Girlfriend x3

This 3-parter on "11 Tracks of Whack’s" Girlfriend has been in the works for a while. 

But we've finally pulled together a few interesting and, we hope, illuminating bits from the voluminous Vault versions of this popular tune. 

But it’s more than just a full-band rundown, which many of you have requested over the years. 

Because the twists and turns and — some would say — surprising resolution for this cut are pretty good Exhibit-As for one of our WBM lief motifs: the persistent and oftentimes iterative process of songwriting and track production. 

It also happens to illustrate that sometimes the right step forward may be a step back. 

And zooming in to the personal, we’ll consider that Walter really seems to have dug in ... to get this tune emotionally, psychologically right; to discover and distill some core subjective truths which he felt compelled to express. 

1) Full Band Rundown

"I am a person! “ 

We’ve noted your requests for a (any) full band versions of GF that might exist, We know some of you have live versions from the SD ’93 tour, and several folks even mis-remembered it being in the Slim's ’94 set (it wasn't).

Here is one of several rundowns* from “the Maui band” of Perowsky, Ephron, Rogers, Parks, and Beasley. It’s not necessarily the “best” rundown, nor even their last — but it does have W's audible singalong,** and is roughly representative of other rundowns we’ve heard. 

*Rundowns: meaning, the tryouts and rehearsals and all the playing and tweaks and arrangements and part decisions and sound/tone choices etc that proceed moving on to a “take”. 

A “take” track is when the band, having all those rundown adjustments and decisions under their belt, quiet down, take a breath, Dave Russell runs tape, and the tune is played— without vocals (which will be booth-recorded later) or overdubs. A selected “Take” track — many are rejected! — becomes the base upon which subsequent vocals and overdubs are laid. 

** Luckily for us archivists and Beckerphiles, Walter decided to sing along during most rundowns — not necessarily a choice that other artists automatically make. He decided to do this early on (and even noted as much in his preparatory project notes), thinking that the band would benefit  from hearing the melodies, lyrics, and — he emphasized this — the rhythmic swing and emotional feel of his vocals. Of course it also gave him a chance to try out and rehearse his vocals — seeing as he was, after all, a novice solo singer in those days. 

Dean Parks - Guitar || Adam Rogers - Guitar || John Beasley - Keys || Fima Ephron - Bass || Ben Perowsky - Drums || Walter Becker - Vox

Dave Russell - Engineer

Video Stem: Dan Belcher (thanks!).

2)  Trio Rundown

"No?? OK…”  

A stripped-down trio session. Surely Walter didn’t conceive of the track as a bass-less trio. More likely, rundowns like these were opportunistic experiments in “feel” —  which apparently Walter wasn’t hearing to his liking just yet.

Dean Parks - Guitar || John Beasley - Keys || Ben Perowsky - Drums || Walter Becker - Vox

Dave Russell - Engineer

3) Walter and Dean do a Strip-tease

But in the end, the on-record Girlfriend used neither of these approaches, nor built upon any of the several other band rundowns of this tune.

Question: How then did they execute the final track?

Answer: Piece by piece  

That’s right. In the end, Walter and Dean Parks built the song up from components they recorded themselves, one at a time, and the final 11TOW version added tweaks, overdubs, some re-done vocals, and a few effects to this LegoLand creation.

The audio below contain excerpts of each component part. The visuals point to relevant parts of the DAT label containing the component audio, with some of Walter’s working lyric notebook pages appearing about halfway though. 

Dean Parks - Guitar and machines || Walter Becker - Vox, keys, and machines

Dave Russell - Engineer

Hearty kudos to First Lieutenant Atticus Matticus, Director of Operations, Technology, Motivation, and All-Around Righteous Action — Matthew Kerns —  for splicing up the DAT contents and laying them together so beautifully in this AV— all without benefit of the reel-to-reel timestamps. Thanks Matt!

So — Walter chose what was essentially a demo recreation, over some great-sounding band renditions. 

Why? Why would the manifestly “skilled enough” co-creator of some of the most lush audio soundscapes of the 70s — also apparent in his pre-Whack production jobs —  elect to build so much of his solo debut on such a relatively stripped-down sonic base? 

God knows it’s been asked often enough.

The “Demo Aesthetic” (???) 

We’ve mused about it here before — as in our Paging Audrey Demo post :

" If the writer has written a successful demo for a particular song ... knows what must be included, and knows what must be cut … some writers — Walter among them — believe that they’ve acquired both a map to and guardian for the soul of their song,

" Walter spoke many times in interviews about both the found and the lost of life with your song. You find your song when you decide that this demo, as you've crafted it, has the essentials you need to always recognize, if you are to remember its soul, and what of yours you gave it. Walter once described good demo like a fire pot. It will carry what’s alive and crucial in your song wherever you may need to go".

Walter also said it’s all too easy to leave the firepot behind on the way to a track, to loose touch with the essence of the song, or what made the demo comfortable to sing with, or otherwise Just Not Sound And Feel As The Writer/Performer Wants It To anymore. 

That sounds tautological, but it isn’t, really. Consider, first, that Walter’s demos are themselves the product of work and change and time and adjustment; he didn’t just smash the “SpaceGroove Bass N' Drum #51” module on a Casio and...bam-done. He often labored over a demo for days and weeks and sometimes months; tweaking the drum pattern and sounds; bouncing the baseline just so; all the while singing over every version — even before he had all the lyrics or even, sometimes, the verse melodies locked. 

It’s about support

He was doing that because writing a song through to demo form isn’t just transcription — at least not for most musicians, and certainly not for Walter. Writing is discovering —and in crafting his demos Walter was, among other things, building the best, most natural support structure for presenting and singing a song with ease and flow; with pocket and bounce*

*For every professional singer I know — and as Walter said in more that one interview and notebook page —  the flow of their best performance (or, sometimes, any performance at all) is completely reliant on a just-right (to them) feel of the backing track or band. People, I’ve got pages of rough drafts on this idea;  testimonies from performers; first-hand observations of recording and touring; tales  of discarded tracks and unreleased songs…  but all that's for another time, perhaps.

So thinking of 11TOW features in terms of a “demo aesthetic” really isn’t a complete or accurate categorization. Rather, Walter simply invested heavily in finding that just-right feel. Sometimes that came from a band of musicians — his dispositional preference,  stalwart as he was for Live vs ProFools music. He certainly brought everything he had to a band, to different players, in Maui and in LA. And often enough, those great bands delivered the track that Walter wanted to hear — and bones he felt comfortable in. 

But … sometimes not. So in the end, we’re compelled to acknowledge that Walter Becker simply chose; he went with what felt and sounded right — to him. 

And he did so utterly unbothered by the prospect of listeners’ somehow expecting “a Steely Dan album without the singer from Steely Dan”. ( There’s already some really good group discussion of this and related notions on the site here and here). 

Not to mention multiple interviews in which he expresses his explicit intent for a 

“very stripped down sound, with strong emphasis on melody and bass line, and not too much in the way of chording. The idea was to get a kind of spacious feel, where the harmonies were more defined by melodies and roots than spelled out with static vertical comping type chords.” 

and an

"emphasis on the songs and the groove.”

and a 

" minimalist approach that would enable me to focus on the overall thrust of the song, rather that bogging down in harmonic complexities and ornaments that were perhaps irrelevant ...”

He had a vision for his songs and his sound. 

He was drawn to a new, different musical vocabulary. 

And he had nothing to prove. 

Perhaps his most direct and potent mission statement appears in a very early note for 11TOW — written in large letters in the center of the page: 

All that really matters:

Songs Structure Soul

An Interior World (and sound).

Finally, consider for a moment something obvious about bands: they ring; there’s room sound; there’s ambient aural space; there’s natural decay of notes and sounds. Live music played on band instruments makes music and sounds we mentally place somewhere “out here”. 

So... what? 

So … bear with me a bit: 

Walter’s notebooks and text files show that he really worked and re-worked the lyrics to this one; he dug in to get them emotionally, psychologically right.  And just as writing is discovering in the demo realm, so it is especially for lyrics and prose. Those pages and files weren’t just refinements of words and lines — although there was plenty of that too — they contained a lot of what is considered “emotive free-writing”; uncensored phrases or feelings or images that were never headed for “lyric”-land, but which helped him discover, explore, and distill some core subjective truths which he felt compelled to express. 

To my ears at least, it lands as an intensely internal dialog. Consider the central phrase “Girlfriend — if it can’t be you…”. It sounds like a question sent out to another —  but in context, it’s more a rhetorical, hopeful-but-hopeless, almost anguished phrase put in an oddly affecting form (is it a "counterfactual conditional interrogative”...or something? eek! grammar nerds, help me out here). Somehow, it feels more characteristic of how we express our hopes and needs —  and fears — to ourselves. And of course the rest of the lyrics are recognizable as similarly interior ruminations.

All of this is just one listener’s impression. 

But if it holds any water, then perhaps Walter’s opting for flatter, more controlled, less ringing sounds for his track — especially in the verses and interstitials —  comported well with his lyrical sentiments and expressive intent. Compared to a live kit, the tom and kicks here thud; the beats flatly thump; the guitar lines are small, picked, and palm-muted ... with that eerie opening twilight-zone clock tick-tocking the seconds away. It all sounds so inside to me. The interior of one’s own brain is a relatively small space, after all; there’s not a lot of ringing and sound decay and big room ambiance in there. Thoughts (and plaintive aches) seem to thwack against close-in walls with flat, echoless color. So — maybe his sonic choices are substantively of a piece with his adoption of an internal narrative voice. 

I’d hoped to also consider the momentary exceptions to this sonic “interiority”: when an instrument suddenly breaks through with an expansive, ringing gliss or honk. And of course how the chorus  opens up — as any good Becker chorus is want to do. 

But... a posting deadline looms. 

In fact, that deadline is looming bigly, telling me to pack it up here. Make like a tree and split.

So. 

Looking forward to your discussion and comments…