History
By the time the sessions for the album were in full swing, David Palmer had left the group, leaving Donald Fagen to assume full lead vocalist duties.
The album was originally released in two-channel stereo and also in a special four-channel quadrophonic mix. There are some significant musical differences between the two mixes.
A live version of the song "Bodhisattva" was used as the B-side for both "Hey Nineteen" and "Babylon Sisters", released as singles in the 1980s.
"Bodhisattva" is a playable track in the video game Rock Band 2, while "My Old School" is featured as downloadable content.
The cover art to the album originally included only the three pink figures seated up front, but because there were five members of Steely Dan, the two ghostly figures to the left were added by the record company to "balance" it out.
Read more about this topic: Countdown To Ecstasy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)