"My Old School" is a single drawn from Steely Dan's 1973 album Countdown to Ecstasy. It reached number 63 on the Billboard Hot 100.[1]
"My Old School" | ||||
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Single by Steely Dan | ||||
from the album Countdown to Ecstasy | ||||
B-side | "Pearl of the Quarter" | |||
Released | October 1973 | |||
Genre | Rock, pop rock, jazz fusion | |||
Songwriter(s) | Donald Fagen, Walter Becker | |||
Producer(s) | Gary Katz | |||
Steely Dan singles chronology | ||||
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Music video | ||||
"My Old School" on YouTube | ||||
The song's lyrics tell the story of a May 1969 drug bust at Bard College, referred to in the lyrics by its location, Annandale. The incident happened while both Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were students there, and the song mentions how a female acquaintance had betrayed them to "Daddy Gee" (G. Gordon Liddy), then the local prosecutor. According to a 2014 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, 44 people were arrested, including Fagen, whose long hair was cut off at the Poughkeepsie jail.[2] The upshot in the song is that the singer vows he is "never going back" to the college until "California tumbles into the sea".[3]
Cash Box described the song as a "departure from the group’s usual fare, but definitely a track that’s going to have programmers and listeners buzzing."[4]
The song was written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker[5] and is in the key of G major. The original studio track features a guitar solo by Jeff Baxter.
Fagen went back on his "never going back" promise. He returned to Bard College when he received an honorary Doctor of the Arts degree in 1985.[6]
"My Old School" is the pair's most overt song about their alma mater, a sarcastically chipper-sounding remembrance of the time Becker and Fagen, along with several dozen other students, found themselves caught up in a trumped-up drug raid during an election cycle.
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