When you kick off your first album with a number about the travails of recidivist schlimazels — a mutant-Latin groove with the damnedest beautifully-queasy electric sitar and Yamaha organ solos — and that song becomes a hit? That has to look like a creative blank check just on its own. But if “Do It Again” was all Becker and Fagen had to offer a restless record-buying public yearning for something ineffably weird in their post-psychedelic listening, Can’t Buy A Thrill would just be a curio instead of a classic. Instead, this is one of those debuts where even the minor album cuts (the sardonic Robin Hood soul of “Kings”; the bossa-lounge cynicism of “Only A Fool Would Say That”) feel major. That even holds in the company of rep-making favorites like “Dirty Work” and “Reelin’ in the Years” and “Midnite Cruiser” — songs that interrogate the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, romantic or otherwise, with the shrugs of a perceptive yet doomed philosopher-schmuck: “I foresee terrible trouble / And I stay here just the same”; “The things that pass for knowledge / I can’t understand”; “The time of our time has come and gone / I fear we’ve been waiting too long.” If Walt and Don wrote with an alarmingly mature world-weariness for a couple of under-25s, the uneasily-mellow sound they arranged to express it was well in place already, too, with arrangements that lurked somewhere between late ’60s Blue Note soul-jazz crossover and the imminent Laurel Canyon sea change of Joni’s Court and Spark — still vibrantly hopped-up enough to sate rockist tastes (hats off to Denny Dias and Skunk Baxter for finding a place for guitar heroics in, cough cough, “soft” rock), but hooky enough to be weird on classic Brill Building pop’s terms. The Kubrickian hundred-take perfectionism would come a bit later, but that’s just the means — Can’t Buy a Thrill proved they always had some amazing ends.