Gavin Martin, the Independent,
6 June 2003
It is late afternoon before Walter Becker and Don Fagen greet their first interviewer of the day. The two men, who first fronted a band called Steely Dan in 1972, are lounging in a fifth-floor suite of the ocean-front Fairmont Miramar hotel in Santa Monica, California.
The venue, a midway point between Becker’s home in Hawaii and Donald’s upstate New York residence, has a faded grandeur perfectly in keeping with the Steely Dan canon, where musical opulence and a longing for a distant past are so often intertwined. Sat on the couch in front of me, Becker, at fifty-three the younger by two years, momentarily stops reading the morning paper to offer an amiable welcome. Fagen hovers uncertainly behind my chair, slurping from a bowl of raspberry sorbet. The singer/pianist has the most painfully ill-at-ease body language of any interviewee I’ve ever encountered.
Like Becker, Fagen has a rapidly receding hairline and middle-aged spread, visible beneath his rumpled sweatshirt. But his head has all but vanished deep into hunched shoulders, while his eyes dart furtively round the room like a trapped animal.
The new Steely Dan album, Everything Must Go, was made in a comparatively short space of time. Mostly recorded live, it is a stark and punchy counterpart to its predecessor, the four-Grammy-winning album Two Against Nature, released three years ago.
Though Steely Dan have seldom been considered an overtly political band, from its opening ‘The Last Mall’ to the closing title track, Everything Must Go is an unflinching look at venal greed, mindless consumption and ersatz realities. The album’s recurring concerns are the debris of the capitalist dream (the impoverished divorcee on ‘Things I Miss the Most’) and the victims of counter-culture utopia (the junkies on ‘Blues Beach’). Neither Don nor Walter is aware that Welsh agit-poppers the Manic Street Preachers have already used the record’s title.
‘So what, every set of words has been used by someone somewhere already, it’s a common phrase. Anyway, I think capitalism has got everybody’s goat, don’t you?’ grins Becker.
‘Only for the last fifty years or so. Actually, I think you will find these same themes on our very first record,’ argues Fagen.
Walter: ‘If it wasn’t capitalism it would be something else – we’d be complaining about whatever system was calling the shots.’
As Donald continues to slurp his sorbet, Walter returns to the paper to brief his partner on the issues of the day, namely current uneasiness in Europe over US foreign policy.
‘The actor Vince Vaughn says we just have to try to remind Europeans about the Marshall Plan.’
‘Oh, I see, so he’s just like all the other scumbags,’ moans Fagen, noticeably relaxing as he sits down at the opposite end of the couch to his pal.
Becker shrugs. ‘Well, I suppose you can take historical details and twist them whatever way you want.’
Indeed. In the late 1960s Walter and Don were two smart, jazzy, savvy kids fresh out of Bard College in upstate New York. Their attempt to establish themselves in the Brill Building songwriting stable met with meagre success so they set about rewriting the pop rulebook in Steely Dan, a hastily convened group named after a steam-powered dildo in William Burroughs’ junkie, sci-fi beat-era novel Naked Lunch. Burroughs, however, never became a fan.
Becker: ‘I think he found we were marginally less unpleasant than other popular music, but no more than that.’
Apart from the striking appendage, did Burroughs’ writing particularly inspire them?
Fagen: ‘He brought something new into literature, but most of his work is unreadable. The way he influenced us was through his use of science fiction and the erotic, though his flavour of the erotic was not the same as ours.’
Walter: ‘And the use of addiction as a metaphor for existence was very interesting. He wasn’t just a bohemian joker; he had points to make.’
And so of course did the Dan. Between 1972 and 1980, Walter and Don were the unassailable hepcats of East Coast cool, subverting the West Coast mainstream with lyrical intrigue, dazzling crafted intelligence, their twitchy finger on the pulse of popular taste.
They wrote about gambling addicts (‘Do It Again’), a stock market crash (‘Black Friday’), cruel decadence (‘Show Biz Kids’), drug dealers (‘Kid Charlemagne’), fugitive gunmen (‘With A Gun’, ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’). Albums like Pretzel Logic and Countdown To Ecstasy presented a quintessential American songbook filled with characters that ranged from the seedy and desperate to vengeful dreamers (‘My Old School’) and lost romantics (‘Midnite Cruiser’).
Steely Dan has always been Walter and Don with an ever-changing line-up of the finest musicians that money and talent can buy. ‘As musicians, we’ve had dream careers: just being in the studio or in the control room with those guys was all you could ask for, really,’ reflects Becker.
Looming large in Dan mythology is Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, the moustachioed guitarist responsible for some jaw-dropping solos. Bizarrely, as Becker explains how their former associate is now ‘a self-instructed expert on numerous weapons systems’, a military helicopter thunders up the coast rattling the windows of the hotel as it passes. ‘See what you get when you mess with the Skunk, don’t fuck with him,’ exclaims Becker.
‘His U2 plane will be along in a minute,’ warns Fagen.
In 1974, before they’d recorded their biggest hits, Steely Dan ceased to function as a live band. Signs of studio exhaustion were evident beneath the meticulous design of 1980’s Gaucho and, shortly after it was released, they ceased operations completely. For the rest of the decade they engaged in fitful solo careers and waged personal battles against tragedy and depression. Becker’s girlfriend OD’d in his New York apartment and he struggled to conquer heroin addiction. Fagen had a breakdown and suffered a long period of writer’s block.
Their comeback took time to blossom after the 1993 reunion tour, but they are now on a creative roll which even their deeply imbued cynicism can’t stop. They’ve changed labels since Two Against Nature, but are quick to dispel any illusion that they are now independent guns for hire.
Becker: ‘The idea that we’re working for a different record company is purely an illusion – it’s actually the same record company with a different name. I would say we are merely foot soldiers for a vast criminal enterprise where the names keep changing but the faces are always the same – namely, the music business.
‘I think what we do artistically is subversive, but when it comes to marketing and that sort of thing, we’re not interested, we settle for what is easiest. We talked over some options, we could put out our own record, do it over the internet, but it was all too much trouble.’
Fagen: ‘We aren’t really salesmen. Who wants to spend time and energy in the marketing business? I know there are some talented younger performers who use the internet and have no intention of getting a record deal …’
Walter: ‘ … or earning a living, buying a house or raising a family.’
Don: ‘Yeah, they’re young, they will learn.’
As they slip into their old repartee, it is hard to imagine how they coped apart from each other during their extended separation. Did they each feel they were only half there without their sparring partner?
‘By that time, I was only half there,’ laughs Becker, alluding to his drug problem, ‘but I managed to get about thirty per cent of it back.’
The comment causes Fagen to guffaw uncontrollably – a weird whinnying sound that resembles a mule in traction.
Other artists who’ve undergone trauma and recovery favour personalised songs of survival, anguished and confessional interviews. That is not the Dan style. They admit that gallows humour has been an essential part of their survival mechanism, although past personal experience does feed into their lyrics, however obliquely.
Becker: ‘We are constantly competing with the monsters from the id.’
Fagen: ‘The unseen reptiles within.’
Walter: ‘All the good things we tried to do and all the bad things we tried not to do, as James Brown once said.’
Becker and Fagen are many things – laconic revolutionaries, mischief-makers who seem irrevocably altered by past chemical intake, jazz buffs with a still-bright pop sensibility, and, perhaps most surprisingly, concerned parents too.
On the new album, ‘Pixeleen’ is born out of unease with present-day teenage reality.
Don: ‘I have stepkids but Walter has had experience parenting teenagers; he contributed his knowledge of teenage mores.’
Becker: ‘I think what television and videogames do is reminiscent of drug addiction. There’s a measure of reinforcement and a behavioural loop. Even from a metabolic point of view, a person sitting on a couch watching television burns fewer calories than a person sitting on a couch. Though far be it from me to preach.’
‘You mean you can lose weight just by turning off the TV?’ says Fagen. ‘That sounds like a good diet.’
Becker and Fagen on the Heavy Rollers tour, Rotterdam, July 2007.
Paul Bergen/Getty Images