Steely Dan opens artist residency in Miami Beach. Here’s how to get tickets for the tour

Say you’re a Steely Dan fan and would love to hear one of their classic albums performed in its entirety. And you can pick a concert date devoted to a particular album that the musicians have chosen. And you can mix or match and attend one, two, three or four concerts all in the same venue in the same city because the group is doing a residency?

You can do all that depending on how well off you are ‘cuz you’d have to be as rich as the production on Steely Dan’s “Gaucho” to afford more than one concert, but that’s another thing altogether.

This is the happy news South Florida Steely Dan fans can ponder.

Steely Dan — or, more accurately, founder Donald Fagen and a great group of musicians known as the “Steely Dan Band” since co-founder Walter Becker died in 2017 — has made Miami the start of its Absolutely Normal Tour ’21, which kicks off with a four-night stand at The Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater on Tuesday, Oct. 5, with subsequent shows on Wednesday, Oct. 6, Friday, Oct. 8, and Saturday, Oct. 9.

The U.S. tour plays 15 cities over 28 concerts and closes at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston on Nov. 20.

Other Florida dates are: Oct. 12-13 in Orlando at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts; Oct. 15-16 in St. Petersburg at the Duke Energy Center for the Arts; and Oct. 19 in Jacksonville at the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts.

What albums are Steely Dan playing in Miami Beach?

Here are the albums Fagen and company plan to showcase on the Miami Beach run:

▪ Oct. 5: “Aja,” the 1977 rock-jazz landmark that had the hits “Peg,” “Deacon Blues,” “Josie” and that amazing Steve Gadd drum solo on the title track.

▪ Oct. 6: “The Royal Scam,” the 1976 effort that inspired an Eagles response in that year’s “Hotel California.” Seems Becker’s girlfriend loved the Eagles and played the band’s music all the time in their home, eventually driving him nuts. So in the “Royal Scam” song “Everything You Did” a snarky lyric goes: “Turn up the Eagles/The neighbors are listening.”

The Eagles, recording “Hotel California” at North Miami’s Criteria Studios, reportedly referenced the group name in the title song’s line, “They stab it with their steely knives/But they just can’t kill the beast.”

▪ Oct. 8: “Gaucho,” the “Aja” follow-up, released in 1980, took more than a year to record and was the work of more than 40 musicians, and busted the recording budget to the tune of a million-plus. But you can hear every penny spent as the immaculate recording won a Grammy for its peerless engineering.

▪ Oct. 9: “Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live!” OK, that’s kind of a cheat. Call this the greatest hits show as “Northeast Corridor” is the coming new live album to be released on Sept. 24, which draws performances from New York’s Beacon Theatre, The Met Philadelphia, Mohegan Sun Arena and elsewhere in 2019. Songs featured on this set include “Hey Nineteen,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Any Major Dude,” “Reelin’ in the Years” and eight others.

How to get Steely Dan Miami tickets

Tickets for the tour, promoted by Live Nation, go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, July 30 through Ticketmaster.

Reserved seats for each Steely Dan residency performance in Miami Beach are $256.50, $181.50, $131.50, $96, $76 and $41.50. The tickets can be bought via Ticketmaster and at the Fillmore Box Office during show days.

It’s back to the future as we pack into Florida theaters for post-COVID concerts, shows