Dylan Jones, GQ,
February 2014
NOTE: This is an edited version of a piece that Jones, the magazine’s editor, wrote for British GQ.
‘Like most bands from before my time,’ says Mark Ronson. ‘I discovered Steely Dan through rap music, specifically because “Peg” had been sampled by De La Soul on 3 Feet High and Rising. That was about twenty years ago, and I’m still discovering new things every time I put on a Steely Dan record. I’m still even discovering songs for the first time. No other band managed to let groove and intellect coexist as seamlessly. The most incredible rhythm sections with the most captivating narratives and these crazy chord changes.’
You can tell almost all you need to know about a person by asking them what sort of music they like. And although that’s the sort of question usually only asked (and answered) by boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I was asked it a while ago by someone I’d never met before. It felt like a childish thing to be asked, but even though I could have easily beaten it back by saying something flippant – the last One Direction single, the next Jake Bugg album – I was stumped.
The American writer Chuck Klosterman said that – having for many years experimented with a litany of abstract responses when asked this question – he started to say, with some honesty as well as accuracy, ‘Music that sounds like the opening fourteen seconds of Humble Pie’s “I Don’t Need No Doctor”, as performed on their 1971 album, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore.’
Now, never having heard this record, I couldn’t comment – although it certainly sounds like the sort of thing I wouldn’t like at all – but apparently it has the desired effect, the reply having the added bonus of significantly changing the conversation, or (preferable, this) ending it entirely. Usually, the answers to questions like these are either endearingly banal – ‘Oh, the usual, you know, Jay-Z, the Beatles, a bit of Coldplay’ – unbearably pretentious – ‘the first five Fall singles and pretty much nothing before or since’ – or, in the case of most politicians, simply lies.
Having thought about it myself, I’ve decided to adopt Chuck’s policy. Initially I thought of just saying ‘Steely Dan’, because it not only shows confidence (by any modern definition of the term, they’re not really what anyone would call cool), but like Marmite, they are an acquired taste and, unless you’re an aficionado, you’ll probably hate them.
However, like Chuck, I’ve decided to be annoyingly specific and, while I thought about singing the praises, yet again, of their sixth album, Aja, the next time someone asks me what kind of music I like I’m going to say, having first locked them in with my most sincere stare, ‘Music that sounds like the second guitar solo in “Green Earrings” [from Steely Dan’s fifth album, 1976’s The Royal Scam], the one that arrives after two minutes and seven seconds, the one that makes you feel as though you’re cruising over the Florida Keys’ Seven Mile Bridge in a rented Mustang.’
And if I were asked what the best album of all time is? Well, it isn’t Nevermind, isn’t Revolver and isn’t Pet Sounds. Strangely it isn’t even Rumours, London Calling or The Ramones Leave Home. No, the best album of all time was released at the end of August 1977, just as the sweltering Summer of Hate was beginning to wilt, a record that has nothing to do with the Sex Pistols, the Clash or the Jam (who all released classic LPs in 1977), and which has no affinity with the estuarial guttersnipe squall of punk. In fact, this record is as far away from the insurgency of punk as Southern California is from the Westway.
Steely Dan weren’t just up my street; they were, to paraphrase Nick Hornby, knocking on my door, pressing the intercom and peering through the letterbox to see if I was in. Which I was, crouched over the B&O, devouring the pop-art dystopia that was the DNA of the Steely Dan brand (available in different forms on Can’t Buy A Thrill, Countdown To Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, Katy Lied, and more).
Aja was their high-water mark. You can keep your Zuma, your Neon Bible, your Back To Black, your Parachutes or your OK Computer. You can even keep The Chronic. They might all be straight from the heart, but Steely Dan’s Aja offers the delights of a world uncharted by pop groups, past or present.
Those who hate the band call them sterile, surgical, cold. Which is sort of the point. Becker and Fagen – fundamentally sociopaths masquerading as benign dictators – like to give the impression they’re being as insincere as possible, the very antithesis, frankly, of almost everyone else in the music business.
The aforementioned Aja is as gentrified and as anal a record as you’ll ever hope to hear. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s masterpiece is an homage to passive-aggressive studio cool, even though they were as disdainful of the palm tree and flared-denim world of Los Angeles as the whey-faced urchins from west London. The band’s nihilism is plain for all to hear, disguised as FM-friendly soft-rock. Their lyrics are dispassionate, the architecture of their songs often labyrinthine, the guitar solos ridiculously sarcastic. And yet, on Aja, they made some of the most sophisticated, most polished, most burnished music ever heard: ‘Black Cow’, ‘Deacon Blues’, ‘Home At Last’ and the rest.
Aja is also the record that many musicians rate as the personification of musical excellence. Technically and sonically it is beyond compare. (The late New York Times critic Robert Palmer – no relation to the late singer – said that Steely Dan’s music sounded like it had been ‘recorded in a hospital ward’.)
You rarely meet a musician who doesn’t love some aspect of Aja and whenever I’ve interviewed a rock star at their home, I’ve often seen a CD copy around the place somewhere. It used to be played constantly in those places where you went to buy expensive hi-fi equipment and can still be heard in the type of luxury retailers who understand the notion of immersive wealth. Having heard the album’s ‘Deacon Blues’, Ricky Ross named his bandafter it, while ‘Peg’ would become widely known because of De La Soul’s sampling of it on ‘Eye Know’. Three years ago, it was deemed by the Library of Congress to be ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically important’ and added to the United States National Recording Registry. Get them!
At the time, Becker and Fagen were hard taskmasters in the studio, and would hire dozens of session musicians to record the same guitar solo or drum fill until they felt they had something approaching what they had imagined. They were obsessive perfectionists who spent millions of dollars relentlessly torturing the dozens of grade-A guitarists who apparently weren’t ‘yacht-smooth’ enough. Musicians would spend hours, sometimes days, in one of the many Los Angeles studios that Steely Dan used to record Aja, only to find that their work had been jettisoned in favour of someone else’s.
At the time of Aja, Fagen and Becker were New Yorkers on location in LA and, although they revelled in the recording facilities and the abundance of great musicians, seemingly on tap – they spent their days getting studio tans as opposed to any other kind – they found the city faintly ridiculous.
‘Becker and Fagen are interesting characters, sort of isolationists by nature,’ one of their session musicians, Elliott Randall, said at the time. ‘They live in these houses in Malibu, not near anybody, and I have a feeling LA helps them keep their music going on a certain level – they’re almost laughing at the people in their songs.’
Almost?
Still, they weren’t above sentimentality. There was always a kind of skeuomorphic feel about Steely Dan records, in that they imbued a certain kind of nostalgia, even though the songs themselves were incredibly modern.
Aja was a case in point. Released at a time when both punk and disco were experiencing their own apotheoses, it seemed completely at odds with anything else. As a testament to that, the record was remixed thirteen times in the five months before its release. Becker and Fagen were scathing about the hard-rock world – finding groups like Led Zeppelin, the Eagles and Bad Company preposterous – and were far more interested in the construction of old jazz records. For them, the only correct response to the entire culture of ‘rock’ was to be dismissive about it. They were occasionally, and unfairly, compared to the soporific jazz-rock that seeped across US radio in the ’70s, as their obsession with technical proficiency was mistaken for musical indolence.
Fagen and Becker were far more radical than that and, although they expressed the same disdain for punk and disco as they felt for the hegemony of mainstream rock, they enjoyed the fact that both were rebelling against the orthodoxy of FM radio. Not only that, but Fagen always seemed to be singing with one eyebrow raised.
Nevertheless, Aja oozed detached sophistication, its highly polished surface disguising awkward time signatures and extra-credit guitar fills. ‘We’re actually accused of starting smooth jazz, which I don’t think is exactly true,’ Fagen told New York magazine in 2006. ‘A lot of the effects we got were intended to be comic, like “Hey Nineteen”. We were in our thirties and still saddled with these enormous sex drives and faced with the problem that you can no longer talk to a nineteen-year-old girl because the culture has changed. That’s set against an extremely polite little groove. And then the chorus is set to jazz chords and when you play them on electronic instruments there’s a flattening effect, a dead kind of sound. And it’s scored for falsetto voices, which adds to the effect. To me, it’s very funny. Other people think it’s nauseating.’
Like a lot of those obsessed by recondite impulses, both Fagen and Becker were as intimidated as they were dismissive about the popular and the cool.
At the time, Fagen said, ‘We write the same way a writer of fiction would write. We’re basically assuming the role of a character, and for that reason it may not sound personal.’
White-hot chops and black humour, more like. Yet Steely Dan were actually cooler than anyone. Maybe not on a haberdashery level, but cool all the same.
As the band didn’t project their personalities, determined instead to tell their tales of dissipated, sun-bleached, ’70s California angst, they became faceless. ‘This is what happens when you don’t construct an archetypal persona,’ says Chuck Klosterman. ‘If you’re popular and melodic and faceless, you seem meaningless. [Look at] Steely Dan, a group who served as the house band for every 1978 West Coast singles band despite being more lyrically subversive than the Sex Pistols and the Clash combined. If a musician can’t convince people that he’s cool, nobody cool is going to care.’
As a personality, Fagen is an acquired taste these days – if you were to take an inventory of prominent men, you would have to scroll down quite a way before you found him – but then he always was. He never warmed to the weave of the sleeve, and, like his music, was always perhaps a little too cool, dry and fastidious. In this sense, an important sign of legitimacy has been missing, but then this is what makes Fagen who he is: someone who doesn’t need validation. Yet he and his band are revered.
‘Years ago, I flew out to LA to visit a girlfriend who dumped me as soon as I arrived,’ says Mark Ronson. ‘I couldn’t change my ticket so I had to stay in LA, miserable, for five days. I bought the Steely Dan song book and a cheap electric piano and stayed in my room for the duration of the time, teaching myself those songs. I don’t often think of the girl, but I use those amazing chord voicings nearly every day.’
The Farrelly brothers based an entire soundtrack on the band, as eight of their songs were covered by the likes of Wilco, the Ben Folds Five and the Brian Setzer Orchestra in their 2000 movie Me, Myself & Irene. ‘Only one person turned down our request to do a cover and that was Jonathan Richman,’ says Peter Farrelly. ‘I called him up and said, “Look, will you do a cover of a Steely Dan song?” He called back and said, “Uh, Peter, I’d like to do this, but the lyrics – I don’t know what they mean. I never understood what they were saying.” When Jonathan sings, he puts his whole heart into it, so he passed.’
They have another film fan in Judd Apatow: ‘I don’t think I have listened to any band more than Steely Dan,’ he says. ‘They are a bottomless pit of joy. The songs are gorgeous, the lyrics are mysterious and witty. When I was young, I used those records as a gateway drug to learn about a lot of great jazz performers. I would read the credits and buy the albums of all the people who played on their records. That led to thousands of hours listening to the Brecker Brothers, Larry Carlton, Phil Woods, Wayne Shorter and countless others.’
Blackpool’s Rae Morris, who has toured with Bombay Bicycle Club, Noah and the Whale and Tom Odell, is something of a fan, albeit begrudgingly. ‘I was exposed to a lot of Steely Dan when I was little,’ she says. ‘I hated it [then, but] now I’m starting to think it was a good musical influence.’
Other fans include Phoenix and Daft Punk. The latter have made no secret of their fondness for the band, while their influence can be heard all over last year’s Random Access Memories. ‘If people still went into stereo shops and bought stereos regularly, like they did during the era Daft Punk draw from, this record, with its meticulously recorded analogue sound, would be an album to test out a potential system, right up there with Steely Dan’s Aja and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon,’ wrote Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson. ‘Daft Punk make clear that one way to “give life back to music” is through the power of high fidelity.’
The band are a sampling smorgasbord, and have been grazed by Beyoncé (‘Black Cow’ on the J’Ty remix of 2004’s ‘Me, Myself and I’), Ice Cube (‘Green Earrings’ on 1992’s ‘Don’t Trust ’Em’), Hit Boy featuring John Legend (‘The Boston Rag’ on 2012’s ‘WyW’), Naughty by Nature (‘Third World Man’ on 1999’s ‘Live or Die’) and dozens more. Kanye West famously sampled their 1976 hit ‘Kid Charlemagne’ for his 2007 single ‘Champion’, although not without a lot of heavy lifting.
‘From time to time, we get requests for a licence for hip-hoppers to use part of an old song or something,’ says Fagen. ‘We usually say “Yes”, but we didn’t like the general curve of the way that one sounded … Kanye actually sent us a sample of his tunes and, frankly, Walter and I listened to it and although we’d love some of the income, neither of us particularly liked what he had done with it. We said, “No” at first, and then he wrote us a handwritten letter that was kind of touching, about how the song was about his father and he said, “I love your stuff, and I really want to use it because it’s a very personal thing for me.”’ Surprisingly, the plea worked.
Somewhat perversely, Fagen and Becker were the winners of the 1999 award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for the most-played rap song, ‘Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)’, by Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz, who’d used a refrain from ‘Black Cow’.
‘ASCAP sent us these handsome plaques, but they told us we shouldn’t come to the ceremony,’ said Becker. ‘They said there was some violence the year before and we should stay at home. So I did.’
The rappers, who had originally used the song without a license, managed to irritate P. Diddy too. According to Fagen, ‘They were angry because the sample had already been licensed for Puff Daddy and Mase. We actually heard that Puff Daddy was riding around in a limo with Lenny Kravitz and went crazy when he heard it. He said, “They stole my sample!”’
Last year, Donald Fagen became a bona-fide author, albeit tentatively, with his memoir, Eminent Hipsters. As an eminent hipster himself, Fagen is more than adequately qualified to write about cool, although the book was a lot less expansive than it could have been. He is not what you would call loosey-goosey and in recent years has been described as behaving like a college professor trying to get fired.
The first half of the book is a collection of portraits of the cultural figures who influenced Fagen growing up in New Jersey in the early ’60s, including Gene Shepherd, composers Henry Mancini and Ennio Morricone, and Ray Charles. The second half of the book is a kind of geriatric Diary Of A Rock’n’Roll Star and catalogues in exhaustive detail the trials and tribulations of touring in your sixties.
As you would expect from someone who has been one of the most consistently mordant voices in rock, Fagen can write. Here he is describing Blake Edwards’ TV detective series, Peter Gunn: ‘Edwards’ camera eye seemed to take a carnal interest in the luxe and leisure objects of the period, focusing on the Scandinavian furniture, potted palms, light wood panelling and sleek, shark-finned convertibles. It was, in fact, all the same stuff my parents adored, but darkened with a tablespoon of alienation and danger. Sort of like seeing a smiling Pan Am pilot climb out of his 707 with a copy of La Nausée sticking out of his back pocket.’
Eminent Hipsters is full of such gems, although for those who have silently worshipped Fagen from afar for too, too many years, perhaps he could have dug a little deeper into his psyche, and described some of the personal and professional motivations that have contributed to one of the most important and influential bodies of work in all pop.
But then perhaps that wouldn’t have been cool.