Once you've lived with Katy Lied it's hard to imagine it sounding any way except the way it sounds--the basement-apartment rumble of the bass, the hollow underwater quality of the drums on "Everyone's Gone to the Movies," the way the cymbals on "Dr. Wu" hiss like an inner tube's last breath. Like the photo on the album cover, the music is greenish-brown and out of focus, and it doesn't get that much sharper or more present even if you crank the volume; every copy of Katy Lied sounds like an old cassette tape baked in dashboard sun for three or more summers. You can't hear Katy Lied the way Donald and Walter intended; the only Katy Lied experience you can have is the compromised version.

Steely Dan are famous, or infamous, for their perfectionism, for redoing and redoing and redoing until the oxide flaked from their master tapes. But when you get down to it, so many of the stories about how their records came to be are really stories about human error and Steely Dan falling victim to circumstances even control freaks couldn't control. In the liner notes to the 1998 reissue of Countdown to Ecstasy, Donald and Walter describe trying again and again to add three notes to a particular section of Denny Dias' guitar part on "Show Biz Kids."

"No matter how many times we punched in," they write, "these three notes refused to stick to the tape."

Eventually a surgical splice was performed, and the notes were added manually. Afterward, they wrote, "we sent the little piece of defective tape back to 3M. Months later, they sent us their report. The piece of tape had a tiny blister where the oxide had bubbled up from the backing. Inside this little blister was a drop of mustard. Some clot up in Minnesota had taken his sandwich into the room in the plant where the huge sheets of mylar were coated with oxide, taken a bite and squirted a tiny drop of mustard onto the mylar on the exact spot where we were going to put Denny's guitar part. In effect, our efforts had been sabotaged in advance by a careless worker. This was to haunt us over and over in the years to come."

There's one conception of rock music where the recording process is less about capturing the Platonic ideal of a song and more about documenting people in a room grappling toward that ideal, even if they can't quite get there; recording is about catching unplanned moments of vehemence or trance or grace or badassery as they happen to happen. Steely Dan were after the actual ideal, and that's part of what their detractors don't like about them--they wanted the songs to sound a certain way, and pursued that fidelity at the expense of the spontaneity and friction essential to the part of rock that's derived from rock 'n' roll, producing spotless recordings conveying no sense of musicians tumbling down the same hill together or breathing each other's smoke and funk in enclosed spaces.

But the story of Steely Dan is only superficially about a band making the most impossibly smooth and flawless music the world had ever heard; it's really about a band setting out to do that, committing to the goal so completely they were willing to sacrifice fellowship and profit and even their own mental health to achieve it, and being thwarted over and over--by the limitations of their collaborators, by their ability to capture what those players did in the room, by the technology available to them in their time.