Nick Coleman, Time Out,
September 1993
A. J. Liebling, the great New Yorker columnist, used to describe the walk to Madison Square Garden with epicurean keenness, as if New York in flood to its boxing mecca were a flux of wine and food and bodily functions, in which small but exquisite truths about life might be nosed. Going to the Garden was a meal in itself then, in the ’50s, when the Garden was still the Garden (it’s moved), and when Marciano slugged heavyweights into the cutlery box, by which symbolic act people learned to know their place.
Tonight, however, New York in flood is a thing without special flavour. There’s an even press of bodies not shoving against the crash doors of the new-ish Garden, comprising nervously amiable, white, 30-pluses dressed to patio-party and maybe shout a bit – we got our shorts, we got our Nikes, we got our Steely Dan T-shirts – the lot of us acting bleary-cheerful but not wanting to trouble our neighbours with anything, like, too picaresque, man. Check this. There’s a spod in front with a bucket of popcorn so voluminous he’s happy to shower the escalator brushes every time he rams a fistful between his mandibles, which is happening every two or three seconds. Dangerously exuberant, this. Irresponsible, even. But then in the land of the bland, the man with bad table manners is King Kong.
Still, fifteen thousand of the suckers cleaned out all the tickets within forty minutes of box office opening time, which might not be a record but is a much sharper reaction than Prince gets these days. Fifteen thousand in forty minutes. However you look at them, these are decent figures on the first concert in nineteen years by a band who never much liked playing concerts and were never really a band into the bargain. Donald Fagen has had his successes since the duo ‘disbanded’ at the end of the ’70s – The Nightfly and Kamakiriad, which was Nightfly 2 in lots of ways – but hip nostalgia will always succeed like disease. So what’s scary about Danitis is that no one really, but really, can say how many of the suckers swarming all over the Garden tonight are here for the Steely Dan thing, and how many are here because they liked Steely Dan with a frankfurter in the ’70s. Looking around, it’s hard to tell. The Dan reformed because it seemed like a good fun thing to do after Walter produced Kamakiriad ’n’ all. This lot are here, at the very least, because a frankfurter can be a wonderful thing.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen make one of the great entrances, in that it’s almost certain that no one in the Garden tonight can have seen an entry like this in their adult life; certainly not in the last decade and a half, during which time the conventional rock entrance has become so enslaved to the choreography of bombast that most large gigs are now dedicated in their entirety to the single effect of getting their star on and off the stage. (One day, indeed, rock concerts will run backwards, starting with the encores, so that the show can climax with the artist’s entrance.) What happens is this. The band do a little overture on the themes of ‘Bad Sneakers’ and ‘Aja’, and Becker and Fagen walk on. And that’s it.
What then follows is the sound of fifteen thousand people holding a rabbity debate amongst themselves on what the hell it is Becker looks like. A lab assistant. A computer journalist. A Shake n’ Vac salesman. A projectionist in a porn cinema. ‘A science nerd,’ is how Donald loyally described him earlier this year and, when Donald introduces Walter in his black jeans, black shirt, purple tie, scrotty beard and slightly full bottom, the little fella shuffles to the microphone and says, ‘I guess I get a cheer, huh? Thank you. Marvellous.’ We then listen to him sing one of two songs, called ‘Book Of Liars’, from his own forthcoming solo album. This sounds like a very beautiful song – groove underscores lilted melody, sung in the woodgrained, hangdog, country-romantic style of pre-Nighthawks Tom Waits – but we’ll need to study the words to be sure. There was one line with ‘electrons’ in it.
Meanwhile, Fagen has returned to his Fender Rhodes, where he jerks from side to side as he plays, with his head back, shades like two boreholes, mouth ajar. One does wonder whether his impersonation of a Jewish-geek Ray Charles on downers is self-conscious or not, and one makes a note to ask him should the opportunity arise. (‘Go Walter,’ Fagen drones flatly through his nose at the beginning of Walter’s solo in ‘Hey Nineteen’, not unlike Dustin Hoffman encouraging a vegetable, thereby intensifying the confusion.)
What you get, then, for your twenty-year wait and frantic plastic-flashing in the first forty minutes after the markets open, is two and a half hours of tricky detail.
Steely Dan were indeed a barbecue hits band of the ’70s. But they were also a twisty subplot in the history of man’s cruelty to man, all educated and eaten up with longing to be hip; a subplot involving terrible sarcasm, brilliant musicianship, a sordid anxiety about being white and suburban, a writing style so coldly acute you knew they must hate themselves and a Leiber ’n’ Stolleresque attachment to the simple pleasures of the pop tune.
This is a group that used to write the sleeve notes to their own albums in the style of a dimwit rock journalist. (Walter, indeed, took the trouble to introduce Donald as ‘Tristan Fabriani’, the self-same dimwit.) And who frazzled so comprehensively in the glare of their own brilliance that whatever chance they had of inadvertently becoming happy rock stars was Charlie Parker’d every night by a shared metabolite: Steely Dan were outsiders in everything. The only thing they were in love with was the eloquence of their contempt for the world they came from.
So, yes, two and a half hours of all that, including material from the whole canon, solo and collective – though not, oddly, from Pretzel Logic – is a fine thing. They tackled the songs as if they were new, re-stroking arrangements for added poke (only ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ copped a total re-bore), driving a band of extreme funkiness with unversed, chopping arm motions, as if one or the both of them were indeed Thelonious Monk at the wheel of a car.
A brief chat later, in a hotel room, which Becker and Fagen occupy uneasily: yes, well, maybe they’ll come to Europe ‘if things go well’. No, they don’t fantasise about being black, though Walter occasionally wishes Donald were black when he wants a cab. And certainly, Becker and Fagen are working from the same basic set of assumptions they always did, though their lives have changed and they do now at last consider themselves adults.
And how do Steely Dan reckon they’re perceived by the amorphous, flavour-free fifteen thousand flower of adulthood who pressed so gently at the crash-doors of the Garden last night?
Becker: ‘Oh, we’re perceived as crusty old fucks.’
Fagen, overlapping: ‘It’s not for us to say. It depends if it’s a fan or whether it’s someone who just remembers “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” when they were making out in the back of a car in 1973. It depends.’
And what are Steely Dan’s expectations of their audience?
Fagen: ‘I’d expect them to be attentive, well-dressed, cheerful, thrifty, clean-bred and reverent. By which I mean, naturally, that they be open to what we’re doing. I don’t wanna participate in a nostalgia-fest.’
The couple in front of me at the Garden were in frankfurter heaven. They whooped with recognition at the beginning of every song and then talked about something else until the next one came along. They were both confident they were going to have sex later.