Can't Buy a Thrill Is the Better Steely Dan Album — and Yes, I'll Die on This Hill

I've listened to Aja more times than I can count. I understand what it is. I'm just not sure it ever loved me back.

Go ahead. Say it out loud at a dinner party. Watch the wine glasses tremble. Watch someone set down their fork with the slow deliberateness of a person trying very hard not to scream. Can't Buy a Thrill is a better Steely Dan album than Aja. I've said it. It's out there. We can't go back.

And look, I want to be clear about something before the letters arrive. I have listened to Aja countless times. I've given it every fair shot. I understand the production quality. I hear the Wayne Shorter saxophone solo. I recognize what Becker and Fagen were doing in that studio and how meticulously they did it. I get it. I respect it deeply.

But here's the thing, respecting an album and being moved by one are two entirely different experiences and after all those listens, Aja has never quite made the leap from the former to the latter for me. The songs on Can't Buy a Thrill are, simply put, more appealing. More alive. More mine. And I don't think that's a taste failure. I think it's the point.

Three songs that prove the case

Let's start with "Do It Again." That opening with the electric sitar, the hypnotic groove that just locks in and doesn't let go is one of the great album-opening statements in 1970s rock. It tells you immediately that this band is doing something no one else is doing, and it does it while also being genuinely, undeniably fun. Then comes "Dirty Work," which breaks your heart cleanly and efficiently in under three minutes without asking for any credit. And then there's "Reelin' in the Years."

"Reelin' in the Years" is one of the great rock songs ever recorded, full stop. The guitar solo alone is a defining moment in the history of the instrument and is performed by session player Elliott Randall in a single continuous take, no edits, no punch-ins, on a 1965 Stratocaster plugged straight into a bass amp. The band had called Randall in after their regular guitarist couldn't nail the part. Randall read the lyrics, got the feel of the song, and played it through once for the engineer (who forgot to hit record). The second take, the one we've all been living with for fifty years, is what you hear on the album. One run. Done.

Notable endorsement

Jimmy Page, the man behind "Stairway to Heaven" and some of the most celebrated guitar work in rock history named Elliott Randall's solo on "Reelin' in the Years" his favorite guitar solo of all time in a 1999 interview with Classic Rock. When played the track again in 2016, Page rated it 12 out of a possible 10. The man knows his way around a guitar neck. His word carries some weight here.

And here's the irony, Fagen himself called the solo "dumb but effective," and Becker said simply, "It's no fun." The two men who wrote the song couldn't love the very thing that made it immortal. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page who spent his career playing guitar solos that people worship, listened to it and ran out of numbers. That contrast tells you everything about the gap between technical perfectionism and actual feeling.

The fidelity trap

Before nothing else was said about Aja, someone decided it was the album for testing speaker systems. Audiophiles have been reaching for it ever since to show off their equipment, and that framing has quietly warped how we talk about it. "Does this sound incredible on expensive speakers" and "is this the better album" are not the same question, but fifty years of overlap have made them feel that way.

Aja is optimized for being heard. Can't Buy a Thrill is optimized for being felt. Those are different design goals, and they produce different experiences. The debut sounds like a band in a room making urgent, irreversible decisions. Aja sounds like an ideal, polished to a state beyond argument. And ideals, as it turns out, are hard to love. You can't get close to them.

What I keep coming back to

Music criticism loves a coronation. Aja won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978 and was immediately assigned to the permanent canon, and once something is in the canon, questioning it starts to feel like bad taste rather than honest listening. But taste is the whole point. My ears keep going back to 1972. They keep going back to "Do It Again" and "Dirty Work" and the sound of Elliott Randall playing the greatest guitar solo of Jimmy Page's lifetime in a single unrehearsed take.

That's the debut. That's where Steely Dan's soul lives, before the studio became a controlled environment and the craft became the product. Can't Buy a Thrill isn't the album Steely Dan is remembered for. It's the album that explains why they deserved to be remembered at all.

The verdict

Aja is a masterpiece of execution. Can't Buy a Thrill is a masterpiece of feeling. I've given both every chance they deserve, and one consistently resonates more. You already know which one.