Another long-lost Steely Dan monitor has lastly been introduced to mild — this time, an early-’70s jingle written for the Milwaukee-based Schlitz Beer.
You can pay attention to the monitor under.
The Schlitz Beer jingle comes from the archive of late, longtime Steely Dan engineer Roger Nichols. It arrives roughly one month after the 1979 tune “The Second Arrangement” surfaced on-line, additionally courtesy of Nichols’ archive.
According to Jake Malooley’s Expanding Dan publication, Steely Dan minimize the jingle through the eight-month hole between their 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill and their 1973 sophomore LP Countdown to Ecstasy. “It was soon after ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ that someone called and asked if the guys would write a song for the Schlitz commercial,” longtime Steely Dan producer Gary Katz instructed Malooley. “And as I remember it, Donald [Fagen] said, ‘OK, but we’re gonna write it.’ By which he meant, they didn’t want to do a commercial somebody else wrote.”
“The band was still pretty young in its career,” added co-founding guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, “so everybody was reaching out for whatever opportunities there were.”
The sub-two-minute jingle bears all of the hallmarks of a Steely Dan tune, combining hermetic jazz-rock preparations with a winking aloofness as Fagen sings, “Once around life / Once around livin’ / Once around beer / And you’ll keep around Schlitz.” Fagen additionally interprets Baxter’s Spanish narration into English, announcing: “When I get home from a hard day’s work / He says he likes to grab for all the gusto he can get / ‘Cause you only go around one time.”
Fagen made it abundantly clear through the studio session that he wouldn’t be cowed into appeasing the highest brass at Schlitz. “As we were doing it, somebody came by from Schlitz’s ad agency — you know, a guy with a powder-blue sweater tied around his neck and quite literally a stopwatch in his hand,” Katz recalled. “He walked into the control room and thought he was going to take over, and that just wasn’t gonna happen.
“He began asking questions in regards to the tune. Donald mentioned aloud to me, ‘Do you have got your hand close to the pink button?’ Then he addressed the advert man: ‘If you say one other phrase about this tune, we’re simply gonna erase it.’ So the man left. I did not hear about it once more.”
Despite the band’s best efforts, Schlitz ultimately shelved the ad due to concerns over the Spanish word for “seize.” As Baxter told Malooley: “The verb ‘coger’ can be utilized as a slang time period for sexual activity.” A photo of Fagen and guitarist Denny Dias from the session later appeared on the back cover to Steely Dan’s 1975 album Katy Lied.
Schlitz was sold to Pabst Brewing Company in 1999, and Steely Dan’s ill-fated jingle was relegated to the dustbin of rock history, which Baxter considered a mistake. “If I had been the Schlitz firm,” he said, “I’d contact Donald Fagen and pay him one million {dollars} to do one other one.”
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