The band per­form­ing in the video above is Steely Dan. Yet it does­n’t sound quite like Steely Dan, an impres­sion par­tial­ly explained by it being a live show rather than the kind of per­fec­tion­ist stu­dio record­ings for whose metic­u­lous con­struc­tion (and repeat­ed recon­struc­tion) the group’s very name has long been a byword. But its found­ing mas­ter­minds Wal­ter Beck­er and Don­ald Fagen had­n’t yet set­tled into that com­plex­ly pris­tine aes­thet­ic at the time of this appear­ance, which aired fifty years ago next week on The Mid­night Spe­cial. Back then, hav­ing put out only their first cou­ple of albums, they could still present their project as a rel­a­tive­ly con­ven­tion­al ear­ly-sev­en­ties rock band.

It helped that they had a rel­a­tive­ly con­ven­tion­al front­man in singer David Palmer, who han­dles lead vocals on their Mid­night Spe­cial per­for­mance of “Do It Again,” Steely Dan’s first hit. That he did­n’t do so on the stu­dio record­ing under­scores that the band is gen­uine­ly play­ing live, not mim­ing to a back­ing track, as was stan­dard prac­tice on oth­er music shows.

It also con­sti­tutes anoth­er rea­son this ver­sion sounds “off” to a seri­ous Dan­fan, but it would take a tru­ly blink­ered purism (a con­di­tion wide­spread among the ranks of Dan­fans, admit­ted­ly) not to appre­ci­ate this per­for­mance, espe­cial­ly when it gets around to the solo by the band’s orig­i­nal gui­tarist Den­ny Dias — anoth­er of which comes along in “Reel­in’ in the Years,” played in the video just above.

Not that one gui­tarist could suf­fice for Steely Dan, even in this ear­ly line­up: they also had Jeff “Skunk” Bax­ter, now regard­ed as one of the finest stu­dio play­ers in the sub­genre of “yacht rock.” Bax­ter appears promi­nent­ly in their live ren­di­tion of “Show Biz Kids,” albeit as just one ele­ment of the full stage nec­es­sary to repro­duce that song live. Unlike “Do It Again” and “Reel­in’ in the Years,” two sin­gles from Steely Dan’s album Can’t Buy a Thrill, “Show Biz Kids” comes from their then-new­ly released fol­low-up Count­down to Ecsta­sy, which offered a rich­er real­iza­tion of both Steely Dan’s dis­tinc­tive sound and even more dis­tinc­tive world­view. To the refine­ment of that sound and world­view Beck­er and Fagen would devote them­selves less than a year after their Mid­night Spe­cial broad­cast, when they quit live per­for­mance entire­ly for the com­forts and rig­ors of their nat­ur­al habi­tat: the record­ing stu­dio.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Decon­struct­ing Steely Dan: The Band That Was More Than Just a Band

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

Steely Dan Cre­ates the Deadhead/Danfan Con­ver­sion Chart: A Wit­ty Guide Explain­ing How You Can Go From Lov­ing the Dead to Idol­iz­ing Steely Dan

How Steely Dan Went Through Sev­en Gui­tarists and Dozens of Hours of Tape to Get the Per­fect Gui­tar Solo on “Peg”

Watch David Bowie’s Final Per­for­mance as Zig­gy Star­dust, Singing “I Got You Babe” with Mar­i­anne Faith­full, on The Mid­night Spe­cial (1973)

Chuck Berry & the Bee Gees Per­form Togeth­er in 1973: An Unex­pect­ed Video from The Mid­night Spe­cial Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It’s hard to imag­ine one of today’s nation­al­ly known singer-song­writ­ers vol­un­tar­i­ly shar­ing an unfin­ished com­po­si­tion on late night TV, then ask­ing for advice on how to wrap things up.

That’s exact­ly what Paul Simon did on The Dick Cavett Show on Sep­tem­ber 5, 1974, when he shared the first two vers­es of “Still Crazy After All These Years,” accom­pa­ny­ing him­self on acoustic gui­tar:

I met my old lover

On the street last night

She seemed so glad to see me

I just smiled

And we talked about some old times

And we drank our­selves some beers

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

I’m not the kind of man

Who tends to social­ize

I seem to lean on

Old famil­iar ways

And I ain’t no fool for love songs

That whis­per in my ears

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

Next, he pre­sent­ed Cavett and the stu­dio audi­ence with options, warn­ing that they would be musi­cal choic­es, “because lyri­cal­ly, I real­ly don’t know what I have to say.”

Simon quick­ly demon­strat­ed what a fol­low up might sound like in G major or G sharp minor, explain­ing that the wis­est move from a music the­o­ry stand­point, would be an as yet unused C nat­ur­al or C sharp, to sub­lim­i­nal­ly refresh listener’s ears, a tac­tic he likened to the comedic Rule of Threes.

When the song was released the fol­low­ing year, the key had gone up to G and the gui­tar had mor­phed into piano backed by the Mus­cle Shoals Rhythm Sec­tion, with a jazzy sax solo after the bridge.

All in all, a slick­er, less intro­spec­tive sound.

In an inter­view with Amer­i­can Song­writer, Simon not only delves fur­ther into Still Crazy’s chord pro­gres­sions, he pegs its famous­ly enig­mat­ic lyrics as an unhap­py assess­ment of his per­son­al life at the time of their writ­ing:

That was a long time ago. I’ve long since stopped feel­ing that way. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t describe myself that way. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t think that way at all.

The words are per­son­al. It sounds like I was talk­ing about where I was then. I have the same instinct as all writ­ers: if some­thing from my life works, I use it. If I have to change it and exag­ger­ate it because that works, I’ll change it and exag­ger­ate it. 

I’m not com­mit­ted to telling the truth. I’m com­mit­ted to find­ing what the truth is in the song. But that’s not a com­mit­ment to telling every­one what’s going on with you. That’s very com­mon.

True. But would he still agree to per­form the song in a turkey suit if threat­ened with the sobri­quet “Mr. Alien­ation”?

Here are the lyrics that stuck, from the album that shares the song’s title:

I met my old lover

On the street last night

She seemed so glad to see me

I just smiled

And we talked about some old times

And we drank our­selves some beers

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

I’m not the kind of man

Who tends to social­ize

I seem to lean on

Old famil­iar ways

And I ain’t no fool for love songs

That whis­per in my ears

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

Four in the morn­ing

Crapped out

Yawn­ing

Long­ing my life away

I’ll nev­er wor­ry

Why should I?

It’s all gonna fade

Now I sit by my win­dow

And I watch the cars

I fear I’ll do some dam­age

One fine day

But I would not be con­vict­ed

By a jury of my peers

Still crazy

Still crazy

Still crazy after all these years

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

Jazz Vir­tu­oso Oscar Peter­son Gives Dick Cavett a Daz­zling Piano Les­son (1979)

Paul Simon Decon­structs “Mrs. Robin­son” (1970)

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Bri­an Eno famous­ly said of the Vel­vet Under­ground that, though their debut album did­n’t sell well, every­one who bought a copy start­ed a band. One could, per­haps, make a sim­i­lar remark about a new wave band called The Plas­tics, who formed a decade or so lat­er on the oth­er side of the Pacif­ic. They record­ed for only five years, from the mid-nine­teen-sev­en­ties to the ear­ly eight­ies, but wide swaths of all Japan­ese pop­u­lar music released since bear marks of their influ­ence. Accord­ing to Under­ground, co-founder Toshio Nakan­ishi, who sang and played gui­tar, is “now con­sid­ered one of the most well-known Japan­ese musi­cians of all time.”

“One day in 1976,” writes Neo­japon­is­me’s W. David Marx, the 20-year-old Nakan­ishi “gath­ered his friends at Harajuku’s most famous cafe, Leon, and decid­ed they need­ed to form a band. They did not own any instru­ments, but music seemed an obvi­ous means of expres­sion.” They began by cov­er­ing the likes of Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Par­ty” and Con­nie Fran­cis’ “Vaca­tion” at fash­ion par­ties, but were soon advised by the vis­it­ing David Bowie to write songs of their own; sub­se­quent well-timed encoun­ters with the work of bands like the Sex Pis­tols and Devo gave them an idea of how to do it.

“The Plas­tics’ reliance on the lat­est West­ern musi­cal trends was a com­mon prac­tice in the Tokyo music scene, but unlike their pre­de­ces­sors, the band was able to be in dia­logue with their favorite West­ern artists in real time.”

Marx quotes Nakan­ishi writ­ing in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy that “YMO’s record label plot­ted to make them inter­na­tion­al, but we forged all of those devel­op­ments our­selves and the label just fol­lowed up.” Those devel­op­ments includ­ed the mem­bers’ asso­ci­a­tions with West­ern musi­cal fig­ures as var­i­ous as Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Bri­an Fer­ry, Bob Mar­ley, and Iggy Pop. When the group’s gui­tarist Hajime Tachibana, who also worked as a graph­ic design­er, cre­at­ed Japan­ese tour pro­grams for Talk­ing Heads, David Byrne end­ed up with a Plas­tics demo tape in hand, which he passed along to the B‑52s, who passed it along to their man­ag­er, who signed them. The height of their expo­sure to West­ern audi­ences came in 1982, when SCTV aired the music video for their song “Top Secret Man” on its “Mid­night Video Spe­cial.”

Clad in checker­board-and-neon retro fash­ions, singing non­sen­si­cal­ly catchy lyrics, and bust­ing extrav­a­gant­ly herky-jerky dance moves against void-like back­drops, the mem­bers of The Plas­tics come off in the “Top Secret Man” as near-par­o­d­ic embod­i­ments of the new wave musi­cal aes­thet­ic. That they also hap­pened to be Japan­ese sure­ly added, for West­ern view­ers those four decades ago, a cer­tain lay­er of cross-cul­tur­al absur­di­ty. “Indeed, is the dis­par­i­ty between the East and West which sets the Plas­tics apart from their con­tem­po­raries,” says Unde­ground, “their lyrics cit­ing Bauhaus and Russ­ian avant-garde, tech­nol­o­gy and Amer­i­can con­sumerism through their remote, Japan­ese lens.” (Marx quotes Byrne’s obser­va­tion that “the very name Plas­tics was a tip off: an iron­ic take on the com­mon West­ern per­cep­tion of Japan­ese prod­ucts being ‘plas­tic,’ and there­fore infe­ri­or copies of bet­ter made West­ern items.”)

Hav­ing spent the decade since the war both absorb­ing West­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture and achiev­ing an almost futur­is­ti­cal­ly advanced lev­el of devel­op­ment, the Japan of the ear­ly eight­ies had actu­al­ly become an ide­al place to devel­op new wave’s sig­na­ture incon­gruity of D.I.Y and high tech. Plas­tics Masahide Saku­ma even worked on the devel­op­ment of Roland’s TR-808, and before that drum machine went on to shape the sound of entire gen­res of music around the world, his band owned the very first mod­el. Alas, Saku­ma and Nakan­ishi both died in the twen­ty-tens, and with them the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a true Plas­tics reunion. But it would be a sur­prise if their three albums — Wel­come Plas­tics, Ori­ga­to Plas­ti­co, and the West-ori­ent­ed set of remakes Wel­come Back — don’t still have more than a few new bands, East­ern or West­ern, to inspire.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Meet Les Ral­lizes Dénudés, the Mys­te­ri­ous Japan­ese Psych-Rock Band Whose Influ­ence Is Every­where

How Youtube’s Algo­rithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japan­ese Song Into an Enor­mous­ly Pop­u­lar Hit: Dis­cov­er Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love”

Ryuichi Sakamo­to, RIP: Watch Him Cre­ate Ground­break­ing Elec­tron­ic Music in 1984

The Roland TR-808, the Drum Machine That Changed Music For­ev­er, Is Back! And It’s Now Afford­able & Com­pact

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Com­plete Con­cert

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.