Gaucho (Bass Drums Vocals)

This is the title track from the Gaucho album, but with only bass, drums, vocals, lead guitar and the occasional synth stab.

One of the things I think is so fundamental to understanding the music of Steely Dan / Walter Becker / Donald Fagen and their reputation for being exceptionally hard on drummers and exceptionally picky with bass players and bass parts, is the time and effort they spent getting the bass and drums right. I think of the drummer and the bass player like the pitcher and catcher on a baseball team. The battery. They aren't the whole team, but without the right player at each position, the rest of the team isn't going to fare very well. In this case, both the bass and lead guitar parts are Walter, and you can really get a sense of Walter's bass chops and compositional style around the Gaucho era. There are little touches, little flourishes, that no one else would have played in exactly that way.

It goes without saying that much of this song's beauty is in the horn chart and the horn playing, but stripped bare of all of that, I think the composition still holds up. It's pretty astounding how bass / drums / melody gives you everything you need to frame the song.