Black Friday- Steely Dan & An American Scandal

With the Thanksgiving meal put away, and the dishes washed up, I see the TV commercials are all hopped up on the Black Friday Kool-Aid. Invariably, I start humming Steely Dan whenever i hear the phrase- 'Black Friday' is one of my favorite songs of theirs. But the song is not actually about early Christmas sales, a practice which was not really a thing in 1975 when the tune was released.

The Friday referred to in the song occured in 1869, when speculators tried to game the gold market, and ended up sending the US economy into a tailspin. Robber-baron Jay Gould and is partner James Fisk used insider connections to get close to President Ulysses Grant, who was selling gold weekly to pay off debt, boost the economy and stabilize the dollar. The pair used their advanced knowledge of sales to manipulate the market, eventually tricking the president to suspend sales. On September 24, the speculators bought up all available gold, hiking the price up. When Grant caught wind of the pump and dump scheme, he flooded the market with $4 million worth of the commodity, driving the price even lower than before and thwarting the scheme. This caused a Wall Street panic and a few months of economic woes for the country before things were straightened out. Actually, there is probably a lot more that went on behind the scenes here, if you took the time to dig, but this is the official story, at any rate.

Gould & Fisk

Written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagan for the album Katy Lied, Black Friday seems to describe the thought process of a scam-artist a'la Bernie Madoff, who knows his scheme is about to fall apart and come to the public eye. The schemer is grabbing all the cash he can and getting out while the getting is good. I always wondered about one line in the song: (gonna) fly down to Muswellbrook. What is Muswellbrook? A few lines later is a clue, as he says there won't be anything to do but feed kangaroos. Muswellbrook as it turns out is a small Australian town north of Sydney. There was no need for Gould and Fisk to escape halfway around the world, though....their fortunes paid for the "best" lawyers, and neither man was prosecuted.