The Story of an Outsider’s Unrequited, Sentimental Love for a Working Girl in the Languid, Decadent Heat of the French Quarter.
The year was 1973. Rock music was still reeling from the smooth, cynical shock of Steely Dan’s debut, but co-founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were already deepening their unique brand of jazz-inflected sophistication and lyrical barbed wire. Their second album, Countdown to Ecstasy, was the immediate follow-up, released in July, and it marked a critical, and often less heralded, juncture in their career. While the album was lauded by critics, it struggled commercially compared to its predecessor, reaching a respectable but modest peak of No. 35 on the US Billboard 200—a reflection of its dense, challenging musicality and the failure of its two singles (“Show Biz Kids” and “My Old School”) to crack the Top 60.
Nestled toward the end of this ambitious track list is “Pearl Of The Quarter,” a song that stands out precisely because it almost completely sheds the duo’s signature sardonic sneer. “Pearl Of The Quarter” was not released as a single and therefore has no individual chart history, but its lasting resonance comes from its portrayal of a pure, if profoundly naive, romantic yearning. It is a cinematic vignette, a miniature tragedy set against the smoky, cobblestone backdrop of New Orleans’ French Quarter.
The story of the song is one of unrequited, doomed affection. Our narrator, a traveler or perhaps a lonely soul new to the city, has fallen hopelessly in love with a woman named Louise, whom he calls the “Pearl Of The Quarter.” The setting and the French phrase she sings—“Voulez-voulez-vous?” (Do you want? likely short for a more explicit solicitation)—make it heartbreakingly clear that Louise is a working girl, a prostitute. The narrator is blinded by love, weaving fantasies about her while she is simply conducting her business, a necessary transaction in a world where “Red beans and rice for a quarter” defines existence.
The emotional core, and thus the meaning, of “Pearl Of The Quarter” lies in the narrator’s self-delusion and the profound gap between his idealistic love and her harsh reality. He believes that the “million dollar words” he speaks and the candy and flowers he buys her are tokens of a burgeoning romance. Yet, she accepts his gifts and then simply says she loves him “and was on her way”—back to the streets, back to the next client. The song culminates in a truly tender, almost unbearably sad plea: the narrator asks anyone who hears from his Louise to let her know that “when her day is done, she got a place to go.” It’s a clean, open offer of sanctuary and a stable life, a desire to rescue her from the Quarter’s shadows. The devastating implication, of course, is that she will never take him up on it, either because she is playing a role in a professional transaction or because the wild freedom of her life, however dangerous, is all she knows.
For those of us who grew up with Steely Dan, this song is a potent memory jogger, not just for the distinctive, mellow country-jazz sound—perfectly colored by the languid, weeping sound of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s pedal steel guitar—but for the familiar themes of misplaced idealism. It transports us back to a time when we, or people we knew, were caught in the whirlwind of a beautiful, impossible passion, willing to overlook the stark, cruel truths of another person’s life in exchange for a few moments of manufactured warmth. “Pearl Of The Quarter” is a gorgeous, painful testament to the kind of love that asks for nothing less than a complete, dramatic change in a person, and almost always ends with the lover standing alone, gazing into the neon-lit distance of a dream that was never truly his. It is a drama of the heart, quiet but unforgettable.