‘If we were ahead of our time, it was simply because we
grew up with a certain natural ironic stance that later
became the norm in society.’
Donald Fagen, 1991
7 July 2007: Old bald white blokes are standing about in striped shirts, clutching plastic cups of tepid lager. Some may be here at the old Hammersmith Odeon – now rebranded as the HMV Apollo – to rekindle memories of seeing Steely Dan at London’s Rainbow Theatre in May 1974, shortly before the group’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen quit touring and retreated to the hermetic insulation of southern California’s plushest recording studios.
Back then, these old blokes would have been lone groovers in loon pants, habitués of import record stores who’d heard the Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972) or Countdown to Ecstasy (1973) and quickly concurred with Ian MacDonald of the New Musical Express when he asked where else a ‘deafened connoisseur’ could ‘get his shots of lyric succinctness matched with thoroughly coherent musicality’. Writing in Creem that year, MacDonald’s fellow rock critic Wayne Robins noted that the typical Dan fan could be ‘found often in unlikely places, following no discernible pattern except walking slow, drinking alone, and moving swiftly through the night …’ (the piece is included in this anthology in its NME reprint).
Robins, as it happens, had known jazzbo misanthropes Becker and Fagen at ‘funky and fragmented’ Bard College, upstate from Manhattan on the Hudson, in the late ’60s. ‘Reelin’ in the Years’, the second hit from Can’t Buy a Thrill, was, for him, ‘probably the best song ever written about the pseudo-poetic, preppie-hippie assholism that dominated Bard and other joints of its kind’.
At the HMV Apollo, Fagen reels in his sixty-one years, planted behind his Fender Rhodes electric piano like some Hebraic Ray Charles with a mouth like The Simpsons’ Moe the Bartender. The theatre is, he declares, ‘one of the many fine toilets we’ll be playing’ on a European tour that’s already taken in Amsterdam, Brussels, Edinburgh and Birmingham and will include more cosmopolitan stops in Paris, Rome, Milan and Monte Carlo. When occasionally Fagen gets to his feet, hunched and clutching a melodica – Augustus Pablo eat your heart out – he patrols the stage like a kind of king penguin.
The last time I saw Steely Dan live it was at Wembley Arena in September 2000, when they offered two amiable fingers to anyone who still lumped them in with all the tepid funk-lite the duo inspired in the ’70s and ’80s. Backed by such simpatico stalwarts as drummer Ricky Lawson and chameleonic guitarist Jon Herington (still a member of their touring band), they invested ageless vignettes like ‘The Boston Rag’ and ‘Hey Nineteen’ with vim, humour, and slick Jewish soul. ‘This is no one-night stand,’ Fagen drawled on Gaucho’s insidiously slinky ‘Babylon Sisters’. ‘This is a real occasion.’
It was.
Twice I’ve been granted audiences with Becker and Fagen; twice they’ve come on like a comic double-act – Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon via Larry David or Garry Shandling. Transcriptions of conversations with them read more like Marx Brothers scripts than music-press interviews. It’s not hard to imagine the merciless wit they must have wielded at Bard, where – as Can’t Buy a Thrill’s scornful ‘Only a Fool Would Say That’ made plain – they were as removed from the general hippietopian vibe of the times as Randy Newman or Frank Zappa or the Velvet Underground. ‘We were a little younger than the ’60s bands,’ Fagen told me in 2000. ‘A lot of the ’60s foundation was starting to collapse by the time we put out our first record.’
Jay Black, who hired the young Don ’n’ Walt to play in his mob-backed Top 40 group Jay & the Americans, referred to the duo as ‘[Charles] Manson and [Charles] Starkweather’. Tickled by their unusual mixture of erudition and subversion, Black joked that they were like ‘librarians on acid’. The pair saw themselves not as rock stars but as backroom boys, Leiber and Stoller for longhairs, the logical late-’60s successors to Barry and Greenwich (or Bacharach and David or Berns and Ragovoy). The pair haunted Manhattan song-hive the Brill Building in hopes someone might mistake their quirky, cryptic little songs for actual hits. (Fat chance, given the extreme strangeness of compositions such as ‘Yellow Peril’, ‘Brain Tap Shuffle’ and ‘The Roaring of the Lamb’ – though early stabs at ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Barrytown’ should have caught the ear of any half-decent A&R man.)
Kenny Vance, manager of Jay & the Americans, bankrolled Becker and Fagen’s demos; a cover of ‘I Mean to Shine’ even wound up on Barbra Streisand’s 1971 album Barbra Joan Streisand. But thanks to the intercession of producer Gary Katz (a.k.a. Kannon), Becker and Fagen left New York for Los Angeles, brought into the desperately unhip fold of ABC-Dunhill Records as staff writers for such fundamentally unsuitable acts as the Grass Roots and Steppenwolf’s John Kay. (Exceptions to the rule: Thomas Jefferson Kaye’s versions of the glorious ‘Jones’ and ‘American Lovers’ from his great 1973 album First Grade.) There the dyed-in-the-wool east-coasters strove to make satirical sense of miasmic southern California. The common ground the duo might have felt with a local satirist like Randy Newman brought them no closer to the calico mafia of Laurel Canyon or the hegemony of Lenny Waronker’s Warner-Reprise roster in Burbank.
Summer 1972 saw the release of the Dan’s debut LP, kicked off by the slinky, addiction-themed hit ‘Do It Again’. ‘The newly formed amalgam [of Steely Dan] threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite,’ Tristan Fabriani (Fagen) wrote drolly in Can’t Buy a Thrill’s sleevenote. The band, he added, ‘casts a long shadow upon the contemporary rock wasteland … struggling to make sense out of the flotsam and jetsam of its eclectic musical heritage.’ (Little wonder that Fagen, a pop intellectual, wrote a column for the movie monthly Premiere in the eighties and later authored the shrewd and amusing Eminent Hipsters.)
Though Steely Dan were never a critics’ band per se – not like the Velvet Underground or Big Star were – Becker and Fagen talked about music like critics talked about music (for instance, inserting the notorious line ‘Even Cathy Berberian knows there’s one roulade she can’t sing’ into Countdown to Ecstasy’s ‘Your Gold Teeth’). In the long run this may have counted against them, since critics rarely embrace anything as cerebral or egg-headed as, well, critics.
Offsetting the clever-clogs component on Thrill were the pure melodic pleasures of ‘Dirty Work’, ‘Kings’, ‘Reelin’ in the Years’, ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Change of the Guard’. Drilling a hastily-assembled LA band (guitarists Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter and Denny Dias, an old collaborator from the east coast; drummer Jim Hodder; temporary second singer David Palmer and some auxiliary session men), Becker and Fagen made everything count in the playful precision of their chords and harmonies, every last fill exact and satisfying. ‘Midnite Cruiser’, all sun-kissed vocals and liquid twin guitars, wasn’t far from the creamy freeway rock of LA contemporaries the Eagles, a band later wryly namechecked on The Royal Scam’s ‘Everything You Did’. (The Eagles, who shared management with the Dan, returned the namecheck compliment in a line about ‘steely knives’ on ‘Hotel California’.)
Can’t Buy a Thrill was where Becker and Fagen set out their stall: a suite of singalong songs that sounded both personal and conversational – almost short-story-esque – while being still essentially ambiguous and mysterious. Listening to ‘Fire in the Hole’ and ‘Turn that Heartbeat Again’ – as to ‘Razor Boy’ (Countdown to Ecstasy), ‘Any Major Dude Will Tell You’ (Pretzel Logic) and ‘Bad Sneakers’ (Katy Lied) – was like hearing Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 set to rock music.
William Gibson, whose precocious novels from Neuromancer onwards were a clear influence on Fagen’s 1993 solo album Kamakiriad, once suggested to me that ‘a lot of people think of Steely Dan as the epitome of boring ’70s stuff, never realising this is probably the most subversive material pop has ever thrown up.’
Cyberpunk king Gibson saw all too clearly how Becker and Fagen had camouflaged their beat-influenced mischief and drug references so subtly that they went straight over the average rock fan’s head. As the LA Times’ Richard Cromelin wrote on the release of The Royal Scam (1976), ‘The amorphous nature of Steely Dan, furthered by the mysterious outré world their music creates and by wry Walt and doleful Don’s resolute reclusiveness, has bred widespread indifference among the public at large and unceasing fascination among aficionados of the Steely Dan mystique.’
Hearing ‘Show Biz Kids’ – that most withering dissection of Californian narcissism – on John Peel’s Radio 1 show was thoroughly disorienting for my fourteen-year-old self. Who were these people? Were they Yanks or Brits? White or black or brown? Why were the backing vocalists urging us to go to Las Vegas? (They weren’t, as it turned out: Wayne Robins elucidates further in the 1974 NME piece included in this collection.) And was the singer consciously filching the vocal line from Harry Nilsson’s ‘Coconut’? In 1973 there was no frame of reference for music so funky or coolly cynical. Who else would have slipped the phrase ‘coup de grâce’ – or, indeed, the name of their own band – into a song?
Some get the point of Steely Dan but reject the idea that a rock group can sound so slick and put such a premium on the chops of top session musicians. For them, rock should be raw and untamed – ‘guts and fire and feeling,’ in the words of Dan fan Nick Hornby, ‘not difficult chords and ironic detachment’. Even William Burroughs, after whom they’d named themselves, thought Steely Dan ‘too fancy … doing too many things at once’.
The NME stayed loyal to the duo even after punk toppled pomp-rock, but it wasn’t easy to defend the extended jazz-funk-rock pieces on 1977’s huge-selling Aja when the prevailing musical mood was so bluntly reductive. Joni Mitchell came up against the same jazzphobia when she released Court and Spark (1974) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), albums featuring some of the session men (Tom Scott, John Guerin, Victor Feldman et al.) whom Becker and Fagen employed.
With punk, naturally, came a deep suspicion of perfectionism – and Fagen, for one, was so neurotically perfectionist in the studio that people referred to him as ‘Mother’. Turning away from rock’s fake guitar bravado – as from the fake bonhomie of on-the-road band democracy – Steely Dan fashioned a new sound with the assistance of maestro engineer Roger ‘The Immortal’ Nichols: crisply funky, glisteningly elegant, clinically cushioned. On the non-album song ‘FM’, theme track for their manager Irving Azoff’s 1978 film of the same name, Fagen sang the immortal line ‘Give her some funked-up muzak, she treats you nice …’ If you’d wilfully invented a genre that was diametrically antithetical to punk rock, funked-up muzak would probably be it.
Becker and Fagen were deeply smitten by the artifice of studio sound, particularly the way disco records were being produced in the ’70s. Hence the fetishising of such luminaries as guitarist Larry Carlton and drummer Steve Gadd, plying their tasty trade in the perma-twilight of New York’s and LA’s most well-appointed studios.
In 2000 I asked Becker and Fagen why they felt so at home behind the recording console. ‘[It’s] all about the idea of the set-up,’ Fagen offered. ‘[It’s] a room where you have all this technology to help you and where you have some toys. And you need air-conditioning and a book with menus in it. It’s about that space-age bachelor-pad vibe. The studio satisfies a lot of those urges.’
Even Fagen thought he and Becker had gone too far on Gaucho, ‘trying to realise a technical perfection that started to deaden the material’ (Robert Palmer – whose 1981 Rolling Stone piece on the duo is included in this book – opined that Steely Dan’s music sounded like it had been ‘recorded in a hospital ward’). It’s interesting, therefore, to note how many Gaucho songs are trotted out tonight at the HMV Apollo.
‘Time Out of Mind’, an oddly cheery junkie classic written in the full flow of Becker’s turn-of-the-decade addiction, is the second song up. ‘Hey Nineteen’ remains the wittiest observation ever penned about comely young women and older male predators. The smooth-jazz anomie of ‘Babylon Sisters’ is followed seamlessly by the jet-set coke anthem ‘Glamour Profession’.
At Hammersmith there’s plenty from Aja and Katy Lied, less from Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic; a song apiece from Can’t Buy a Thrill and The Royal Scam and Two Against Nature; and nothing at all from Everything Must Go or the Becker and Fagen solo works (Fagen’s 1982 album The Nightfly incidentally being as good as anything Steely Dan ever recorded). The black jazz-virtuoso feel of so much Dan music doesn’t alter the fact that the only African-American faces for miles around belong to bass guitarist Freddie Washington and the trio of backing-vocal honeys, one of whom turns out to be Tawatha Agee, baby-doll siren of Scritti Politti’s Cupid and Psyche ’85. Picture the Sweet Inspirations resurrected as the Babylon Sistas: ‘You got to shake it, baby, you got to shake it, baby, you got to shake it …’ That Steely Dan has been sampled by hip hop artists from De La Soul (‘Peg’) to Kanye West (‘Kid Charlemagne’) is an irony they must relish when they look out over the seas of Caucasian faces that flock to their concerts.
Several songs (‘Reelin’ in the Years’, ‘Show Biz Kids’ et al.) are all but unidentifiable in revised guises. Becker and Fagen are truer to ‘My Old School’ – one of their most purely hummable songs – and to the dark boogie of ‘Black Friday’. ‘Aja’ is magnificent, drummer Keith Carlock pulling off uncanny simulacra of Steve Gadd’s awesome fills on the original album of that name. Generally the sound is a little thin and boxy, with the jazz overlay sometimes crimping the glossy succulence of Aja and Gaucho, but the gloopy Fender Rhodes keyboard remains a trademark signature of what Becker at one juncture refers to as ‘the deep ’70s’. Walter’s limited palette on the Stratocaster hasn’t changed much; then again, let’s be thankful we only have to hear his undulcet vocal tones the once, on ‘Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More’.
It’s hard to believe Becker was ever a major dope fiend or that his girlfriend Karen Stanley actually died of an overdose back in 1980: but then has any band ever been so cryptically allusive about class-A substances? ‘He was kind of leaping toward destruction,’ Fagen said of his partner in the Gaucho era. ‘When he was having a really hotcha swell time, you know, he’d be late for sessions and was not that easy to deal with.’
‘Deacon Blues’ recalls not only the spate of ’80s bands who cited Steely Dan as an antecedent – Danny Wilson, Prefab Sprout, Hue and Cry and, natch, Deacon Blue – but the long-term damage arguably done to the duo’s credibility by such Brit disciples. ‘[Our songs],’ Fagen conceded, ‘had some of the irony that became the lingua franca of the ’80s.’ Though Danny Wilson’s Gary Clark had a voice like Donald Fagen crossed with Dan-sideman-turned-Doobie-brother Michael McDonald, the artfulness of such groups was soon shunted aside by Madchester and then by grunge.
Guitarist Elliott Randall, who played so blisteringly on Can’t Buy a Thrill, enters stage right for a more orthodox ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ – the night’s first encore – and is the same shamblingly happy figure I recall jamming with Fagen in 1993 in the latter’s long-forgotten New York Rock and Soul Revue. The final song is ‘Kid Charlemagne’, that glorious paean to a sometime drug kingpin whose ‘patrons have all left you in the red’.
Does one get more – or just a different – pleasure from hearing and seeing Steely Dan live? At a time when prices are sky-high for live music, wouldn’t you rather hear ‘Aja’, always predictably perfect, on your own faux-luxe sound system? Weren’t Steely Dan one of those bands it was always better to imagine than actually watch?
That Steely Dan was one of the defining acts of the deep ’70s is as indisputable as the fact that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are the greatest duo of their kind – think Sparks, Pet Shop Boys, and other ironic subverters-from-within – that pop-rock ever produced. It’s hard not to yearn for days when a brainy and not terribly pretty band like Steely Dan could be given a serious shot at realising their arena dreams.
But would it ultimately have been better – cooler – for Becker and Fagen to disappear almost completely from view, as they did for the best part of a decade after parting ways in June 1981? Donald himself would later concede to Richard Cromelin that Steely Dan ‘may be inseparable from its time’ and that ‘the way we looked at things and what was going on at the time gave it a specific character which I don’t think it could ever have [again].’
When the duo resurfaced against all expectation to tour in 1993 – releasing the lukewarm Alive in America as a memento – the astringent cynics of the ’70s sounded almost avuncular. And though their lyric powers on Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go (as on Fagen’s subsequent solo albums) were undimmed by the reeled-in years, the music had lost more than a little of its edge. Middle-aged boffins competing in a world of midriff display and what Becker called ‘nominal generational anger’, Steely Dan were themselves less furious at (and more accepting of) the world. One could also posit the theory that America – or at least US television (Seinfeld, The Simpsons et seq.) – had caught up with the Dan brand of irony, forcing them to adopt the stance of what Fagen termed ‘pseudo-post-irony’.
‘I think what happens with a lot of people is that after that initial youthful spurt, they never come out of it,’ Fagen said to me in 2000. ‘They either succumb to despair or intoxicants. Part of it is that you have to throw off the narcissism of youth, which is your energy when you start. When that’s gone, you have to find another source.’
Three years later, Becker expounded on roughly the same theme to me. ‘Donald and I have been moderately successful at reconciling our sense of alienation with the actual need for survival,’ he told me. ‘It’s been more or less accommodated by the world and by our wives and partners and by the physical realities of our bodies and so on, so that we can still sort of live in these fantasy bubbles of art. We spend most of the day planning our revenge without actually walking out into the middle of the traffic.’
Thank the Lord for that.
Bernard Purdie, self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Drummer and star of Aja’s ‘Home at Last’, said Steely Dan were ‘the closest thing to genius I’ve ever seen’. Other Dan collaborators would agree. Personally I contend that whatever age you are – and however nominally angry – it behoves you to acquaint yourself with what former Time critic Jay Cocks called ‘the lithe inflections of the Becker-Fagen melodies … a grace that is both sensuous and sinister’.
When I last met the indomitable duo, in a swish hotel suite in Santa Monica in 2003, I asked if it was ironic that some regarded Steely Dan as old farts when actually they were writing more trenchantly about the fucked-up virtual world of the early twenty-first century than anyone else in rock music.
Becker paused to think about it – or at least about how Steely Dan came to ‘subvert from within’ in the first place – before replying. ‘I think part of the reason that we were able to slip through the cracks or get in the door was because you could see what we did at that level and it was mildly humorous yet palatable, and it wasn’t necessary to know or be troubled by anything beyond that level.’
‘It was lucky that we had these populist tastes,’ added Fagen. ‘Kind of bad taste, in a way.’
‘We’ve been able,’ Becker concluded with an owlish look, ‘to combine high vulgarian stuff with low highbrow stuff.’
Fagen glanced at his old college buddy for a moment before saying, in a cod-English accent I had to assume was partly for my benefit, ‘Or whatever …’
The Dan in Coldwater Canyon, Los Angeles, September 1972. Clockwise from top left: Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, Denny Dias, Jim Hodder, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.
Ed Caraeff/Morgan Media/Getty Images