Good covers of Steely Dan songs are hard to come by, and this is generally acknowledged as one of the best. Rickie Lee Jones gave Fagen and Becker’s nasty riff and snide lyrics a decidedly beatnik vibe on her Grammy-winning 2000 LP of covers, “It’s Like This.”
The original has inspired years of debate about what the backing singers are actually saying. Part of the time it sounds like “Las Vegas” but sometimes it sounds like “lost wages,” the punchline of a Lenny Bruce joke. Walter Becker once told a BBC interviewer that the women were supposed to sing “Las Vegas” but sometimes they mispronounced it as “lost wages” and they left it in.
