Mark Leviton, BAM,
December 1985
One of the most difficult-to-understand phenomena in a musician’s life is silence, the silence that comes occasionally when a talented performer or songwriter simply stops working after years or decades of dedication to The Muse.
Walter Becker, as co-leader and co-songwriter with Donald Fagen in Steely Dan, has more than his share of sterling moments to look back on. Few popular musicians have achieved fame from the kind of idiosyncratic recordings Steely Dan issued, and fewer still ever manage to combine left-field lyrics with a glossy, professional sound that’s the envy of the industry.
Since Steely Dan’s last LP Gaucho in 1980, Becker has remained completely silent, while Donald Fagen has issued only one solo album and co-produced one original cast album. But recently Becker finally emerged with a one-off production job on China Crisis’ album Flaunt The Imperfection. He then flew into Los Angeles from his home in Hawaii to do a little more nosing around in search of production work, just putting one toe back into the water of the music business he’s had nothing to do with for five years.
‘The last few years were a period of readjustment for me,’ he says. ‘I had to change certain things about the way I was living and get into a whole different groove. And that meant living in Hawaii and having no ambition to do anything in the business. I stopped practising scales on my instruments, hardly picked up a bass or played the piano and felt no pull to write songs either. Then about a year ago I started missing those leather couches, those little knobs and faders on the control panels … I thought producing would be a way of getting back into it without living in LA. When I was in Steely Dan, I’d get up at 4 p.m. take a shower, go to the studio and work all night, and that was all my life. For a long time, rock’n’roll was all I wanted to do. By switching to family life more, I lost the interest in music that used to be so central.
‘I figured with production I could make my little contribution and then get out. So I dramatically announced the availability of my services to some people at Warners, which is my record label – even though Steely Dan never got around to recording anything for them. I looked over the roster and came up with China Crisis. I thought their first American album was pretty good.’
The album at moments (especially on ‘Black Man Ray’) sounds as if Becker had a hand in songwriting, although he’s credited only with production, arrangement and a bit of synthesiser. ‘As it turned out, some of the songs weren’t finished when I first met them and they were counting on the producer in the process of recording to contribute certain things. Their other albums were not tremendously textured, they had a few ideas with a kind of fill-in “wash”. Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon are self-taught musicians, so their parts tend to be very essential, but past that point they are not virtuosos. They used a lot of legato things, sustains. It turned out to be a good marriage as we got underway, since I was always into arrangements. In Steely Dan, with Donald and Gary Katz co-producing with me, everything took a tremendous amount of time, of boredom and repetition. The basic tracks would run by a million times. The tedium was incredible. And in doing China Crisis I tried to find alternatives to building up thick pads, of always doing that one more take to get something perfect. The guys took the title from a TV show they’d seen that sort of jokingly suggested, “If you don’t have it, flaunt it.”
‘You see, I had to learn that in England they do a few takes and that’s it. Nobody records like Steely Dan. I started to see the value of limitations in time and money. Flaws that would bother me, they wouldn’t even hear. They’d tell me “flaunt the imperfection”. As you can hear from Donald’s solo record, there were a number of solutions to problems we developed together in Steely Dan and that’s why you can hear that sound in his work alone. We had years of technique-development together. With China Crisis, a number of those things were just inappropriate, so I tried to develop different ways of dealing with problems.
‘The hardest problem we had in Steely Dan was making machines not sound like machines. Now everybody uses drum machines without disguising them. Steely Dan used to get attacked for not being a “real group”, because Donald and I would hire whomever we wanted to play, but today nobody much cares about that. Now you can elaborate and develop musical ideas quickly, making demos with machines. But I find that unless you are really proficient with machines, you can’t afford the labour-saving devices because you’re spending so much time setting them up to work right. And then you pass it in front of a tape once and it’s over. What I’ve come back to thinking about is capturing live performance and getting away from the mechanical stuff. If you listen to “Show Biz Kids”, say, you can hear how we used tape loops, and Donald especially is still enthusiastic about combining loops with machines in interesting ways.
‘But in Steely Dan we could have any band we wanted and we began to arrange parts for specific players, which is a very old-line jazz kind of thing that Ellington, Basie, Monk could all do. The songs we wrote therefore grew up at least partly as recorded experiences. Our songs were always a little idiosyncratic and it did conspire against things like cover versions being done. People used to do one occasionally and get all the chord changes wrong. Critics used to say that the session musicians we employed weren’t really creative, just robots, but if you work with the guys you know that’s ridiculous. Somebody like Elliott Randall is very volatile, never plays the same thing twice. Consumers would have to hear all sixty takes before they’d realise that we could only pick one to make the record and they were all different! It’s strange, but even when you record all the parts separately and each line of the vocal might be recorded on different days, the listener creates the link for you. You can almost feel the band getting excited together, even though in reality most of them never saw each other in the studio.’
Steely Dan went about things the ‘wrong way’ quite a bit. For instance, they almost never gave interviews and, after a brief time of touring early in their careers, were never seen live again. ‘If I did want to start a solo career now,’ says Becker, ‘I could stay in Hawaii and send these things called videos out to tour for me. But since I have no financial need to write songs or record and Hawaii is such a nice place to do nothing – it breeds lack of ambition, I think – I just don’t have the desire. In Steely Dan, we were never really hiding from people, we just didn’t act like pop stars are supposed to act. There were always magazine stories with the most outrageous statements, because no one really understood us. And I have to admit that Gary Katz, Donald and myself are all pretty odd people in certain ways. Our working relationship was very special, and we still keep in touch.’
So for the moment, Becker is only a little closer to reclaiming his rightful place in the limelight. After years of being labelled a perfectionist, he’s content to leave the intensity of constant creation to others. ‘I’ll tell you what I find interesting about production,’ he concludes. ‘Someone once said it takes two people to paint a picture: one to paint and one to shoot the guy so at some point the painting will be finished. Otherwise he’d go on painting forever. That just about sums up the producer’s role on rock records and it’s something I’m comfortable with right now. I’m not really asking for more.’