Richard Cromelin, New Musical Express,
26 April 1975
Encino is a grisly, prefabricated hard-wood-and-metal sprawl, basking in the Beach Boys sun of the suburban San Fernando Valley. A seething mob of condominiums, gas stations, expansive shopping centres, tawdry lunch stands and slick sandwich shops. Glistening, seductive automobile showrooms. Tracts of houses – built before the apartment boom – lined up like a smart battalion. It’s an arrogant, pathetic parody of itself.
The chaotic topography is dotted here and there off the main boulevard with broad green fields, the weary survivors of the farms and ranches that prospered here before the people came. In the lush hills to the south and west, there seems to be a scent of freedom, but down on the flats it’s totally desolate and dispiriting.
This, to the body, soul, heart and mind of Steely Dan, is California, and they hate it.
‘Gay ’50s culture,’ Walter Becker calls it. ‘This neighbourhood – have you had a chance to peruse any of it? The Encino Spa, Vic Tanny’s. Big shiny cars, condominiums.’
‘It’s about ten or fifteen years behind,’ offers Donald Fagen.
‘Well,’ Becker suggests, ‘they just got to the point where they liked it and they stayed there.’
‘It doesn’t change. The weather doesn’t change.’ Nor does Fagen’s flat, arid monotone.
‘Jacuzzi baths, I guess, are a big innovation … saunas.’
‘They feel compelled to keep all the black people in one part of the town so you don’t have to look at them.’
‘Yoga lessons out in the rotunda.’
‘We’re going to have to relocate,’ Fagen concludes.
‘I hear there’s a great studio in Tanganyika.’
‘We follow the studios,’ explains Fagen, ‘like the guys in The Endless Summer.’
‘Searching for the perfect noise reduction system.’
‘The perfect noise-reduction system is our goal. I don’t know, there’s not much to say about California.’
Nonetheless, here they are, right in the midst of it, on this particular afternoon at the (you guessed it) condominium apartment of their producer, Gary Katz. (They only rent, Mrs. Katz insists, and are looking for something near the beach.)
Walter Becker has the round clean face of a malevolently impish 13-year-old smart-ass. He’s sharp, quick and flippant to the point of brusqueness. He keeps looking at his watch.
Donald Fagen’s chiselled face looks as if it has permanently clamped itself in that grim expression in order to support the weight of his eyebrows. He sits crouching like a gargoyle and glares straight ahead, as if he’s about to pounce on something.
When he talks, he seems to swallow the words before they get out of his mouth, a perfect stylistic complement to his exceedingly droll pronouncements.
Becker and Fagen, rock’s odd couple, the pair of disrespectful misfits who stuck by their unconventional guns until it paid off big.
They moved to California three years ago to become staff songwriters at ABC-Dunhill.
They came at the behest of Katz, who had preceded them from New York to be a producer. (‘At that time,’ Becker points out, ‘ABC was in the market for a producer with a Fu Manchu moustache to produce underground records.’)
As dismal as they make their life here sound, the kitschatropolis culture has seeped into and enriched Steely Dan’s music (in songs like ‘Show Biz Kids’ and the unrecorded ‘Megashine City’), emerging as one pole of the east–west odyssey which is at the core of the Steely Dan mythos.
Says Fagen: ‘Our heart is still on Second Avenue, and that’s what we like to write about. Our lyrics are basically experience combined with a little fantasy.’
‘I think there’s a lot of New York urban-area type imagery and settings and so on,’ says Becker. ‘Even the language in our songs is an imitation thereof.’
Fagen further elucidates the charm of New York: ‘You can watch the weather, and there’s a lot of people on the street doing funny things. You can walk.’
‘Or run,’ Becker advises.
‘Or run, depending on who’s chasing you, and it’s just more exciting and dangerous.’
Becker, apparently forgetting ‘My Old School’ and ‘Barrytown’ for the moment, maintains that Steely Dan’s music reflects little if any of their college days. But the mention of the beloved alma mater – Bard College in upstate New York – inspires Fagen to recall his first fateful encounter with his colleague.
‘I was walking past this small building,’ he says in his best raconteur manner, ‘that they used for entertainment of the student body, who were very idle and bored most of the term. And I heard what I assumed was Howlin’ Wolf playing in this particular building. I walked in, and there was Walter with this red Epiphone guitar.’
‘Donald,’ says Walter, ‘was the dean of the pickup-band syndrome at Bard … At the beginning of every term someone would reopen the club and they’d need a band for two nights. There were about eight musicians on the whole campus, and most of those were poor …’
‘Well,’ Fagen clarifies, ‘they were rich, but they were poor musicians.’
‘Yes. They played poorly, although they spent handsomely. Most of our bands were made up of a collection of folk musicians, guys who hadn’t mastered your basic Dave Van Ronk techniques. They had a limited exposure to the things that we were trying to emulate. We were jazz fans. We were writing tunes where some of the chords were not triads, and you couldn’t use your capo that much.’
‘Right,’ says Fagen, ‘and you had to be able to play in all eight keys, as they say. We had a jazz group. We had several versions of several rock groups.’
‘It was all the same band and we just didn’t bring in certain guys as it graded up towards imitation jazz.’
‘I used to play the saxophone quite a bit,’ says Fagen.
‘Yes, I remember that. “The Star Spangled Banner”, an avant garde rendition … It was a shocking display.’
‘It was a shocking display, but I really used to get my rocks off,’ says Fagen, deadpan. ‘And people would listen to it too.’
‘They were very bored there,’ says Becker, earning a hearty laugh. ‘The drummers kept flipping out and leaving school – you know, it was hard to get what we wanted in those days, so it didn’t come out in utter magnificence. It was very bizarre, the bands that we came up with. It was like the Kingsmen performing Frank Zappa material.’
Having cut their inimitable swathe through the inimitable music community, the team hit New York City to peddle their folio of songs.
‘That’s essentially what we did for the next three years,’ says Becker, ‘until somebody actually believed that we were songwriters.’
‘Of course,’ Fagen points out, ‘a lot of people still don’t believe that’s true … We were very naive. We used to try to push these songs that were completely – no one wanted to hear them. The lyrics were completely unintelligible, except to us.’
‘They were bizarre, depressing tunes,’ adds Becker, ‘and we had to play them for people who had record companies or publishing companies and stuff, and they got very depressed, and slightly hostile … They’d leave or make some kind of excuse and turn off the tape recorder, and they never wanted to see us again … All except for Gary Katz, and Gary …’
‘No,’ says Fagen, ‘he ran out of the office the first time too.’
Katz, who’s been sitting quietly in the background, pipes up. ‘No, no, no. The first time was in the studio, and I didn’t run … You were doing “Let George Do It” and “Brain Tap Shuffle”. It was really strange to hear. The music was a little more bizarre than it is now. I was really intrigued, but it didn’t hit me at all … They just kept playing it for me and said, “Listen, just keep listening.” And one day I got it.’
Becker and Fagen joined forces with Katz to write some songs for – and to perform on an album (never released) by – a woman singer whom Fagen refers to as ‘Gary’s protégée’.
‘She had three songs that she’d written in her whole life,’ says Becker. ‘One was about her mother, one was about her boyfriend, and the other was about the fall.’
Some of the Becker–Fagen titles from the period are ‘The Roaring of the Lamb’, ‘Jones’ and ‘I Mean To Shine’ (later recorded by Barbra Streisand), songs that contained glimmerings of the sound to come.
‘There were,’ says Becker, ‘some proto-Steely Dan songs, and there were also what we conceived as good songs, nice pop songs for a female vocalist.’
‘I think there were two songs that were more or less in the present style,’ says Fagen, ‘which sounded very strange by the way, with a very naive female vocalist singing them who hadn’t the faintest idea what she was singing about.’
That was the last job (except sideman gigs, with such as Jay & the Americans) that they had before moving west. But first, destiny dealt them one more card in New York.
‘“Bass and keyboard player with jazz chops”,’ says Walter Becker, remembering Denny Dias’s advert in the Village Voice. ‘So we drove out to this house in Hicksville, Long Island, and Denny was there with his band … Denny had some songs that he had written, and they did all the Top 40 songs. They worked in clubs and stuff, which was something we’d never heard of. In fact, when we found out what the clubs were like and what it was supposed to be we refused to learn any of the songs and we never got any jobs. And everyone quit the band … That’s how we met Denny, and he was the only one left in his band.’
‘We used to chastise them and abuse them,’ Fagen recalls wistfully, ‘so they all quit. And so there was Denny and we’d ruined his band. So he had no place else to go.’
A couple of years later they gave him a call from Los Angeles. ‘He was just waiting by the phone,’ says Becker, ‘and he hung up and drove straight out.’
Denny is now the only remaining member of Becker and Fagen’s original Steely Dan.
Katz had recruited drummer Jim Hodder and guitarist Jeff Baxter from Boston, and there was a lead singer, David Palmer. They rehearsed after office hours in the ABC accounting department and when they had their ten songs they went in to record Can’t Buy A Thrill.
‘We knew,’ says Fagen, ‘if they got one song on the radio, if by chance one of them was played on the radio, we had a shot to do what we wanted to do.’
‘It was that simple,’ Katz agrees. ‘If we could get someone that believed in the music and forced it down some radio stations, it would happen. And we were lucky. We found a guy who forced it down some radio stations and sat with them a long while until they did play it.’
But it hasn’t been all bonbons and dumplings and No. 1 singles for Steely Dan. There was a period, following the success of ‘Reelin’ in the Years’, when the threat of obscurity loomed dangerously near. The second album, Countdown To Ecstasy, proved a bit arcane for many of the original Dan fans, and the next single, ‘Show Biz Kids’, was, in Fagen’s words, ‘a brutal failure’. Few even know that they followed it with an edited ‘My Old School’, which saw even less action.
Becker and Fagen’s contempt for record companies, disc jockeys, the media, most of the music that’s popular these days – for the world, actually – was a bit more blatant fourteen months ago than it is today.
During the mixing of Pretzel Logic, they discussed their difficulties. ‘It’s all the record company,’ Fagen was sneering. ‘They felt that at that point in our career, when the album came out we should pick the single, for some reason that I couldn’t understand. So naturally we would pick what we liked the best. Unfortunately, apparently, it was a little too bizarre for the single-buying public …
‘These days,’ he said of contemporary sounds, ‘there ain’t much that we hear. It’s especially astounding to me that standards have been lowered to the point where it’s hard to impress anyone with anything that’s harmonically interesting or rhythmically interesting … We’re basically all jazz fans and most of the records we listen to are jazz – the people who made them are dead or they were recorded so long ago that they’ve been forgotten. We’re definitely pretty cold at the moment. We’ve more or less abandoned hope of being one of the big, important rock’n’roll groups, simply because our music is somehow a little too cheesy at times and turns off the rock intelligentsia for the most part, and at other times it’s too bizarre to be appreciated by anybody. But we’re hoping that we’re going to make some sort of miracle sweep and just sort of worm our way into the hearts of America.’
Which is, of course, exactly what they did, with the resounding critical and commercial success of Pretzel Logic and ‘Rikki’ and a smash US tour which garnered them further appreciation from press and fan alike. In retrospect, Fagen’s primary misgiving of last year has proven false: ‘I didn’t think,’ he said, ‘most people wanted to hear a Jew sing.’
But a couple of tribulations were to come in the midst of prosperity.
A funny thing happened to Katy Lied, the fourth album, on its way from the studio. ‘The recording went very quickly,’ explains Fagen. ‘The mixing went very quickly, and then we realised that the mixes wouldn’t play back because of a defect in one of the pieces of equipment, which they were never exactly able to pin down. But we fixed it, and it took a long time to fix it.’
‘It was harsh,’ adds Becker. ‘It was bleak. If it weren’t for that, the album would have been out right around Christmas. But this little thing came up and we realised we had to go back and do a lot of the more painstaking things that you do to make a record over again – such as mixing it.’
And then there was the matter of the departure of two original Steely Dan players, Hodder and Baxter. ‘The only reason,’ Fagen says, ‘that Jeffrey actually didn’t play on the last album is he was on the road with the Doobie Brothers. And we missed him on the dates where we could have used him, so somebody else did it. I talked to him just the other day. The Doobie Brothers are doing very nicely. Going on a tour. He’ll be in Oxford, Mississippi, before us.’
Baxter’s move led to speculation that – what a shame – this must be the end of the line for the beloved Dan. Mention of their projected demise elicits incredulous smiles from Becker and Fagen, for the simple reason that Steely Dan is not structured as a conventional rock band.
‘If you think of it more as a concept than a group of specific musicians,’ says Fagen, ‘there’s no way it’ll break up.’
‘We have a situation,’ Becker continues, ‘where for a particular tour we select a band. We make up a band and then rehearse it and then go out and do it …
‘You’ll see two Steely Dan shows on different tours, it’ll be different bands and a different kind of musical presentation. The nucleus of the band has always been the same.’
‘We have a bunch of satellite performers,’ adds Fagen, ‘who more or less are interchangeable from time to time … Usually we pick musicians that we think will fit the particular song. Sometimes we’ll just hear somebody on a record and hire them for the date, and if it works out it’s all the better … You know, we grew up listening to jazz musicians, and they’re always playing with different musicians, so I don’t see why the same kind of thing can’t happen here. It makes it much more interesting. I think the musicians like to play on our sessions and concerts, ’cause the material’s a little more challenging than the fare they usually have to play. Like, I remember Rick Derringer. “Chain Lightning” has all the aspects of a straight blues, except the chords constantly modulate, and he was sort of freaked out by that for about three or four seconds, and then realised he had to do something a little different from what he usually does.’
‘On the other hand,’ says Becker, ‘there are people that don’t like that.’
‘Right. Every once in a while, we’ll get somebody that’ll come in and they won’t know what’s going on. We get somebody else.’
‘They leave.’
Like a depressed executive confronted with ‘Brain Tap Shuffle’ maybe.
They say it’s too early yet to discuss the next configuration of Steely Dan.
‘We’re always meeting new musicians,’ says Fagen. ‘There are certainly some that are well-qualified. Including Jeff.’
But before Becker and Fagen and their musical phalanx hit the civic halls and gymnasiums (gymnasia?) one more time, they’re going to cut another album.
‘The idea,’ says Becker, ‘is to get an ongoing recording process going and not have to be interrupted by a tour. ’Cause what usually happens is, just as you’re finishing an album, you have some ideas on how you’d do it differently, things that you’d like to do while it’s fresh in your mind, and it’s always been for us that immediately on completion of the album we were pressured by various forces, internal and external, to go back on the road. As if we’re going to make some money or something. The Countdown to Ecstasy album, we were actually doing gigs on weekends and recording during the week. And it was ridiculous, ’cause all the equipment would come back all mangled, and nothing would play in tune and everybody had the flu and so on.’
As for this next album: ‘It’s in its very early stages,’ Becker says. ‘It’s really too soon to comment on the general character.’
‘We have some warped songs already,’ offers Fagen.
More warped than before, we wonder?
‘The same general kind of warp.’
‘It may be more warped than before,’ says Becker. ‘It’s too soon to tell. The actual execution of the record has a lot to do with how warped it is. You can start out with a very warped song and if …’
‘And if the vinyl itself is warped – ’
‘Then it’ll be even more warped and you’ll never get to hear it, ’cause your needle would just skip. Some dare call it vinyl.’
‘Yes,’ says Fagen, perking up a bit. ‘We’re going on a crusade to bring back records that don’t go …,’ he extends his bony arms and shakes an imaginary, wafer-thin platter back and forth, mouthing the appropriate ‘Whoop-whoop’ sound effect.
‘That’s right,’ says Becker. ‘I remember when I bought my first copy of Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis and took the record out of the jacket and found that it weighed seven pounds. I knew this was a musical landmark … Fewer but thicker records.’
Now what about this ‘concept’ that is Steely Dan?
Becker and Fagen can’t, or won’t, define it:
‘We’ve been working on it,’ says Fagen, ‘and as soon as we can articulate it properly, it’ll appear on a record probably. See, all we can give is clues, ’cause we’re too close to it. It’s all on the record, you know. It’s all there. There isn’t much to say about it.’
‘Even if we could answer the question,’ says a smiling Becker, ‘you know that we would lie. We would deliberately lead you off the scent.’
Fagen surrounds the matter a bit with a glimpse at the Steely Dan songwriting process: ‘Because of the lack of input, experience, that’s available to you in the United States of America, or the world in general these days, we more or less rely on pure imagination for song ideas. And we like to make them original, and we’ll set up a framework, no matter how bizarre it may be, and proceed to write a song on that basis.
‘I’ll come up with an idea, and he’ll come up with a scenario, and we’ll decide what we think the song is about, and which part of the exposition of what’s happening is in each verse, and get a title together, and no matter how strange the idea may be we just go along and hope that we can finish the song and that it actually emerges as something.
‘When we go into the studio it’s further refined by the musicians who are playing on it … Both of us in concert write the music and the words. You know, it’s a lot of pacing around the living room. Whenever Walter has some free time he’ll drop over, show me what he’s got, I’ll show him what I’ve got and kick it around a little bit. It’s very informal.
‘I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of stuff packed into the records musically … There’s so much junk packed into each unit. We try to make it unboring, that’s one of the main things we go for. If it’s boring, that’s the main indication that there’s some failure.’
Fagen, who once described his (and by extension Steely Dan’s) personality as ‘venomous,’ continues with some cryptic words on the Katy Lied material.
‘Each song is seen from a different viewpoint. Some, I imagine, have an idealistic tone to them, while others are someone who’s obviously suicidal. Obviously the narrator, if you will, is really in the deep stages of severe depression. And, of course, I probably was when I was performing them … Everybody’s personality is just a symptom of the times. I always seem to see both sides of things simultaneously, for which reason I never seem to have an opinion about anything.’
One final stab at it, then, directed in Donald Fagen’s direction: What kind of life do you like to live?
‘I rarely step over the portals of my door to the outside world … I watch TV, I listen to old records and play the piano a lot. I think we insult people unintentionally – we keep getting invited to this and that. Like the Grammy Awards, I got a thing that said, “Wear beautiful clothes”.’ He suddenly becomes animated, in his own sullen way, for the first time, flashing a trace of the possessed, mad-professor demeanour he exhibits when he leads the band on stage. ‘I don’t have any beautiful clothes!’
‘You have a nice sweater, though,’ Katz reminds him.
‘It said,’ Fagen responds vehemently. ‘“Wear beautiful …” now I know what they wanted. They wanted me to come dressed like Cher!’ ‘You don’t have anything like that,’ Katz admits.
‘I don’t have anything like that! I don’t have a little Hawaiian bra. I’d be petrified to go to something like that.’
‘You do look beautiful, though,’ says the ever-consoling Katz, ‘in that sweater.’