The first two songs Steely Dan played at their May 15 show at the Tokyo International Forum -- "The Boston Rag" and " Bodhisattva" -- come from their second record, "Countdown to Ecstasy," which happens to be their least-selling album as well as my personal favorite. I should have been giddy with appreciation, but I was less impressed by the songs themselves than I was by the fact that they were playing them.

When they made that album back in 1973, Steely Dan was still touring, still an organic band. By the next record, however, they had been reduced to their songwriting essence, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who, already disillusioned with the rock life, abandoned live performances altogether.

In the mid-'90s the two agreed to tour again for the first time in 20 years, ostensibly to record a live album. Having been studio nerds for the better part of their careers, their feeling was that if you couldn't bring the audience to the studio, you brought the studio to the audience, which meant lots of high-priced musicians and well-rehearsed shows.

So the Forum version of "The Boston Rag," a real rock song written and recorded when Steely Dan was a real rock band, was closer in spirit and sound to the disinfected fusion of "Aja" and "Gaucho," the last two records Fagen and Becker released before retiring in 1980, and their biggest-selling efforts.

The disinfected fusion is still there on "Two Against Nature," the first album of new music that the duo has released together since "Gaucho," but now that they have finally outgrown their embarrassing youth and entered humiliating middle age, the lite jazz suits them, not to mention their view of the world, which was middle-aged to begin with.

For example, the quiet funk of "Janie Runaway" from the new album makes more musical and thematic sense than "Josie," a similar song from "Aja" whose simple pop pleasures are marred by strained harmonic shifts and a boring lyric. At the Forum, they played the songs back-to-back, and Fagen's cool, elegant banter on the former was vastly superior to the forced enthusiasms of the latter. "You be the showgirl and I'll be Sinatra," he croons to Janie, the "wonderwaif of Gramercy Park," looking very much his 52 years as Becker punctuated his moist musings with delicate guitar runs and staccato offbeats.

It was, in a word, tasteful -- the way Danish Modern furniture and Raymond Carver are tasteful: full of clean, unassuming lines. The fact that the song, as with most of the material on "Two Against Nature," is an unapologetic ode to dirty old manhood doesn't make it any less so. Fagen and Becker seem more comfortable now exploring their libidos than they were back in the '70s busting their brains to come up with retro-hipster abstractions.

Another benefit of no longer having to dodge youthful conventions you hate is that you don't have to defer to rock expectations. Except for a few shouters, the fans seemed perfectly happy to remain in their seats the entire evening, and Becker and Fagen equally happy to see them there, even though the oldies they played leaned more toward funk and rock than to fusion and jazz.

With his dark glasses and hunched playing style, Fagen looked like an unsmiling, sped-up Ray Charles behind his keyboard. His nasal piping has mellowed but lost none of its cogency. "Cousin Dupree," another song about hitting on someone less than half your age, was a perfect mix of snarling confidence and over-the-hill cluelessness.

Becker, needing some kind of justification for being there, gave himself two numbers, "Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More," and "Monkey in Your Soul," which were originally sung on record by Fagen. They're great songs, but his dry vocal style wasn't flexible enough to bring out their overt funkiness.

Though the two partners couldn't compliment their musicians enough ("Isn't that a great band?") they didn't allow them many opportunities to distinguish themselves individually, with the exception of guitarist John Herrington. As far as the oldies go, it's the guitar riffs that mainly stick in the mind, so Herrington's job was unenviable considering how many different guitarists slogged through the group's albums in the '70s. He proved more than equal to the task, not only reproducing Denny Diaz's and Jeff Baxter's manic tradeoff breaks in "My Old School," but improving on Larry Carlton's solo in "Peg."

The main problem was that Fagen and Becker felt they had to use the horn section and three chick singers as much as possible, even when they weren't needed. The organ parts in "Bodhisattva" and "Do It Again" were taken by the horns, and, consequently, the songs sounded less sleek, more cluttered. Cynthia Calhoun sang lead on "Dirty Work," presumably because it was originally sung by the band's first vocalist, David Palmer (Remember him? Of course not), but it wasn't a good song in the first place.

Still, Calhoun was a welcome participant, and not just because she and her two colleagues did such a great job on "Cousin Dupree," "Night by Night" and the amazing version of "Kid Charlemagne" that finished the show. She was the only person onstage who looked like a fan instead of a hired hand, gesturing effusively and dancing in her own little world. She even played air guitar during "Josie."

Donald and Walter may not want to admit it, but their stuff still rocks.