Bodhisattva is the first track of Steely Dan’s second album Countdown To Ecstasy, released in July 1973. The studio version was never released as a single. However, a live version from the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on 3 July 1974 was released as the b-side of the Hey Nineteen single on 21 November 1980.
This live recording is best known for featuring an introduction of legendary proportions by Jerome Aniton. You can tell that he started that evening’s party early. He is in a great mood, is hilariously over-the-top, panders shamelessly to the crowd (referred to as “the pretty ones” and “the beautiful ones”), and it all ends with Aniton introducing the band as “Mister Steely Dan!”
When the single featuring the live recording first came out, most people had no idea who the announcer was. It was widely assumed to be someone associated with the club they were playing, delivering an introduction to their usual crowd. It sounds like he knows very little about the band he is introducing (not even the band name), and is consequently struggling to come up with anything fitting to say about them, but that does not stop him from trying to get the audience pumped up for the show.
The truth is very different. Jerome Aniton was the band’s bus driver! He was just having a very good time that night.
The result? The audience and the band were in stitches. On the recording, you can hear the band laughing and exchanging remarks in the background behind Aniton on the stage.
The full introduction should really be listened to (and there is a video clip featuring it below), but here it is in all its printed glory:
One, two, test…
Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman. We’re glad you made it here tonight. Because you gonna miss out… ’cause you can tell your friend tomorrow… that they gonna miss out on a goddamn good thing… we gonna give you tonight. Yeah! Right on. What we gonna give you tonight… will be down to the nitty-gritty. Yeah. You can tell all your friends… way over in the… hell, hell I don’t care, you can tell them over there in Watts! God, ahahaha. You can tell them they met, you can tell them tonight, that Santa Monica has been definitely… set on fire! And they met, and they met out on a… damn good thing. The best thing ever happened to Santa Monica is gonna be here… tonight. Yeah! And you can also… all you little old pretty, pretty… little pretty ones… ha… if he ain’t here tonight… ha… you can tell him forget it too. Because Mister… Whatever… is here tonight. He gonna get down tonight brother… he gonna get with it! He gonna give you something that Santa Monica ain’t never had. If it good to you, it gotta be good for you. Right on, yeah. Now one thing I can tell you, brother, is here tonight. Mister Magnificent One is here…
At this point, a band member shouted “Steely Dan!” as Aniton was clearly too drunk to remember the band’s name. He continued:
“The Beautiful One’s here… hahaha… and you little old pretty ones here too… you know… whatever. Here is the Magnificant One, the one and only one, Mister Steely Dan! …and whatever!”
With that, the band launched into Bodhisattva. They had to get the show back on track before it derailed completely, but this spoken introduction was still destined to go down in legend.
As it happened, that night in Santa Monica would be the Dan’s final show for nearly two decades. With band leaders (and, soon enough, sole band members) Donald Fagan and Walter Becker preferring the control and nuance of studio work to what they labelled ‘logistical chaos and artistic compromises’ of live shows, they did not perform live again until their 1993 comeback tour.
This was part of the atmosphere going into the Santa Monica show. Jerome Aniton had served as the group’s bus driver for the entire tour, and as the tour was now wrapping up, he had been unwinding that evening.
“He was normally a very soft-spoken, quiet guy,” keyboardist/vocalist Michael McDonald shared during a 2020 interview on the Naked Lunch podcast. “Donald and Walter kind of got him drunk that night, I think. It was the last night of the tour, so he was hanging out in the dressing room, not moving onto the next show as usual, waiting for load-in or sleeping so he could drive to the next gig. He got to hang out that night.”
Aniton had been introducing the band periodically on the tour, but never quite like this. He was flying as the show was about to kick off, but Fagan still had no qualms about asking him to introduce them on that night.
“It was like James Brown’s Live at the Apollo or something,” McDonald continued. “He kind of went into this whole spiel about Steely Dan. He made up words, to just kind of make it even more fantastical. When he got to actually saying the name, I could tell he wasn’t quite sure. He goes, ‘Mr. Steely Dan, and whatever!’”
Fagen and Becker were so delighted by the moment that they were more than happy to include Aniton’s full intro as part of the Bodhisattva performance when they used the live recording of the song as a b-side in 1980. It has later been included on boxed sets and album reissues as a bonus track, spreading the gospel of Jerome Aniton even further.
“We dig him,” Fagen told Rolling Stone in an interview shortly after the Santa Monica gig. “Nobody does better buildups than he does. ‘Mr. Whatever’! Once he introduced us as ‘Stevie Dan.'”
“That was probably the single aesthetic decision from the ’70s I don’t have any regrets about making,” Becker added in a 2015 USA Today profile.
Adding a few words about the song that this introduction will forever be attached to, it is worth noting that a ‘bodhisattva’ is a human who has reached enlightenment, as the Buddha did, and can leave physical existence behind, but chooses to remain in human form to help others achieve freedom.
In a 2024 article in Far Out Magazine, Donald Fagen said this song was “sort of a parody of the way Western people look at Eastern religion – sort of oversimplify it. We thought it was rather amusing – most people don’t get it.”
In typically cryptic fashion, the Countdown to Ecstacy album liner notes for the 1998 reissue said this of the song: “Dias the Bebopper meets Baxter the skunk beneath the Bo Tree in this altered blues.” ‘Dios’ is Denny Dias, who played the first guitar solo on the track; ‘Baxter the skunk’ is Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, who played the second solo.
This was the first time the word ‘bodhisattva’ showed up in a song by a popular artist, but it wasn’t the last. In 1992, Beastie Boys released Bodhisattva Vow on their album Check Your Head. That song explored that spiritual side of the group, which had taken an interest in Tibetan Buddhism.
Steely Dan first performed Bodhisattva in late 1972, long before its parent album Countdown To Ecstasy had been recorded. The track returned as an opener in both 1973 and 1974, with it being played at most if not all shows from that period. A 19-year long break followed until the song reappeared in setlists in 1993, becoming a regular from 2006 onward, being played every tour usually before the encores.
No one ever attempted to live up to the 1974 introduction of the song.
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