Barney Hoskyns, Arena,
Spring 1993
Sabbaticals have become essential career moves in today’s music business: any self-respecting rock legend will tell you as much. Put out an album a year and you blow all credibility; wait five (or ten, preferably) and the world will be salivating.
Even so, few legends have taken quite as much time out as Donald Fagen, erstwhile frontman with the indisputably legendary Steely Dan. Over a decade has now elapsed since Fagen released his masterful solo album The Nightfly, and in that time there’s been scant word from the man: a short-lived column for Premiere; the soundtrack to the lame Bright Lights, Big City; a low-key reunion with his old partner Walter Becker on flame-haired Rosie Vela’s Zazu. But nothing substantial until his appearance as ringmaster at the circus that was 1991’s New York Rock and Soul Revue, an all-star live affair on which the likes of Boz Scaggs and old Dan hand Michael McDonald applied their chops to a batch of Fagen’s favourite R&B/soul chestnuts. So what in God’s name has Donald Fagen done for ten years?
‘Well, the ’80s weren’t very inspiring, for a start,’ says the unassuming-looking character who sits opposite me in lopsided wire-frame glasses and a pair of shoes that definitely do not become a legend. It’s as if I’m meeting the man Donald Fagen could so easily become: a forty-something Jewish academic on some upstate liberal arts campus, not the singing half of the most brilliant rock duo of the ’70s.
‘More to the point,’ Fagen continues, ‘I’d used up all I knew on The Nightfly and I had to live another ten years to write a new album. Basically, I was just trying to get a life, having been a workaholic ever since I was in college. I’d never been able to figure out what to do with myself when I wasn’t writing or recording and it was time to learn. You know … getting into relationships … getting out of relationships. I even, uh, practised the piano a little.’
He manages a faint smile and sinks into the black leather sofa in his publicist’s office. Outside, high above Broadway on an early March afternoon, snowflakes whirl ineffectually through the sky, failing to settle on the window ledge as on the blustery streets below.
This ‘new album’, for those of you who’ve given up keeping tabs on the activities of Messrs Becker and Fagen, is the intriguingly titled Kamakiriad, on Warner Bros – a company that wisely agreed to let Fagen take his time when they signed him back in 1981. (‘I told them there was no way I could be sure of meeting any particular deadlines,’ he says.)
Produced by Becker and recorded over a period of two and a half years in New York and Hawaii, it’s an extraordinary ‘comeback’ for two principal reasons: first, because it’s set in the future, towards the end of the millennium, thereby dashing the hopes of anyone counting on some retro-nuevo reprise of The Nightfly; second, because almost every one of its eight tracks boasts the kind of kick-ass funk grooves that were only ever implicit in the music of Steely Dan. Rhythm one expected of Donald Fagen; a virtual dance album comes as something of a shock.
‘It’s a little more aggressive than anything I’ve done before,’ concedes the man behind the wire frames. ‘Dance music to me is still the soul of the ’60s and the funk of the ’70s, and that’s kind of what I wanted to capture on the record – funk based on sixteenth rather than eighth notes, everything from Sly to Earth, Wind & Fire. I was writing the album at the time when we were putting the Rock and Soul Revue together, and that whole experience had a major impact on the songs.’
The marriage of Fagen and Becker’s nouveau ’90s funk with Fagen’s inspired sci-fi imagery – the Kamakiri of the title, for instance, is a steam-driven car with its very own hydroponic vegetable garden! – makes for some curious listening. Take ‘Springtime’, a close encounter between early Marvin Gaye and recent William Gibson in some twilight zone timewarp. Or ‘Tomorrow’s Girls’, a song whose glorious pop chorus marks it out as a potential hit single of the order of Fagen’s classic ‘I. G. Y.’ – the B-52s meet The Stepford Wives, anyone?
In the album’s brief sleeve note, Fagen explains that Kamakiriad is the story of a journey in which ‘each song is a charming detour or dangerous adventure along the way’. Slumped on the sofa opposite me, he adds that his peripatetic hero is ‘kind of a fuck-up, but with excellent intentions’.
‘As in all the grand old myths, he only really discovers his destination as he continues along,’ Fagen adds. ‘The journey can be taken on different levels, of course: the literal level of the action, and then a deeper, more psychological level.’ He further contends that Kamakiriad ‘completes some inherent trilogy, with The Nightfly being the past, the Steely Dan records being about the present as it unfolded and this album being about the future.’
Whether any of that will make the record less bemusing to the world at large is hard to predict: I fear Fagen may lose hardcore Dan fans without gaining a substantial number of new ones. (I also have reservations about Walter Becker’s production: perhaps it’s the hand of Dan/Nightfly producer Gary Katz that’s the major missing ingredient here.) For the sake of sabbatical-taking iconoclasts the world over, I hope I’m wrong.
Whatever one’s feelings about Fagen’s new groove – and an initial disappointment may be inevitable after the pristine perfection of The Nightfly – it’s hard to begrudge the man his new spirit of celebration. (There’s a deliciously desolate jazz ballad that dates back to the Nightfly era – ‘On The Dunes’ – but the remainder of the songs are all upbeat.) It would seem that, for Fagen, ‘getting a life’ has partly entailed the thawing-out of everything that was so coldly aloof about Steely Dan, a process which began with the Rock and Soul Revue and now continues with the kinetic workouts of ‘Countermoon’ and ‘Trans-Island Skyway’.
Certainly the Revue was hardly something that Steely Dan – those malcontented New York misfits let loose in Hollywood Babylon – would have had much truck with. But Steely Dan never had much truck with anyone but themselves.
‘In Steely Dan we were very arrogant kids,’ says Fagen. ‘And when life starts to kick you around, you have to swallow your pride. See, there was a real family feeling about the Rock and Soul Revue that I’d never experienced before, and certainly not in Steely Dan. In a way, people from my generation have had to create new families, since their own families have so often failed to satisfy the needs that a family historically provided.’
Donald Fagen, a dysfunctional family man? Never thought I’d live to see the day. So is he repudiating the blistering cynicism, the merciless irony, of the great Becker/Fagen songs?
‘No, because it wasn’t like we were promoting or endorsing that cynical attitude. We were just reflecting the zeitgeist, talking about the way the world seemed to us in the ’70s. But by the end, when we were making Gaucho, I think both Walter and I were down and depressed, and both of us really had to make changes.’
In Becker’s case, the changes included the termination of a hazardous drug habit and the adoption of an idyllic Hawaiian lifestyle that, in Fagen’s words, ‘is very amusing to me, and to him as well’. In Fagen’s case, the changes have simply been about coming in from the cold.
That Fagen has begun to join in is evident from his appearance several hours after our interview at a sub-Rock and Soul Revue hoedown at the Lone Star Roadhouse on West 52nd Street. This ‘New York Night’, like the Revue itself, is the brainchild of Fagen’s companion Libby Titus, who I suspect has had to push her reclusive paramour into having the kind of sloppy, informal fun for which all these all-star Lone Star jams are renowned.
‘The whole thing started when Libby asked if I’d do a jazz evening with Mac Rebennack [Dr John],’ says Fagen. ‘I then helped put together a show celebrating the songs of Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy, using all the great New York musicians who’d played on their records, like Paul Griffin and Jerry Jermott. The evenings got so popular that we ended up at the Beacon Theatre.’
The trouble is, the moment Fagen walks on, unannounced, to take his place alongside such luminaries as Al Kooper and Elliott Randall (the almost-legendary axeman who soloed on ‘Reelin’ In The Years’), he looks distinctly out of place. In straining to get down with these dishevelled old lags, he only accentuates the distance between himself and rock’n’roll in general. For the fact is that Fagen is not a joiner-in, even if Libby Titus has managed to convince him that he is or that it’s somehow good for him. Nor are his makeshift renditions of ‘Green Earrings’, ‘FM’ and ‘Josie’ far short of torturous, since Fagen is barely able to stay in tune on any of them.
Only when Chuck Jackson, that now-forgotten legend of the uptown New York soul which Fagen so adores, strides on to sing Leiber and Stoller’s wacky 1963 beat concerto ‘I Keep Forgettin’’ (covered by David Bowie on Tonight) does our hero’s face momentarily light up.
As I watch him, I’m asking myself whether this is supposed to be some sort of therapy for the man who called a halt to all live performances after the ill-tempered Pretzel Logic tour nearly twenty years ago. And I’m wondering if, after all, the point of Donald Fagen doesn’t lie precisely in his detachment, his distance from such beery gatherings as this ‘New York Night’. Yes, Steely Dan were cold, soulless, fetishists of the studio and ‘funked-up muzak’. But next to all the phoney passion and bravado of most rock music, that in itself was bracing. In the wake of the Great Grunge Overkill, moreover, we have much to learn from the classicism and strategy of vintage Becker and Fagen. I’m far from convinced that whooping it up with clapped-out Al Kooper and co. – or exhuming soporific ’70s’ jazz-funk on Kamakiriad’s ‘Florida Room’, come to that – is really the answer for Fagen himself. At the Lone Star Roadhouse, he doesn’t look too convinced either. Perhaps that’s why he failed to mention the show during our interview.
‘From somewhere deep inside you,’ Fagen sings on ‘Teahouse On The Tracks’, the album’s spirited finale, ‘some frozen stuff begins to crack …’ Me, I’ll miss the frozen stuff of Steely Dan’s glory days: the grim comedy and clinical precision that sheared away all the bullshit of rock’n’roll. I just hope Donald Fagen doesn’t thaw out completely.