Guitar Lessons – DMI’s Timeless Guitar Solos Series – Steely Dan

Guitar Lessons

DMI’s Timeless Guitar Solos Series

Larry Carlton for Steely Dan | Intro Guitar Solo – Don’t Take Me Alive  

Steely Dan, The Royal Scam

If you are not familiar with the music of Steely Dan, (Donald Fagan and Walter Becker), it would be worth your time to have a listen.  Instead of having a traditional line-up of set members, Fagan and Becker would bring in studio musicians, essentially the best players available, and record a song.  Sometimes a completely different line-up of musicians would arrive to record the same song again the next day. When the records were released many of these session players would find out that they were paid for work that was never used.  The Asia album cost a million dollars to produce, an outrageous amount for 1977.  But that is a story for another day. 

The song we are highlighting today is Don’t Take Me Alive from the Steely Dan album The Royal Scam, released in 1976.  On guitar is the incomparable Larry Carlton. What he gives us is what some believe to be the greatest intro guitar solo that has ever been recorded.

Larry Carlton

According to Carlton,  “There was no chord in front of the beginning of the song, nothing. Just ‘wham’. I don’t know what else we tried, but Donald was the one who finally just said, ‘Why don’t we just put a big chord in front of it?’ It was that simple. I went out into the room where my amp was and stood in front of it and tweaked until there was [the right tone] and then I did four or five or six of those chords to where everything rang. They adjusted the limiter and everything so it really sat like they wanted it to. But Donald was right.”

That single, raspy cord falling into a screaming sustain masterfully leads the way for an exquisite guitar solo.  Listen to it. Then listen again. It is really an amazing piece of work.

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