl versions of specific albums with entirely different song sequences. This is a practice that may have continued into the eighties, although no good examples are springing to mind. The three I do remember clearest from the seventies, though, are Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and Can’t Buy a Thrill as well as Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight. Did these differences have to do with space allotment issues from format to format? Maybe, but the complete jumble of those releases I’m familiar with makes me doubt it.
The reason I bring it up is because I can’t handle the fact that Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic now survives only with the inferior vinyl sequence. This isn’t a case of me just being upset because something’s no longer the way I’d gotten used to. I feel downright evangelical in my belief that Pretzel Logic was a better, more meaningful, and logically-sequenced album in its 8-track and cassette versions, and that a careless mistake somewhere has given the vinyl version the right to manufactured survival. Let’s fire up the overhead projector and compare the two.
Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic (LP version): Side One - 1) Rikki Don’t Lose That Number; 2) Night By Night; 3) Any Major Dude Will Tell You; 4) Barrytown; 5) East St. Louis Toodle-Oo. Side Two - 1) Parker’s Band; 2) Through with Buzz; 3) Pretzel Logic; 4) With a Gun; 5) Charlie Freak; 6) Monkey in Your Soul.
Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic (cassette versions): Side One - 1) Rikki Don’t Lose That Number; 2) Through with Buzz; 3) Monkey in Your Soul; 4) Any Major Dude Will Tell You; 5) Parker’s Band; 6) Charlie Freak. Side Two - 1) Barrytown; 2) East St. Louis Toodle-Oo; 3) With a Gun; 4) Night By Night; 5) Pretzel Logic.
As you see with the vinyl version, two of the album’s most crescendo-worthy cuts, the neon-lit “Night By Night” and the epic “Pretzel Logic,” with its mid-sixties Dylanesque mad visions, are squandered off in the middle of sides one and two, respectively. But on the cassette version, they close the album effectively, one after the other with the same sort of authoritative finality as nightfall and dreams. On the vinyl version, sides one and two both end with what sound like offhanded snickers - “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and “Monkey in Your Soul.” On the cassette version, though, they’re rightfully reconfigured as supportive - and therefore more useful - middle tracks, giving way to the haunting and poignant “Charlie Freak” as the side one closer and “Pretzel Logic” for side two.
The entire trajectory of the album, in fact, makes more sense in the cassette versions. Let me rephrase that: it makes sense while the vinyl one doesn’t. Side one of the cassette functions as a series of person-to-person conversations, pleas, jokes, and negotiations, all of which give listeners a sense of the tangled, “pretzel”-like nature of relationships. “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” that vulnerable and familiar message to a girl we all assume the singer will never hear from, is followed up by his declaration of having had it with a pain-in-the-neck friend named Buzz who steals girlfriends (Rikki?) and money. Next comes “Monkey in Your Soul,” which offers classic Steely Dan yuks by featuring a prominent, buzzing guitar line as a follow up to a song called “Through with Buzz.” It also reinforces the “yeah, right” nature of “Monkey’s” message which is that, no, the singer can’t hold his ground. He can only supplicate, wise-crack, or grouse.
This is behavior we see more of in “Any Major Dude Will Tell You.” As much as the left-field slang of its lyrics, it’s the pitifulness of the spectacle - all nifty words and no action - that gives this song so much of its weird pathos. With “Parker’s Band,” our poor, ineffectual singer is listening to records and longing to get lost in the city where he can lead a loose and commitment-free existence, something he’ll actually gun for in response to the crash-down culmination of the tragic “Charlie Freak.” There’s no second-person dialogue going on in this song. Someone’s dead now, and the best our man can do is drop a keepsake in the corpse’s coffin. Time to make some changes.
Side two of Pretzel Logic, as conveyed so well in the cassette version sequence, is all about the nightlife fantasies we heard about in “Parker’s Band,” the flames of which have all been fanned by the interpersonal failures in side one. It’s about foregoing the micro-existence of relationships and losing oneself in the impersonal, macro-existence of the “city.” It kicks off with “Barrytown,” Steely Dan’s own twisted version of “Okie from Muskogee,” in which we find the sun rising on a small-town rant by someone requesting a certain object of derision - presumably the singer in side one - to get away from where folks like to do things the old-fashioned way. This is followed up by more city-life objectification and fantasy with a version of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” which stands in as a symbolic getaway.
The fantasies shrivel some with the scenes of murder and robbery in “With a Gun,” with its campy steel guitars channeled in directly from Muskogee. But this is general street conflict nowhere near as painful as the heartbreaking business documented on side one, and on the following track we see our singer-protagonist joining in the outlaw party and living “night by night.” It’s a moment of bittersweet transcendence that Joe Jackson later tried to capture in “Stepping Out” as the “night” side closer for his Night and Day LP. (It’s no surprise that Jackson was a huge Steely Dan fan, something we find out in his A Cure for Gravity. I’ll bet he owned the cassette version of Pretzel Logic - not the vinyl.) With “Pretzel Logic,” finally, we get a cinematic escape into dreams of time-travel and absurdity, providing the whole story with an apt title to sum it all up.
The cassette versions work so well for me that I can’t fathom the vinyl version being the “right one.” In terms of ratings, its a full star’s worth of difference between a carefully constructed album with an actual story to tell and merely a collection of some cleverly executed songs. But as far as I can tell, the album’s now, and always has been, understood as the latter. Bud Scoppa’s 1974 review of the album in Rolling Stone pretty much set the template with the standard pros and cons: “wonderfully fluid ensemble. . . private-joke obscurities. . . arrogant impenetrability.” But I swear, folks, something has gone terribly wrong with the sequencing. Someone should tell the obviously oblivious Donald and Walter what their label’s done to their baby while they haven’t been looking. Indeed, I may well be the only person who ever took the cassette version seriously enough to understand this long-acknowledged classic album for the classic + one star it actually is. Stay tuned for my next rant, titled “no one understands this music the way I do.”
posted by Kim Simpson
