As an unabashed fan of the 1970s dad-rock heroes Steely Dan, I was always struck by and curious of the famous chorus of the band’s 1977 hit, “Deacon Blues.” You might know it: They call Alabama the Crimson Tide / Call me Deacon Blues [ Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football: Sign up and join a league today! ] What was the genesis of the line? It resonated for me for years, and in the pre-internet days (yes, they existed) I read the few interviews that the Dan duo — Donald Fagan and Walter Becker — did in hopes of finding some nugget of information on this lyric. Nothing. I always envisioned Fagan and Becker as the hermetic anti-rockers, wearing sunglasses inside their big, furniture-less Malibu homes by the sea, emerging every few years to fire off lyrical salvos to their rivals The Eagles (the antiseptic band, not the football team) and not, say, big Bear Bryant guys. Finally, I have my answers. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal , the members of Dan revealed the inspiration for the song and specifically the Crimson Tide line. And with it comes an unexpected bonus: Not only was it about Bama football but also about (!) Deacon Jones. [ Yahoo Daily Fantasy Football: Enter our $1 Million Week 1 contest ] The former Los Angeles Rams and San Diego Chargers defensive lineman, aka the Secretary of Defense and the man who coined the term “sack” (and had 173.5 of them before it became an official NFL statistic in his 14-year Hall of Fame career). At the time Steely Dan recorded “Deacon Blues,” Jones was retired but still a celebrity for his acting work on TV and in movies and commercials. Here’s Fagan on how the song came together: “When Walter came over, we started on the music, then started filling in more lyrics to fit the story. At that time, there had been a lineman with the Los Angeles Rams and the San Diego Chargers, Deacon Jones. We weren’t serious football fans, but Deacon Jones’s name was in the news a lot in the 1960s and early ‘70s, and we liked how it sounded. It also had two syllables, which was convenient, like “Crimson.” The name had nothing to do with Wake Forest’s Demon Deacons or any other team with a losing record. The only Deacon I was familiar with in football at the time was Deacon Jones.”
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