Here’s a charming transcription that surprisingly has not been done yet (at least, nowhere that I could find): “Your Gold Teeth II” by Steely Dan, off the Katy Lied record. Jeff Porcaro is the drummer on this tune, as well as the majority of the LP; the lone exception is “Any World (That I'm Welcome To)” with Hal Blaine. This is somewhat of a deep cut that I rediscovered as I was getting BPMs from all of the most famous Steely Dan albums.
“Your Gold Teeth II” is, of course, the sequel to Countdown to Ecstasy’s “Your Gold Teeth.” I guess that’s the idea anyway; outside of rock operas, I’m never really sure what to make of song sequels, and I don’t know to what extent the two tracks are related, aside from the lyric “Throw out your gold teeth/Do you see how they roll?”
Both tunes start with a bit of an upbeat disco-fusion flair, but whatever tenuous similarities the two songs have quickly evaporate, as after about 40 seconds, “Your Gold Teeth II” slows down and goes into a waltzing jazz feel with a flurry of time signature changes. In fact, “Your Gold Teeth II” is Steely Dan’s most rhythmically adventurous song by a very wide margin.
Regarding those time signature changes, here’s a snippet from that Modern Drummer article I brought up last time (November ’92), where Jeff talks about the tune:
“Your Gold Teeth II” is a song with lots of bars of 3/8, 6/8, and 9/8. And it’s bebop! I could swing the cymbal beat and fake it, but that always bothered me. After recording it, Fagen gave me a Charles Mingus record with Dannie Richmond on drums.* It had a tune that was full of 6/8 and 9/8 bars. I listened to that for a couple of days, and we tried it again and it worked. What a cool thing! The ride cymbal on that, and on the whole record, is an old K Zildjian my dad gave me. Unfortunately, all the cymbals are clipped and phased on the album because the DBX didn’t work. That was real heart-breaking for those guys.
Time signatures are always open to some interpretation, and I looked around for some sheet music of the tune but didn’t get great explanations — the scores either forgo using 9/8 altogether and use weird combinations of 6/8 and 3/8, or just write the whole thing in double time 3/4 (which might be easiest, but according to Jeff, that’s not how it was written).
I’m kind of surprised there aren’t any other breakdowns of the tune. I found this article, although I can’t help but wonder if it was written by a time traveler using AI.
I only used 9/8, 6/8, and 3/8 in my transcription, and as such, I did some interesting things in this transcription that I wouldn’t normally do. For instance, I use 6/8 right at the transition to the waltz feel:
Normally, I would have used 12/8, but 6/8 is a funny meter — it seems to be the case that, for whatever reason, many musicians default to 6/8 instead of 12/8. I don’t really get it, since everyone defaults to 4/4 over 2/4, so I can’t explain the preference for 6/8’s two beats instead of 12/8’s four.
Moreover, there are moments where a bar of 9/8 is followed by a bar of 3/8. Again, I would have likely just combined them into a single bar of 12/8. But Jeff doesn’t mention that 12/8 was used in “Your Gold Teeth II” at all, and I tried to channel his info as best I could.
After the 6/8 setup, we get into the verse, which uses 4 bars of 9/8 plus a bar of 3/8:
The chorus is also in 9/8 with a bar of 3/8 slipped in:
The verse and chorus repeat once, and then we get to the guitar solo, which is quite squirrely, with a deluge of chord changes and meter changes. Here it is in its entirety:
So then. I decided to include the chords here to give you a sense of why I put downbeats where I did. The real oddball thing is the dotted 8th hits in 3/8, which first show up on the second line, measure 72. It shows up again starting at measure 75, with four chord hits — using 6/8 rather than two bars of 3/8 would probably make the most sense, but I kept it in 3/8 for continuity.
The final chunk of the tune more or less reuses some of the phrasing from the verses and choruses, while the outro is in 6/8.
Whew — all of that, and I have barely talked about Jeff’s drumming! Analyzing comping is difficult for me because of the inherent amount of ad-libbing, so for the most part, I’ll let the sheet music speak for itself. You can see a lot of dotted 8th note action, a lot of drags, and some Elvin Jones-style triplets.
There’s a subtle accent on pretty much every downbeat of the swing, but it’s not quite enough to notate. In the drum corps world, the tenuto is used as a half accent, and I’ve always felt like that’s kind of silly, but I was tempted to use it today.
Jeff is also quite adept at the tap-accent, where an accented note immediately follows an unaccented note:
Also, check out the swung snare notes in unison with the kick:
I normally don’t bother with including hi-hat pedals in my transcriptions, because getting down all the pedal chicks can be very tedious. For the most part, Jeff pretty consistently stomps on the second 8th note to each beat. Like this:
Speaking of idiophone insanity, I must point out that the ride cymbal is, at times, quite inaudible. I tried my best to make out as much detail as I could, but it started to drive me crazy, and my extra attention was ultimately fruitless; none of my usual tricks came through to help clear anything up.
Jeff seems to be pretty consistent with the swing pattern, but there may be moments I missed where he only plays 8ths with no swung 16ths. I typically err on the side of adding complexity that might not be there rather than vice versa — it almost feels disrespectful to assume a drummer is playing something easier.
Jeff blames part of the cymbal sound on the dbx noise reduction equipment, but I have not been able to find a clear description of what went wrong with dbx on this album, and how it was fixed. There is a snippet of a lecture from engineer Roger Nichols that discusses the snafu, but it’s a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with how companding noise reduction works. (tl;dr the signal is “encoded” or compressed to make everything louder and better mask the tape hiss. The recording is eventually “decoded” or expanded to restore the dynamic range, and hopefully leave the noise floor inaudible.)
It’s also contradicted somewhat by this article written by Denny Diaz (originally for Steely Dan’s website), but the Diaz article in turn seems to be contradicted somewhat by reality. Diaz claims that the 24-track tape that was compressed by dbx was fixed by Dolby expansion, but I don’t believe that’s technically possible, as only dbx could expand the signal. So maybe he’s misremembering. It’s long been rumored that Walter and Donald refused to listen to the final mixes, but who knows how true that is.
Personally, I’ve never really noticed anything on this LP that sounds particularly mangled; perhaps digital mastering has salvaged it, although there is a funny sustain from the ride during those piano breaks, where it almost sounds like a sizzle cymbal.
Jeff’s effort on “Your Gold Teeth II” is quite admirable, and he did a better job than I think anyone 20-year-old drummer without an obvious jazz background (even then, I can think of some younger “jazz” drummers that Walter and Donald would have chased out of the studio had they been there in 1974).
The funny thing is, in that Modern Drummer article, Jeff talks about his struggles with getting the shuffle down for the (much more straightforward) album opener “Black Friday”:
On “Black Friday” I was again thinking of Jim Gordon, my shuffle champion. I got real frustrated trying to play this, and I just threw a big tantrum. “I’m the wrong guy! You should get Jim Gordon,” I told Gary Katz. After walking around the block three times, cursing myself, I came back in and cut it. That guitar solo is Walter on an old Fender Mustang guitar with rusty strings. That’s a bad-ass solo, man.
From this 1986 Q&A:
On the Katy Lied album, the tune “Black Friday,” I played it twice and I threw my sticks down, and I was 19 years old [he was actually 20], I was like—flipped out! I threw my sticks down, I walked out of the studio and I walked around the block twice, and I was mad because I couldn’t play, I didn’t feel—I know what a shuffle is supposed to feel like because I love hearing guys who play shuffles good. And I’m here listening to myself playing, I just couldn’t stand hearing myself because I know—I knew it wasn’t swinging. So I went up to Fagan and I said “Look, get some other drummer to play this song man, get somebody who really knows a shuffle.” And they got pissed at me and they said “No, you play it,” and I came back in mad and I did that track, and after I did that track people started expecting me to play shuffles. And shuffles are hard man, I can’t stand shuffles!
From this record, you wouldn’t have guessed that was the case. Least of all with “Your Gold Teeth II.”
(Fun fact: Did you know Herbie Hancock covered this song?)
* ^ I have, unfortunately, not been able to pinpoint this exact record.
