Deacon Blues

This song has the curious chorus line of: They call Alabama the Crimson Tide Call me Deacon Blues At the time, the University Of Alabama was a football powerhouse, winning the National Championship in 1973 and losing just one game in each of their next two seasons under the direction of their famous coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. Alabama is known as "The Crimson Tide," a grandiose name that Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen found amusing. The "Deacon" is often thought to be the Wake Forest University "Demon Deacons," whose football team struggled for much of the '70s, winning just seven games from 1972-1975. According to Fagen, however, that name came from Deacon Jones, a star football player with the Rams and Chargers who got a lot of attention in the media because of his aggressive play and outsized personality. The name fit well into the song, with "Deacon" matching up sonically with "Crimson."

The song is about a guy who Becker describes as a "Triple-L loser." In the Classic Albums documentary on Aja, he said: "The protagonist is not a musician, he just sort of imagines that would be one of the mythic forms of loser-dom to which he might aspire. And who's to say that he's not right?" Fagen added: "'Deacon Blues' is about as close to autobiography as our tunes get. We were both kids who grew up in the suburbs, we both felt fairly alienated. Like a lot of kids in the '50s, we were looking for some kind of alternative culture, an escape from where we found ourselves."

When asked about the line, "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blues," Donald Fagen told Rolling Stone magazine: "Walter and I had been working on that song at a house in Malibu. I played him that line, and he said, 'You mean it's like, 'They call these cracker a--holes this grandiose name like the Crimson Tide, and I'm this loser, so they call me this other grandiose name, Deacon Blues?' and I said 'Yeah!' He said, 'Cool, let's finish it.'"