Street Viper Tee

ORDERS OPEN: 9/17/26
ORDERS CLOSE: 9/21/26
TO PRINT: 9/22/26

PRINTED ON LAA GD1801 CREAM TEES. 

ALL ITEMS TAKE BETWEEN 3-4 WEEKS TO PRODUCE AFTER THE ORDER PERIOD ENDS. You will always receive your item unless otherwise contacted. All items are final sale. We are not responsible for lost, stolen, or misplaced packages. Please note all gradient prints are different, variations will occur.

On its November 1972 release, Can’t Buy A Thrill, the debut album from Steely Dan, sounded like the work of a band who’d arrived fully formed. Here was sophisticated, accessible pop loaded with maverick musical ideas and oblique lyrics with melodic hooks to die for. Critical and commercial success was near instant – the album hit the US Top 20, its first single, “Do It Again” the Top 10 – but acclaim had been a long time coming for the dual brains behind the group, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. The two fledging musicians met while studying at Bard College.

In his memoir, Eminent Hipsters, Fagen remembers their meeting, “One afternoon in 1967, I walked over to the Red Balloon, a crummy little shack in the woods that served as an on-campus music club. As I approached, I could hear someone playing some electric blues guitar inside, just messing around. But his wasn’t the trebly, surfadelic, white-guy sound I was used to hearing from other student guitarists. This fellow had an authentic blues touch and feel, and a convincing vibrato… Inside, playing a cranberry red Epiphone guitar, was a severe-looking bespectacled kid who would turn out to be my partner and bandmate for the next forty years.”

The students bonded over a shared love of literature (Nabokov, black humor, sci-fi), Frank Zappa, and Miles Davis. It wasn’t long before the kindred spirits started collaborating, as Fagen recalled, “One of us would come up with some clowny idea, and we’d bounce it around until we were so convulsed with laughter that we’d have to quit. For whatever reason, the combination of the funky grooves, the jazz chords, and the sensibility of the lyrics, which seemed to fall somewhere between Tom Lehrer and Pale Fire, really cracked us up.”

The band’s debut single, “Dallas” and Can’t Buy A Thrill’s “Midnite Cruiser” featured drummer Hodder on lead vocals while singer David Palmer was brought in for the Can’t Buy A Thrill sessions, eventually contributing lead vocals to “Dirty Work” and “Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)” and backing vocals elsewhere. But while Fagen might not have meant to be a frontman, his nasal sneer worked so perfectly on hit singles “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In The Years” that he became the only choice for the role.

That counterpoint of Fagen’s often sardonic delivery with polished ear-candy was key to their early success. Still, even the most radio-friendly of Steely Dan’s early material has the capacity to cut loose. Take “Reelin’ In The Years” – its chorus is synonymous with nostalgic television montages, yet session ace Elliot Randall’s guitar solo is a mind-bending masterclass in jazz technique and rock’n’roll abandon. Can’t Buy A Thrill’s songs were Trojan horses – gleaming and catchy pop marvels with witty, bizarre lyrics and sophisticated musical ideas bubbling under the surface. The album’s success gave Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the momentum they needed to go further still, which would result in some of the greatest albums of the 70s. Turns out you can buy thrills, plenty of them.