If you want a good waypoint for where Steely Dan truly earned their rep for delivering acidic fatalism under cover of unflappable smoothness, here’s where their ennui finally curdled. When MCA reissued Katy Lied in remastered form in 1999, Becker and Fagen used their collective liner-notes voice to try and clear up whatever mindstate it was that they’d clambered into in the wake of a tumultuous, Valium-addled 1974. They’d grown weary of touring life and all the hassles it brought (per said liner notes: “we had long since come to the conclusion that certain individuals were not suited by temperament or constitution to the rigors of long road trips in the company of superannuated prep school hooligans”), while the rest of the band became increasingly agitated about the prospect of being sequestered in the studio for three dozen takes. Once-integral members — guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder chief amongst them — peeled away from the core group and were replaced with a rotation of session players. As a touring concern, Steely Dan were done, the biggest scrap of evidence relegated to the 1980 “Hey Nineteen” single’s b-side: a performance of “Bodhisattva” from their final show on July 4, 1974 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, preceded by two and a half minutes of the world’s drunkest Teamster giving them a rambling introduction. This was considered a hazardous working environment.

And so, without a band or a manager or a reasonable amount of money or much of anything else, Becker and Fagen holed up in the offices of ABC’s imminently doomed Dunhill Records imprint to write the songs that would eventually become Katy Lied. And a lot of them seethed like never before. The ways in which they seethed were rangy, often drenched in wit and charisma and disguised as paeans to self-reinvention and/or self-negation: the speculator in “Black Friday” who sees the next big imminent calamity as a good excuse to fuck around on some lost-weekend tomfoolery; the farewell to the presence of a career dirtbag booze-and-guns aficionado in “Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More”; the roamer of “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” who, amidst his optimistic daydreaming, lets slip the despair of “the one I come from.” But now-what ambivalence isn’t exactly a grand step up from cynicism, and the seediness is hard to shake, with the predatory con-job m.o.s of teen-luring skin-flick screeners (“Everyone’s Gone to The Movies”) and outsiders playing undercover for cryptic rewards — drugs? women? live gigs? (“Throw Back The Little Ones”) — all calling the shots. As for fan-favorite “Doctor Wu,” an existential gem about friendship in the face of relationship woes, Fagen eventually revealed that the song was really about a love triangle — between a woman, a man, and heroin.

But all that sordid business was offset by the first dedicated version of their studio-juggernaut ensemble, the five-man instrumental core of Becker-Fagen-Baxter-Dias-Hodder now pared down to Walter, Donald, Denny, and a whole gang of their favorite sidemen. They found the idea of having modular cohorts they could swap in and out more liberating than the usual set-in-stone dynamic beloved by the kinds of rock groups that actually put photos of themselves on the album cover. And yet their auteurism meant that even with different guitarists soloing on nearly every track and a twenty-year-old kid from the Sonny and Cher band on the drums (spoiler: that kid was future go-to super-sessionman Jeff Porcaro), it all held together and streamlined their rock, jazz, and R&B facets into a cohesive, immediate identity. It didn’t hurt that Fagen, once unsatisfied with his voice, had really begun to work out and play to its strengths — the sinister leer, the plaintive shakiness, the moments of out-of-nowhere intricacy — that slunk around his words like a displaced jazzbo Dylan. And if he couldn’t (or didn’t want to) pull off the high notes, at least they corralled this guy named Michael McDonald to help out.

Bad luck struck, however, and Katy Lied is a 13th floor superstitiously relabeled as the 14th, so to speak. There was a technological disaster alluded to on the sleeve via some hyperbolic faux-audiophile hi-fi gobbledegook that excused the sound as the end result of impossible-to-meet standards. (“Transfer from master tapes to master lacquers is done on a Neumann VMS 70 computerized lathe equipped with a variable pitch, variable depth helium cooled cutting head.”) That slice of bitter humor pertains to the fact that the fancy-assed new dbx-branded noise reduction system the studio used straight-up wrecked the album’s sound quality somewhere in the mixing process, with just enough salvaged after the fact to make the record sound marginally acceptable. Becker and Fagen still refused to listen to the final product out of sheer mortification, but even if the fidelity never got tweaked back to what they’d originally envisioned, the increasingly immaculate everything-just-so quality of the arrangements still shines through.