“Kid Charlemagne” and one of the greatest rock guitar solos

On a day that’s dolorous for many of us, let’s have some music. Here is a fantastic song by a fantastic band, featuring one of the greatest guitar solos in the history of rock: fifty short seconds of sublime inventiveness. The song is “Kid Charlemagne,” the band is of course Steely Dan, and the guitar solo is by Larry Carlton (b. 1948), a great studio musician who isn’t well known because he mostly backed up others. (I once saw him play as a solo act.)

Nearly all Steely Dan’s songs have opaque lyrics, but at least these lyrics were explained by the writers:

Writers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have stated that the lyrics of “Kid Charlemagne” were loosely inspired by the rise and fall of the San Francisco-based LSD chemist Owsley Stanley, augmented with other images of the counterculture of the 1960s:

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your Technicolor motor home

The first two lines draw on the fact that Owsley’s LSD was famed for its purity. The “Technicolor motor home” of the third line is likely a reference to Furthur, the Merry Pranksters‘ modified school bus; Stanley supplied them with LSD.

The final verse describes Stanley’s 1967 arrest after his car reportedly ran out of gas:

Clean this mess up else we’ll all end up in jail
Those test tubes and the scale
Just get it all out of here
Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there’s gas in the car
I think the people down the hall know who you are.

More from Wikipedia:

Larry Carlton’s guitar solo starts at 2:18 into the song and ends at 3:08. Pete Prown and HP Newquist described it as consisting of “twisted single-note phrases, bends, and vibrant melody lines”; they called it and Carlton’s “joyous, off-the-cuff break” during the song’s fade-out “breathtaking.”  According to Rolling Stone, which ranked “Kid Charlemagne” at #80 in its list of the “100 Greatest Guitar Songs”: “In the late seventies, Steely Dan made records by using a revolving crew of great session musicians through take after take, which yielded endless jaw-dropping guitar solos. Larry Carlton’s multi-sectioned, cosmic-jazz lead in this cut may be the best of all: It’s so complex it’s a song in its own right.”  In 2022, Far Out Magazine listed it as the fourth-greatest guitar solo on a Steely Dan song, calling Carlton’s playing “intense, fluid, and frequently on the brink of spinning out of control”.^[10] Nick Hornby, in Songbook, spoke of the solo’s “extraordinary and dexterous exuberance”, though he questioned its relationship with the “dry ironies of the song’s lyrics”.^[11]

“It’s my claim to fame,” Carlton told Guitar World in 1981. “I did maybe two hours worth of solos that we didn’t keep. Then I played the first half of the intro, which they loved, so they kept that. I punched in for the second half. So it was done in two parts and the solo that fades out in the end was done in one pass.”^{[12][unreliable source?]}

. . . Carlton called his solo on “Kid Charlemagne” the high point of his career at the time, saying, “I can’t think of anything else that I still like to listen to as strongly as that.”

Carlton also plays the “outro” at the end.

Listening to Steely Dan songs and reading comments, I see that many people think that Donald Fagen has a horrible voice. I disagree. Yes, it’s nasal, but I thinks it fits very well with their unusual songs.

The band, which included many studio musicians, is vastly underrated, and I wonder if today’s young people even listen to its music. It is sui generis and unmistakable: a melange of jazz, rock, and ballads. Some of my other favorites are “Dr. Wu,” “Dirty Work,” “Bad Sneakers” (totally opaque), and, of course, the song below,” which mentions my alma mater William & Mary—one of the few rock songs to mention a college or university (can you name two others?) Oh, and the guitar-rich stop time during the song is great.

Becker (left) and Fagen: