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Walter has finished producing China Crisis' next album -- called Diary of a Holly Horse and due for a December/January release -- and is now set to produce Rickie Lee Jones' next album.
Gary Katz has also finished his work on the Love and Money album. It's called Strange Kind of Love and should be out by the time you read this. He has now been lined up to produce ex-Christians' mainman Roger Christian's first solo album. Apparently, Christian has such a great voice that he thought he couldn't possibly turn the project down.
Gary Katz was interviewed with Love and Money for Wired but when the programme was transmitted on September 2 his contribution had been edited out.
Steely Dan are at long last to be featured in a future edition of Record Collector. Let's hope this time it actually appears, because I've heard this before somewhere!
Steely Dan's name has been cropping up quite frequently in the specialist music magazines lately. In Guitar World, Steve Lukather said, "Larry (Carlton) is still a big influence, especially the stuff he was doing during The Royal Scam period. You know, when you hear someone playing bebop with a burn sound, you say, 'That's the shit' and that's what I wanted to do. I just put a slightly harder edge to it than Larry."
The Steely Dan influence had even more practical significance in the formation of Toto. "We knew each other in high school. That's one of the big misconceptions about us, that we're studio musicians. We were playing playing in high school bands before we ever did a record date. We had a killer high school band; we learned the whole Katy Lied album before it came out because Jeff brought the tapes in. We were playing these tunes live at high school dances and people were going, "Wow, that sounds like a Steely Dan song!"
Bass player Nathan East told Guitar World that when he was teaching himself the technique of playing with real feel, he would simply listen to Chuck Rainey's playing on Steely Dan albums.
One recent LP to show apparent Steely Dan influences (according to Dave Lee Travis) is The Bible's album, Eureka, which was produced by Steve Earle. Also Hue and Cry's latest single, Ordinary Angel, which was recorded in New York, is supposedly reminiscent of Katy Lied-period Dan. And listen out for the intro to Do It Again in Tom Jones' version of Kiss.