Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone,
5 February 1981
‘You got to shake it, baby, you got to shake it, baby, you got to shake i-i-it.’ The disembodied phrase, sung by six backup vocalists and stripped of its instrumental arrangement, pulsed through a pair of home-size speakers in a Manhattan recording studio.
Donald Fagen, the half of Steely Dan who plays keyboards and sings, stood squarely between the speakers, squinting intently and inhaling a cigarette in spasmodic gulps. He was wearing a black pullover, Calvin Klein jeans and Adidas tennis shoes, and he was not smiling. Neither was producer Gary Katz. Roger Nichols, Steely Dan’s chief engineer, sat next to Katz at the console with a day’s growth of beard. ‘Hey,’ he said, breaking the silence that ensued as the last ‘shake i-i-it’ died away. ‘We could sort of make it sound like the fade starts there and then start the real fade a little later.’
Fagen stubbed out his cigarette and turned to face Katz and Nichols. ‘You mean start a subliminal fade the first time through?’ he asked, his voice laced with the sarcasm that Steely Dan fans have learned to love. ‘Why not a symbolic fade?’
Katz stared into the ashtray. ‘The tigers are symbolic until page 53,’ he said wearily. ‘Then the lions are symbolic and the tigers are real.’
‘What about the cows?’ Nichols wanted to know. ‘We airlift ’em to the top of the World Trade Center, photograph ’em and call the album …’
‘ … High Steaks,’ Fagen and Katz groaned. Nobody laughed, but the malaise seemed to have passed. Katz was on his feet. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘fade thirty-five.’ It was their thirty-fifth try at mixing the voices and instruments in the fifty-second fade-out at the end of ‘Babylon Sisters’, a song slated for Gaucho, the first Steely Dan album in three years.
An hour later, after about thirty more tries, the fade seemed to please everyone. ‘All right, Donald,’ said Katz, ‘it’s the perfect mix. Now what do you want to agonise over?’
Fagen knit his brow. ‘Let’s do an alternate ending without the girls,’ he said. ‘You know, like Francis Coppola.’ Before long, they were back where they’d been, listening to the vocalists’ track by itself. Fagen directed Nichols and two assistants to add minuscule helpings of echo and delay to the voices and, when they had the exact amount he wanted, he asked if they could abruptly cut out the echo after each ‘i-i-it’. Nichols and Katz manned the mixing board and began punching out the last milliseconds of echo each time the phrase came to an end. ‘I like that the best, I think,’ Fagen said, sounding less than convinced.
‘Are you happy, Donald?’ Katz asked.
Fagen looked glumly at the clock; they’d been working on fifty seconds of music for four hours. ‘This,’ he deadpanned, ‘is the happiest night of my life.’
It was the summer of 1980, and Steely Dan were not happy. Aja, their last album and first multi-platinum seller, had been out since the fall of 1977 and, just when they’d finally overcome a series of unexpected delays and were almost ready to mix their next LP, disaster struck. Walter Becker, the guitar-and-bass-playing half of Steely Dan, was walking back to his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side late one night when an automobile came careening down the street toward him. He pushed the woman he was with out of the way but the car hit him, breaking his leg in several places and causing other injuries.
Later, relaxing on a bed in Fagen’s apartment (they live in the same luxury building), Becker would joke about the incident: ‘That car and me, we were attempting to occupy the same space at the same time. We were definitely in violation of certain fundamental laws of physics; we were quantum criminals.’
After the accident, Fagen, Katz and Nichols carried on with the incredibly meticulous process of making a Steely Dan album and nobody was in a joking mood. Becker gamely practised his guitar for hours at a time, but the pain was intense and there were complications, including fever and secondary infections. Fagen and Becker had been a team – as musicians, songwriters, bandleaders and finally as rock’s most popular and notorious non-band – since the mid-’60s. Without Becker or, for that matter, without Fagen, there’d be no Steely Dan.
Before crossing paths at artsy Bard College in upstate New York, Fagen and Becker were budding instrumentalists and song-writers. Fagen, thirty-one, who was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and grew up near Princeton, heard jazz at an early age; his mother had been a big-band vocalist and would play records by the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Helen O’Connell and Sylvia Syms. By the time he was eleven, he was listening to Symphony Sid’s jazz radio show; a turning point came when he found a record he’d heard Sid play, pianist Red Garland’s Jazz Junction. ‘I went down to E. J. Korvette’s [US department store],’ he says, ‘and there it was, right in this bin, along with a lot of albums with unfamiliar names. I bought it and ever since then I’ve tried to imitate his style in the privacy of my own home.’ Fagen took ‘three or four’ piano lessons, and later spent a summer at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. ‘But I never had the patience to become a professional musician,’ he insists. ‘There are great gaps in my musical knowledge; I’m mostly self-taught.’
Becker, thirty, grew up in Queens and also tuned into jazz at a young age, via late-night radio shows and albums by the Dave Brubeck quartet. Both future Steelies had been excited by early rock’n’roll: ‘I liked Chuck Berry’s records,’ Fagen says, ‘because of the lyrics and that sort of nasty, strident sound. But after I started listening to jazz, I developed a strong prejudice against rock’n’roll, which I didn’t lose until 1966 when I heard some of the English bands.’
With Becker it was much the same. ‘I bought rock’n’roll records first,’ he says, ‘but after I got the word, I gave away all my little records with the big holes; I put away childish things.’
Fagen and Becker were, in fact, jazz snobs but, by 1965, when they struck up an acquaintance, rock’n’roll was beginning to interest them again. In fact, Fagen was leading a rock’n’roll band – of sorts. ‘He had a three-man guitar section,’ Becker recalls, ‘one guy who played badly and offensively, one guy who played very crudely and one guy who just wore the guitar in an interesting way.’
At the time, Donald was attempting to incorporate jazz ideas into his music, with considerable resistance from his band. Then he heard Walter play guitar ‘with a little amplifier turned up all the way, bending notes and getting sustain. He’d been listening to all these Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King records. Well, I’d never really heard anything like that.’ Before long, the two were inseparable. They led several college bands, including a jazz trio and various rock units, one of which included drummer Chevy Chase. After Walter quit school (‘My services were no longer required’) and Fagen graduated, they settled in New York and began haunting the Brill Building, hoping to sell their songs to the music publishers who rented offices there.
The songs, some of which made it onto the first Steely Dan album several years later, were not exactly Brill Building material. The harmonies were circuitous, dense and jazzy and the words were difficult if not utterly impenetrable. The duo scored isolated successes, most notably placing their ‘I Mean to Shine’ on a Barbra Streisand album, but for more than a year they eked out a living as backup musicians for Jay & the Americans. During this period they met Gary Katz, a struggling independent producer who actually liked their music.
One day, Katz called from Los Angeles, where he’d gone to work as an A&R man at ABC Records. ‘He said he’d got us a job as staff songwriters and we should come at once,’ Fagen remembers. ‘We went. We found places to live in Encino, this oasis of nothing in the middle of a desert, and every morning we’d hitch a ride to West Hollywood where we had an office and a piano. ABC was involved in commercial AM singles; they had the Grass Roots, Tommy Roe, stuff like that. But they wanted to get into the “underground” and sell albums too, so they’d hired Gary, who could certainly pass any criterion for being underground at that time. He neglected to tell them that, with underground music, you don’t need staff writers. It was obvious we weren’t gonna make it doing that, so with Gary’s help we put together a group and started rehearsing in the ABC building.’
Can’t Buy A Thrill, the first Steely Dan album, was released in 1972. It was different: jazz harmony, rhythms that drew on soul and Latin prototypes and intensely lyrical guitar solos. To ABC’s surprise, the album yielded two AM hits, ‘Do It Again’ and ‘Reelin’ In The Years’.
‘ABC got us a manager and sent us out on the road,’ says Fagen. ‘At first it was really a nightmare. After the record took off, we were able to add more people and, once we’d done two or three records, the gigs got better. I mean, we weren’t opening for the James Gang and Uriah Heep any more – we were opening for Elton John. By the time we closed down shop in 1974, we were headlining.’
At that juncture, the five-man Dan (guitarists Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias, drummer Jim Hodder, Becker on bass, Fagen on lead vocals and keyboards) had added several backup singers (including future Doobie Brother Michael McDonald), a percussionist and a second drummer, Jeff Porcaro, now a Los Angeles studio mainstay. ‘Bodhisattva’, the B-side of Steely Dan’s current hit single ‘Hey Nineteen’, was recorded by this final configuration at the Dan’s next-to-the-last gig. Although it’s a tight, energetic performance and Fagen admits that ‘the band was presentable’, Steely Dan’s intensely self-critical perfectionism was already much in evidence. ‘I would see shows I thought were just incredible,’ remembers Katz, ‘some of the best rock’n’roll shows I ever saw. Then I’d go backstage and Donald and Walter would be sitting with their heads in their hands, complaining about how rotten they’d been.’
After they toured to support their third album, Pretzel Logic (their second LP, Countdown To Ecstasy, featured extended soloing and is named by many Dan fans as their favourite), Becker and Fagen decided that enough was enough. ‘We took the band apart in a decisive fashion,’ says Becker, ‘so that it could not be put back together and we could not be sent out on the road. What were they gonna send, me and Donald with banjos?’ Adds Fagen: ‘It was 1974, and the mystique of rock was starting to fade, certainly as a cultural item. The concert scene seemed sleazy to us and we weren’t satisfied with the way the band was clicking. It was taking a tremendous psychic and physical toll on us. Basically, we couldn’t hack it; we just didn’t want to live that way anymore.’ Becker concludes: ‘It takes a certain disposition to really enjoy what that life has to offer. And the less said about what it has to offer, the better.’
On Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan had already been augmented by a large number of session musicians. With 1975’s Katy Lied, the group officially became Fagen, Becker and a veritable army of studio professionals. But the team that had shaped the music since the beginning – Fagen, Becker, Katz and Nichols – remained intact, and so did Walter and Donald’s personal vision. Though they were living in LA, they wrote about New York’s Lower East Side (‘Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More’), dope deals in South Florida (the unforgettable ‘Doctor Wu’, with a perfect one-take solo from jazz saxophonist Phil Woods) and, on 1976’s The Royal Scam, aging acid chemists, gun-waving psychos and the plight of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York ghettos.
The songs were getting longer and more complex, with harmonies so convoluted even studio pros had trouble with them. The lyrics were getting more ambitious. ‘Aja’ tackled the west’s double-edged fascination with the east; ‘Home At Last’ was a distillation of a key episode from Homer’s Odyssey. Yet each album sold better than its predecessor, and Aja made Steely Dan one of America’s most popular rock acts.
Along the way, they also acquired a reputation as rock’s most obsessive nit-pickers. It was said that they’d throw out a track if one note was out of place and, while that’s probably an exaggeration, Fagen and Becker admit to being ‘fussy’. They’re particularly hard on guitar players, especially when trying to get one of the exquisite solos that grace their albums. Last fall, I spent several hours watching Fagen work on guitar parts for ‘My Rival’ with Rick Derringer – one of their favourite hired guns since contributing the ringing slide solo to ‘Show Biz Kids’ on Countdown To Ecstasy. Though he has a reputation as a barnstorming hard-rocker, Derringer is a well-rounded musician who executes difficult chord progressions with ease. Yet his evening with ‘My Rival’ was arduous.
When I arrived at Sound Works in midtown Manhattan, Derringer was sitting behind the console next to Fagen, looking over a chart and cradling a guitar. ‘A little too much treble,’ Fagen and Katz agreed. Before long, everyone liked the sound, and they began working on some punctuating figures that might recur throughout the song. ‘Do something here like this,’ Fagen suggested, humming a figure. Derringer picked it up and executed it flawlessly. ‘But it shouldn’t come in there,’ Donald decided. ‘It should come in in a funny place.’ Derringer tried a tricky syncopation and Fagen suggested an even trickier one. ‘OK,’ he said when Rick had mastered that, ‘now play it up an octave, and kinda like this.’ He clenched and unclenched his fist to demonstrate the play of rhythmic tension and relaxation he wanted. ‘And don’t use so many of the high strings when you’re playing that fall-off.’
After working on the song’s eight-bar introduction for more than an hour, Fagen concluded, ‘OK, the phrases are all in the right place.’
Katz disagreed. ‘The last one,’ he said, ‘is desperately late.’
‘Well,’ said Fagen, ‘they’re all right stylistically.’
‘Christ,’ said Derringer, who’d been bearing up like a trouper. ‘You guys are just a buncha punks, that’s all.’ After a few more adjustments, they started recording, and eventually Derringer’s punctuations met with everyone’s approval.
Then it was time to move on to the solo – more guitar playing by committee. After they worked on it for an hour, I began to feel restless. In the studio lobby, I encountered Rick’s wife, Liz. ‘Poor Rick,’ I said, ‘they’re really putting him through it.’
‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘He loves playing for them.’
When Gaucho was finally released, I was surprised to find that while Derringer’s punctuations could still be heard on ‘My Rival’, the solo was by Steve Khan. ‘The parts Rick did were voted “Yes”,’ said Fagen, ‘the solo was voted “No”.’
There were brighter moments, like the night Fagen and Katz pitched a baseball back and forth across the studio. On another occasion, Fagen complained that he couldn’t listen properly after hours of going over the fine points of a mix, and he wandered into the studio to play the piano. He ran through some credible modern jazz, including several standards and a difficult Thelonious Monk tune. His technique wasn’t spectacular, but he enlivened the music with creative chord voicings and rhythmic suspensions.
Katz listened for a while and then sat down to talk. ‘I would like to think the next album won’t take this long,’ he said. ‘Donald and I depend on Walter to do some things that we’ve had to do and that slowed us down. There were other factors that delayed us. An engineer accidentally erased a completed track. That was one of the most serious emotional setbacks we’ve had in the studio. At the time, it was my favourite tune on the album. We started it again from scratch, building up the rhythm arrangement, the guitars, the voices and, when that didn’t pan out, we had to start another tune from scratch.’ The new number turned out to be ‘Third World Man’, perhaps Gaucho’s most striking piece of music.
There were other setbacks, too. The death of a close friend earlier in the year had devastated Becker, and Gaucho had gotten off to a slow start. ‘We took some time off after Aja came out,’ says Fagen, ‘and then we tried putting a touring band together, as per a contractual agreement. We had several rehearsals, and I noticed I had lost my enthusiasm for reproducing what we had already created on records; it seemed artificial. Besides, we’d asked the musicians how much money they wanted and given it to them, but they didn’t all ask for the same amount. When they found out some were getting more than others, there was a socialist revolt. We didn’t feel like being perceived as capitalists, so we called the whole thing off. That took time. And then we went back into the studio before we had a selection of songs that met with our standards, and with some misconceived ideas.’
As Gaucho neared completion, Steely Dan manager Irving Azoff attempted to find out how many records the Dan had sold before ABC was absorbed into the MCA conglomerate. According to his accounting, ABC owed Fagen and Becker several million dollars in royalties, and MCA was asked to pay. MCA claimed that the royalties were not its responsibility but, after some legal wrangling, paid part of them. The label also said that since the Dan had owed ABC one more album, Gaucho was rightfully MCA’s. A judge declared that the album did indeed belong to MCA but that the Dan were then free to move to Warner Bros., their label of choice. With that settled, Gaucho reached the stores in a matter of days. It was immediately added to virtually every FM rock playlist in the country and bulleted into the Top 20, rapidly surpassing Aja’s performance.
With Gaucho launched, Fagen and Becker were ready to talk under less-pressured circumstances and I met them one night at Fagen’s apartment. Becker, who was stretched out on the bed, was still having difficulty moving and didn’t stir throughout our three-hour conversation. Although friends had worried several months earlier that he was in an emotional tailspin, Becker seemed to be in excellent spirits. I’d been wondering about the Custerdome, which is where most of the action takes place in the song ‘Gaucho’ and, when I asked what it was, Walter chortled.
‘It’s, ah, it’s one of the largest buildings in the world,’ he said, indicating with his self-righteous tone and arched eyebrows that I was an imbecile for having to ask. ‘You know, an extravagant structure with a rotating restaurant on top.’ His act was so convincing that I fell for it.
‘Where is it?’ I asked.
‘It exists only in our collective imagination,’ said Fagen. ‘In the Steely Dan lexicon, it serves as an archetype of a building that houses great corporations …’
‘ … And yet becomes a recreational centre for the businessmen’s bounce set, the, uh, butter-and-egg set,’ added Becker.
‘Named after General Custer, of course,’ I managed to say, laughing uncontrollably.
‘Of course,’ said Becker, ‘and catering to its clientele’s variegated whims.’
‘A hint of disaster is subtly present,’ Fagen noted. ‘It’s definitely headed for Towering Inferno status.’
‘There is that Irwin Allen aspect,’ Becker concluded. ‘It’s the Little Big Horn of architectural marvels.’
When Becker and Fagen write a song, they often indulge in similar dialogues, stimulating each other’s fantasies and seeing where ideas will lead. ‘I usually come up with the harmonic framework and basic structure,’ Fagen said, ‘and then Walter comes over and we take it from there. Also, a lot of the songs are a sort of testimonial for saving things. I have cassettes left over from college that contain ideas, little snatches of things. They sometimes become useful in other contexts if you keep them around long enough. For example, the chorus in “Glamour Profession” – I can’t even remember when we wrote that.’
What about those complex and unexpected harmonic modulations, which are as challenging as the ’30s’ and ’40s’ pop classics on which many jazzmen base their improvisations? ‘Just a way of making rock’n’roll but trying to keep it interesting,’ said Becker. ‘It’s trying to do something you haven’t done before that’s hard to do and worth having done when you’re finished. I think a lot of people in the audience are unaware that anything unusual is happening harmonically and so much the better, because there are people who are offended by that sort of thing, who think it’s Ed Sullivan pop, Broadway show music. For the benefit of that portion of the audience, we try to make these things work so that they don’t stick out.’
In ‘Hey Nineteen’, the protagonist is a fellow roughly Fagen and Becker’s age who tries to pick up a nineteen-year-old in a rock’n’roll club and has trouble communicating with her, especially when he begins to lecture on the merits of soul music, a genre she’s too young to remember. The music may be cleverly convoluted, but the lyric hits home with a directness that’s surprising, considering Steely Dan’s reputation for distanced cynicism and verbal hide-and-seek. Could Becker and Fagen be mellowing? ‘We could be losing our sense of fantasy as we age,’ Fagen suggested. ‘Or confusing it with our sense of reality,’ Becker countered, ‘along with the rest of the world. But mellowing? I would hope not. I think we’ve maintained a healthy level of misanthropy.’
‘I think that song’s self-explanatory, if not strictly autobiographical,’ said Fagen. ‘I figured a lot of people could identify with it.’
Were they both soul fans during the ’60s? ‘Yeah, of course,’ said Becker. ‘And we’re fiercely proud of our cultural heritage. In fact, we’re a soul band. Just look at the guys who play with us – Bernard Purdie, Chuck Rainey, Paul Griffin. We even used to sing duets like Sam and Dave.’
‘We’re one of the best black bands going these days,’ Fagen wisecracked. ‘Aside from the Bee Gees. Despite what our individual and collective sensibilities are, our music still comes down to being some kind of R&B music.’
Becker concurred: ‘It’s got electric guitars, a real good back-beat; it’s clear to me that it’s, you know, rock’n’roll. What else could it be?’
Not everyone agrees with this assessment. Critics have taken Becker and Fagen to task for being overly slick, and for using facile studio musicians instead of gritty, spontaneous players. ‘Hey Nineteen’ is a rarity among recent Dan tunes in that the most prominent instruments are manned by Becker (lead guitar, bass) and Fagen (electric piano, synthesiser), and it has a more distinctive sound than any other tune on Gaucho. Why use so many session men?
‘We’ve got it all,’ said Fagen, ‘except the fingers. Both of us have terrific feel. I think we get a lot of points for style, but technique and execution are weak; there tend to be a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. If we can’t find a studio musician who’s comfortable with a particular feel, then we’ll haul out our instruments.’
Katz thinks that Becker and Fagen drastically undervalue their own musicianship. ‘I’m always trying to get them to play more on the records,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever stop asking them to tour again. That comes purely from being a fan; I want to go see them. There were shows toward the end of their touring career that were absolutely magical. I still hope that one day, not too far away, it’ll happen again. On the other hand, Donald has said to me, “It’s easy for you to say we should work. You don’t have to go out there and make a fool of yourself.” And he’s right.’
Gary Katz is a patient man, but he’s probably going to have to wait a long time to see Steely Dan onstage again. Fagen and Becker guard their privacy as obsessively as they perfect their music. They seem content to inhabit a Custerdome of their own devising, where they listen to jazz records (mostly from the ’50s; the post-1960 avant-garde is one of their pet peeves), play for their own amusement and turn their rapid-fire rap sessions into quirky pop masterpieces. And with their music enjoying extraordinary critical and commercial success, who’s to say they’re wrong?
Donald Fagen in London, 1991.
Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images