Countdown to Ecstasy

With Palmer gone, Fagen took every lead vocal. The sessions were fitted between tour dates at the Village Recorder and at Caribou Ranch in Nederland, Colorado, where Rick Derringer played slide guitar on Show Biz Kids. Only eight songs were recorded, and a ninth, This All Too Mobile Home, was attempted but not finished. Anthony Robustelli points out that it is the only Steely Dan album on which every song was written for the band.

Bodhisattva was written the night before it was recorded. Fagen overdubbed its saxophone-like lines note by note on a monophonic ARP Pro Soloist that kept drifting out of tune. When the part was done he unplugged the synthesizer, threw it down the stairs and jumped on it, and Nichols brought alcohol to set it on fire. The studio was in the same building as the ABC Dunhill offices, and executives who found the wreckage the next morning had it framed. Fagen summed the song up as the lure of the East and the hubris of hippies. Baxter finished the Stratocaster he played on My Old School three hours before the session, in the parking lot of Valley Sound, and plugged it straight into the console. The chorus of The Boston Rag draws on a chord pattern of Baxter's based on Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and the Lonnie of the lyric is Lonnie Yongue, one of Fagen's college roommates. Hodder said Your Gold Teeth was inspired by Palmer coming back from the dentist with a bridge. King of the World drew on the 1962 film Panic in Year Zero!, and Becker recorded the radio-like voices in its instrumental section while lying under the drum kit. Dias is credited as Stereo Mixmaster General, a joke about an all-night attempt to mix that song in sections and splice the master tape, a mix that went unused.

The cover painting is by Fagen's girlfriend Dorothy White. Label president Jay Lasker asked why it showed three figures for five band members, so she added two. Vocalist and percussionist Royce Jones joined the tour. In Britain, Probe promoted the album with Radio Luxembourg advertising and a Steely Dan balloon race.

It reached 35 in the United States, spent 34 weeks on the chart and went gold in 1978. Show Biz Kids reached 61 on the Hot 100 and My Old School 63. Becker and Fagen thought it sold poorly because it was recorded in a hurry on tour. Rolling Stone's David Logan found the group's control of the basic rock format refreshing, and Christgau put the album ninth in his 1973 year-end list. Rob Sheffield later called it the first of a trilogy with Pretzel Logic and Katy Lied, a film noir tour of Los Angeles losers and showbiz kids.