Listen to Steely Dan’s Long-Lost Schlitz Beer Jingle

One other long-lost Steely Dan observe has lastly been dropped at gentle — this time, an early-’70s jingle written for the Milwaukee-based Schlitz Beer.

You’ll be able to hearken to the observe 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 track “The Second Association” surfaced on-line, additionally courtesy of Nichols’ archive.

In response to Jake Malooley’s Increasing Dan publication, Steely Dan minimize the jingle in the course of the eight-month hole between their 1972 debut Cannot Purchase a Thrill and their 1973 sophomore LP Countdown to Ecstasy. “It was quickly after ‘Reelin’ within the Years’ that somebody referred to as and requested if the fellows would write a track for the Schlitz business,” longtime Steely Dan producer Gary Katz advised Malooley. “And as I keep in mind it, Donald [Fagen] mentioned, ‘OK, however we’re gonna write it.’ By which he meant, they did not wish to do a business someone else wrote.”

“The band was nonetheless fairly younger in its profession,” added co-founding guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, “so all people was reaching out for no matter alternatives there have been.”

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, “As soon as round life / As soon as round livin’ / As soon as round beer / And you may preserve round Schlitz.” Fagen additionally interprets Baxter’s Spanish narration into English, saying: “After I get house from a tough day’s work / He says he likes to seize for all of the gusto he can get / ‘Trigger you solely go round one time.”

Fagen made it abundantly clear in the course of the studio session that he wouldn’t be cowed into appeasing the highest brass at Schlitz. “As we have been doing it, someone got here by from Schlitz’s advert company — you understand, a man with a powder-blue sweater tied round his neck and fairly actually a stopwatch in his hand,” Katz recalled. “He walked into the management room and thought he was going to take over, and that simply wasn’t gonna occur.

“He began asking questions in regards to the track. Donald mentioned aloud to me, ‘Do you’ve gotten your hand close to the pink button?’ Then he addressed the advert man: ‘When you say one other phrase about this track, we’re simply gonna erase it.’ So the man left. I did not hear about it once more.”

Regardless of the band’s finest efforts, Schlitz finally shelved the advert as a consequence of issues over the Spanish phrase for “seize.” As Baxter advised Malooley: “The verb ‘coger’ can be utilized as a slang time period for sexual activity.” A photograph of Fagen and guitarist Denny Dias from the session later appeared on the again cowl to Steely Dan’s 1975 album Katy Lied.

Schlitz was bought to Pabst Brewing Firm in 1999, and Steely Dan’s ill-fated jingle was relegated to the dustbin of rock historical past, which Baxter thought-about a mistake. “If I have been the Schlitz firm,” he mentioned, “I might contact Donald Fagen and pay him one million {dollars} to do one other one.”