Call Me ... ?

Very warm weather suddenly ended yesterday. Now cold and raining. You could literally have worn shorts on Monday. Now you're scrambling for the electric blanket ... .
While driving around on an errand, heard a fave from college senior days: Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues" from the Aja album. Back then, it was another smooth jazz-rock hit with puzzling lyrics by "the Dan." Now, except for the part about learning to work the saxophone, I could be the guy singing the song, for real.
The lyrics are the kind of one-side-of-a-dialogue thing Robert Browning was famous for in Victorian England, like his "My Last Duchess" poem. "Deacon Blues" is about a jazzman who doesn't have a recording contract or a steady gig, is mostly a loner, etc. etc. He's a "loser" in the game of life, like me. When I'd hear the song back in college, I'd wonder how on Earth anybody could live with themselves knowing everyone thought that about them, much less admit it to themselves. Now, I know.
What's also odd is that, going to school in the Atlantic Coast Conference, I knew right away what "Deacon" referred to: Wake Forest University. The "Demon Deacons" were then perennial losers in college football. A fairly small school, it is best known for its academics, not athletics (except basketball). In my day, they were always at the bottom of the list in conference football. The reverse would have been the University of Alabama's "Crimson Tide," where its legendary coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant, ruled supreme. The "Tide" were almost always in college football's Top Ten in those days.
The song's chorus, "They gotta name for the winners in the world/ I, I want a name when I lose ..." is sung quite plaintively. But, now (with CDs and digital remixes) you can also hear outstanding scoring for brass and wind instruments going on in the background. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker knew that many heroes of modern jazz (like master orchestrator Gil Evans, among others) labored in obscurity for most of their careers, and the background arrangements seem to allude to a sad fact that the most creative often are the most copied by the "winners in the world."
But there's something else to think about: Alabama has had such a miserable football record of late that the school spent a record sum to hire away someone else's coach, who then lied about it when asked point-blank by reporters. Even if he's successful, his career with the Tide may remain clouded by that. (The NCAA has in the past frowned on such tactics, preferring its schools' coaches not appear to have been ''bought" from another organization.)
Meanwhile, Wake Forest remained nationally ranked in football most of this past season and won the ACC Conference championship game. Though they lost in the Orange Bowl to Louisville, the Deacons marked history: no school the size of Wake Forest had even been in a Bowl Championship Series game before that. Also, the team's coach won coach-of-the-year honors, both in the conference and nationally.
Sometimes, things turn completely around. And, although the "narrator" in "Deacon Blues" admits he's a loser, he also can play the way he wants to and otherwise go around being himself. Is that losing? Is being a successful fraud winning?

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*For his part, Saban since has given the world a lesson in sustaining momentum, something Jim Grobe was unable to emulate. Also, I've added or changed bits of language in this post for clarity's sake, unlike most previous posts here in this "rebuild".


LJ orig.: 01/17/07