Caves of Altamira - Introduction

Hello, my name is Hailey Carol and I run Caves of Altamira, an unofficial Steely Dan interview archive dedicated to finding and archiving all known interviews from members of Steely Dan and related parties. This is inspired by the Steely Dan Reader, a seemingly now defunct Steely Dan interview archive, and is meant to serve as an unofficial continuation of that project.

My main goal is to include as many interviews and relevant articles I can find into one website.

Citizen Steely Dan liner notes by Chris Willman

From steelydan.com, written by Chris Willman

Still looking for an heir to the title of "Band of the '90s," are we? Here's one hyperbolic vote for Steely Dan, so fluently does their oeuvre fit the temper of the times. Never mind that Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and assorted sidekicks were busy being the band of the '90s way back in the '70s. You can call it prescience or providence, but such incongruities are best dismissed as the odd fluke or evolutionary mistiming.

"I'm into my post-ironic phase...which of course would include irony as well." warns the newly earnest Fagen of 1993. "And I'm not talking about the New Sincerity, of course, but rather Post-Irony. Or maybe it's the Pseudo-New-Sincerity, or New Pseudo-Sincerity, or maybe it's Pseudo-Post-Irony. I don't even know anymore. It's hard to say. You know what? As soon as David Letterman hit the airwaves, it was really all over for irony."

Maybe so. But before there was Dave -- before there was Devo or Bono or Camille Paglia, even -- there was Steely Dan, two overachiever jazz punks who named themselves after a William Burroughs dildo and who mellifluously ravaged the post-counterculture landscape with brilliantly veiled sarcasm and revolutionary lack of sentimentality. In terms of prefiguring today's testy post-modernists, and anticipating the contemporary irony craze as a replacement for old-school rock idealism, it rather seems the world caught up with the voice that Fagen and Becker were able to claim from the get-go.

And the music just hasn't dated. You could pick out songs from "Rikki Don't Loose That Number" to "Black Friday" that spookily seem more apropos to our era than their actual carbon date. But go back and listen to just one album, say, "The Royal Scam", and marvel at its seeming topicality: An ominous narrative about a regular guy who snaps a synapse, shoots a relative or two and holds off a SWAT team ("Don't Take Me Alive"), a cheerful ode to the importance of always wearing a condom ("The Fez"), a hauntingly lyrical paean to dream-laden American immigrants who wind up slouching toward skid row (the title track). All tunes virtually ripped from today's headlines, as they say, despite the 1976 copyright.

So any major dude will tell you, then, that Steely Dan was ahead -- no pun intended -- of its time. Which is not to say that the group was ever as popularly understood as it was popular.

Flash back to the late
'70's, exact date undetermined. You turn on "The Donny and Marie Show", as is your self-flagellating Friday night habit, and are rewarded with one of the most weirdly funny things ever on national television: The teen sibling hosts in spangles and bell-bottoms are doing a tribute to nostalgia, in the form of a bouncy show-opening duet of Steely Dan's "Reelin' In The Years."

"The weekends at the college didn't turn out like you planned," sings Donny to Marie, by all appearances clueless to the absurdity of Fagen's and Becker's unwieldy verses in his beaming mouth. "The things that pass for knowledge I can't understand."

What kind of weekend -- at which branch of Brigham Young University -- did this brother and sister share? What sort of knowledge passed between them there? Did Donny have the slightest idea of what he was singing?

Did Steely Dan Fans, for that matter?

Donny and Marie weren't alone in being oblivious to Donald and Walter's unorthodox intentions, the often blind acceptance of which made a great cosmic joke for certain bored intelligentsia throughout the '70s. That Steely Dan's strange-by-any-standard singles came to be covered by lounge singers and variety-show stalwarts was a measure of how intractably far these pop guerrillas had infiltrated a welcoming culture.

Then again, the hits were brain-enbeddingly hooky enough that folks could hardly be blamed for not fussing too much over meaning in the face of such sheer musicality. What American of a certain age can't sing a few random phrases of Fagen and Becker's obscurantist design" "Babylon Sisters, shake it." "Brooklyn owes the charmer under me." "Drink scotch whiskey all night long, and die behind the wheel." "Drink your big black cow and get outta here."

The dangerous, sad, hilarious, possibly misanthropic elusiveness of the lyrics was matched by Becker and Fagen's relative reclusion as pop personalities. Various M.O.R.-mons might perform Steely Dan's hits live, but the guys in question wouldn't. The duo disbanded its ever-changing backup lineup and quit touring in 1974, ceasing all live performances well before most of their major hits were even released. This allowed them a sort of infamous anonymity on a scale more in line with their bebop heroes than with Rock and Roll's cult of personality.

It was incredibly frustrating to fans that jazz-influenced music which benefitted from some of the best studio playing in the business couldn't be heard in the live setting where you'd figure it'd thrive. But to the true aficionado, Steely Dab's unwillingness to waste time touring in order to focus on the bigger rewards of record-making was just the ultimate measure of their ornery integrity.

Flash forward now to
autumnal 1993, at which point Fagen and Becker have done the unthinkable and -- 13 years after their last album together and an astonishing 19 after their previous gig -- come out of the closet and booked a brief, sold-out U.S. tour under the long-retired moniker of Steely Dan.

And while the faithful understandably salivate at the idea of The Dan made flesh, a few can't help but be nagged by the fear that, after all this time, a "reunion" tour might represent another kind of sell-out, in which the Steely Ones finally cave in to the demand of the masses after all.

Will their revivified "Reelin' In The Years, " the skeptics wonder, end up seeming like Donny and Marie's, taking what was written as a backhanded look at memory-mongering and resurrecting it as another unironic anthem to baby-boom nostalgia?

Far be it from these fellows to dissuade anyone else's hard-fought cynicism.

You talk to Walter Becker after the opening gigs of the 1993 tour and ask him how the band's first shows in nearly two decades have gone. He answers: "Well, not too good. It turns out that show business wasn't in my blood anyway, and I'm looking forward to getting back to working on my car..."

WHEW: Incorrigible after all.

Older fans might still
think of Becker and Fagen as bad boys. But talk up the band to any self-respectingly "alternative," teen or twentysomething Lollapalooza-goer, and the image these unwashed youth have in their minds of Steely Dan might produce about the same look of distaste as if you'd suggested they attend a Kenny G show. The Doc Martens crowd sometimes takes a little educating to learn that, for all the inherent musical "slickness," Steely Dan was the Alternative band of its time.

The generation gap is obvious enough that you could update the lyrics of the group's 1980 Top 10 hit, a famously funny tune about the psychic perils of dating a girl too young to be familiar with Aretha Franklin, to apply to Steely Dan itself: "Hey Nineteen, That's Donald Fagen/ She don't remember the Kings of Scorn..."

Hey Nineteen: The instrumental warmth and smoothness of the sounds, like the wicked humor, were almost a necessary tonic for the bitterness or sorrow sometimes infecting the sentiments (or lack of them). Theirs could be a chilly, emotionally barren songscape, filled with fictional characters and pace names that had less to do with Dylan's or Springsteen's use of the same novelistic devices than their own unique post-Burroughsian, pre-cyberpunk uncharted universe, so full of dens and barely elucidated iniquities.

Steely Dan's key oldies get played on most of the available radio formats. But in trying to figure out exactly who it was that snapped up all those tour tickets so instantly, it springs to mind that today there are probably two core audiences for Steely Dan: First and foremost, there are those lingering, literarily minded, misanthropic anarchists who always dug the Dan's bad attitude. And then, of course, probably outnumbering those at this point, there's the pacifist army of modern "Wave" listeners.

"I'm sorry?" asks Fagen, apparently not familiar with the latter radio format.

Becker jumps in to help his partner: "People who listen to the Light Jazz radio station, like 'The Wave'."

Given the cultural divide between these two camps, we continue, does the duo worry that any brawls might break out between the surly old hipsters and the gentler sax-lovers at these shows?

"They're probably just exactly the same people," muses Becker.

"They'll all have an inner conflict," Fagen offers.

"Right," says Becker, "They're probably different shadow personalities of the same people."

"Dupe-Elgangers," puns Fagen.

"If you will. And I think you will," adds Becker, with a hint of menace.

It is a funny split, in any case, this leap between the archly rendered anger in many of Steely Dan's songs over the years and the easier listening strains the group eventually became synonymous with in the popular mindset.

A handful of other rock-era acts, from Randy Newman to Was (Not Was), have successfully shared this dualism. But in recent history, at least, musicians informed by the intoxicating headiness of jazz have generally drifted toward unchallenging lyrical currents, whereas conversely, bands with subversive intentions to speak of have deliberately tended toward some of the least sophisticated strains of music. As a group with credentials toward serious chopsmanship and in intellectually insurgent attitude, Steely Dan remains widely adored, and all too scarcely imitated.

"Why is that?" says Becker, leaping ahead to the question. "Well, in that respect the situation hasn't changed in 20 years. It's the dichotomy that you mentioned a moment ago: The 'anarchists,' or people who are interested in more interesting lyrics, are generally speaking not interested in jazz harmonies. They want something more raw and what they perceive to be subversive-sounding, which usually means clanging guitars.

"And it was just a quirk of Donald's and my natures that we thought superimposing jazz harmonies on pop songs was subversive in a much subtler way. But I guess most people who are writing songs don't really look at it that way...luckily for us!"

Adds Fagen, "I think people who are sophisticated in the sense that they want to hear some kind of substance in the lyrics are musically going to tend to be primitivists..."

"Or some kind of socialists," points out Becker.

Fagen: "Yeah. They have that kind of nostalgia de la Boue, they're into this purity thing of Rock and Roll; they see it as once being the sort of revolutionary teenage thing and they want to maintain that. I don't know why groups who have some good writers as far as the lyrics go don't get bored playing the same old rock and roll stuff...

"It has to do with when we were born and how we grew up," Fagen adds. "Even though we were really too young to experience a lot of the golden age of jazz in the '50s, nevertheless that's what we were into when we were young, though recordings, although we saw live jazz as well at the tail end of that era. And we also had literary aspirations, I suppose, so I guess it was really a combination of all those circumstances."

A developmental quirk of fate?

"Quirk of Fate. Of course. There are no accidents...as they say in Vienna."

As the oft-told tale
goes: Becker and Fagen met at New York's Bard College in the late '60s, where they shared an equal love for black humor and Charlie Parker and mutual disdain for many things hippie-ish. They participated together in a series of bands before joining up with, of all groups, Jay and the Americans, the first of several souring touring experiences.

After selling a few of their songs at the famous Brill Building in New York, they moved to L.A., having been set up with a publishing deal as hired hands of ABC Records. Their early songwriting demos show that the duo had their unique "voice" from the start and were comically ill-suited to writing generic hits for mainstream stars (although a few compositions did get cut, Barbra Streisand's "I Mean To Shine" among them).

Eventually the ABC label was convinced that these boys were better off writing for themselves. The year 1972 brought the name Steely Dan (borrowed from Burrough's novel "Naked Lunch") and the debut album "Can't Buy A Thrill", with an auspicious first single, "Do It Again," that went to No. 4.

"When we went out in support of the first album, the record company in a way forced us out," Fagen recalls, resorting to out-of-the-womb trauma imagery. "That was just a thing that you were supposed to do. You know, the original band was put together very quickly -- almost instantly, really. And we were dealing with musicians we didn't know very well. Toward the end of our touring days, after two years of touring around and with some additional personnel, we were starting to get pretty good.

"But although the players were good players, we wanted to do a variety of types of music and work with other musicians. And they basically -- and very justifiably -- wanted to go out and play and make money. And so we decided to disband and concentrate on recording and writing music, which takes a lot of time and thought, and to eventually put another band together, perhaps, and then go out. But the inertia kept us in the studio till we never got around to it."

With albums from "Katy Lied" to "Gaucho" resulting from said inertia, fan complaints were tempered. In fact, the retirement from the stage was almost interrupted when Becker and Fagen actually put together and briefly rehearsed a band to tour behind their biggest album, 1977's "Aja," but got fed up with the logistics and the musicians' financial demands and sacked the idea before any dates were booked.

Like another quintessential best-selling group of the '70s, The Eagles, Steely Dan followed up their most successful album ("Aja" equals "Hotel California") by becoming legendary perfectionists in the studio and spending years on a crowning effort whose painstakingness effectively helped kill the band ("Gaucho": "The Long Run"). In 1981, while still considered commercial superstars, they announced the dissolution of their partnership.

Fagen released a very successful solo debut in '82, "The Nightfly", and Becker produced a few jazz and pop albums. Otherwise, the two men who produced one of the most enduring pop catalogs of the '70s were maddeningly invisible throughout the '80s.

The collaboration officially resumed with Becker's production of Fagen's 1993 release, "Kamakiriad", on which he also played bass and guitar. Fagen, in turn, has co-written songs for the solo album Becker hopes to have out in 1994; on this, Becker will be singing lead vocals for the first time since a few errant verses on Steely Dan's debut more than two decades back.

The tentative step back toward the dreaded touring process was a result of the New York Rock & Soul Revue, a combo Fagen put together in 1991 to play R&B oldies. A few Steely Dan chestnuts found their way into the set, and eventually Becker even sat in on a few dates. Both found that being on stage again wasn't so uncomfortable as they'd remembered, at least not under their own terms.

"The fact was, we always liked performing," claims Fagen. "Now we have an opportunity to go out with musicians of our own choosing, and we're touring under conditions which can't even be compared with the sort of things we were doing then, which was mostly opening for a lot of heavy-metal groups in often very inappropriate pairings. And the technology of touring has become refined and much more comfortable, much more human."

As for the ever-present danger of unseemly nostalgia, Becker readily admits, "I don't know if it's really possible to transcend that danger and do old songs at the same time." But the danger surrounding the N-word is allayed -- if not transcended -- by the fact that, by Becker's rough reckoning, these new Steely Dan shows are comprised of "Half Steely Dan stuff, half stuff from Donald's record, and half stuff from my record."

And as for "Reelin' In The Years," the oldie inherently most in danger of transformation into a witless singalong for nostalgia hounds, the band has thoroughly Osmond-proofed it for the '90s with a rearrangement full of tricky jazz modulations. Even the tunes that are rendered more faithfully to the original recordings sound as fresh as the day they were illegitimately born. Fagen had just a few years earlier publicly expressed the concern that a Steely Dan reunion might not be such a good idea, that perhaps the unit had been too youthful, too tied to its time; these nights, happily, the prodigal is proved to have been dead wrong.

Meanwhile, if the popular
culture seems to have caught up and become as cynical as Steely Dan at its peak, can Fagen and Becker do anything but turn tail?

Only future Steely Dan studio albums -- cross your fingers -- will tell. But the hostility that some perceived in the group's early records had given way to a bit more warmth in the band's recording output, culminating most recently in Fagen's emotionally richer "Kamakiriad". True to contrary form, our heroes do seem to be adapting to the archness-uber-alles '90s by getting less sardonic and kinder and gentler. (Ironically).

"Actually, Walter and I are very sweet-natured lads," Fagen insists, his tone not entirely inviting credulity.

Not that they're ever likely to be rechristened Softie Dan. "We were angry kids, there's no doubt about it. I think in that way we weren't that much different from a lot of other kids from our generation. To a lot of people, the '60s is now some sort of incredible layer cake invented by the media. But the fact was that we did have the attitude that we were brought up with inauthentic values, etc., and were trying to find some other kind of alternative values. We were looking for that in a very aggressive way. And as you get older, you're not that angry anymore; you accept a lot of things.

"On the other hand," continues Fagen, "we're both very idealistic in that we're at least trying to do something that's not all bullshit, trying to do something good, in a way that the guys who used to make rye bread wanted it to taste good and the shoemaker who made a pair of shoes wanted the shoes to be good instead of just doing a quick rip-off deal. We still have that attitude, which is real American, in a way. Now we're just not as arrogant about it, maybe."

So the work ethic prevails and Steely Dan, true to its name, flags not. Roll over Dave Letterman, tell William Burroughs the news.

Citizen Steely Dan liner letter by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker

From steelydan.com, written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker

"OY VEY!! THESE BOYS ARE REALLY OFF-THE-WALL SO ENJOY 'EM BEFORE ALL THE DOUGH THEY'RE MAKING STRAIGHTENS 'EM OUT. IT HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF SICKIES Y'KNOW."
ANDY MCKΑΙΕ,
REVIEW OF KATY LIED, 1976

From:

    Room 1420, Longhorn Suite

    Four Seasons Hotel

    Houston, Texas

To:

    Mr. Andy McKaie

    Vice President

    MCA Records

Dear Andy:

Greetings and salutations from the heart of the hinterlands! The Steely Dan tour '93 is in its last two weeks and the long promised historical material for the fabulous Steely Dan box set is likewise in the final editorial phase. Last minute tweaks and adjustments are being dialed in even as we speak. At this time it is our great personal pleasure to present you with the finished biographical notes for the long-awaited Steely Dan box set. Allow us to make, for your edification and for that of the loyal fandom, the following small-but-not-I-hope-insignificant points:

1. We were of course only having a little joke last week when we pretended not to recognize you at the splendid MCA platinum record presentation in the men's room at the Greek Theatre in L.A. When Walter said to you, "Ha! So we meet at last!", he was simply commenting on the fact that you were the last of the MCA bigwigs present that day to be introduced to us at that particular function. Could we ever forget our previous meeting in the auxiliary echo chamber at Village Recorder, or the splendid plaque you gave us that day, or the fine photo of that historic meeting, later published in Billboard Magazine for all the world to see? I don't think so.
2. We are truly sorry about the delay in collecting and editing this material. We know you've been desperate to front-load the retail racks in time for the Christmas crush. Unfortunately, we are dependent on certain obsessive fans and demi-cultish publications for the old photos, reviews, ads, etc. that will make this a fun package. After many hours of tiresome telephone conversation with these collectors, the big envelopes finally arrived, most often in rough condition and/or stained with suspicious substances. We then began the tedious selection process, punctuated by frequent breaks to recuperate from the violent humiliation of seeing how we looked in 1971, '72, '75, '78, '81. Andy, just imagine how you might feel if photos of yourself from the seventies (big stoner grin, greasy hair down to your scrotum, wearing a psychedelic flower shirt, a cowhide vest, extra wide Britannia corduroy bell bottoms over shapeless Acme engineer boots) were plastered all over the public square.
3. One realizes that the addition of outtakes, demos, remixes and so on can enhance a collection of frequently repackaged product. In our case, though, the shelf is pretty much empty. One decent find was a somewhat lame experimental version of "Everyone's Gone To The Movies" that somehow survived storage in a damp, verminous locker for over twenty years. This might be added, not only for historical reasons, but also to give Flo and Eddie (who harmonized on the chorus) the proof they've always needed to back up their assertion that they worked with us in the "old days". Furthermore, the inclusion of this track (an unused B side from the original band's first studio sessions, which predated "Can't Buy A Thrill" by almost a year) might serve to curb the brisk trade in bootleg editions of this and various other demos, live recordings, etc., that now glut the "import" racks of the very same stores that sell our legitimate albums.
4. By the way, please note that the above review fragment is excerpted from a piece you yourself wrote on one of our early albums. As you are now in a position to realize, you needn't have worried back then that we would be ruined by all the money we were making because, at the time, we weren't being paid squat for our records and performances. Now, of course, quite well fixed, we most certainly have been ruined -- but by time, not by money.

On the other hand, we were heartily impressed by your understanding of the tradition of urban humor that nurtured our own sensibilities, as evidenced by the (Lenny) Bruce-inflected lingo, the yiddishisms, etc. In you piece. Reading this musty old quote allowed us to forget for a brief moment that we are even now, as another Bruce (Jay Friedman) once put it, "far from the city of class". Trudging across the flyovers is the price the piper demands from fellows like us. Stranded and perplexed in our mid-forties, wildly eccentric if not actually crazy as dancing mice, we have thrown away an impeccable 19 year record of unrelieved stasis and reclusivity in a desperate late bid to insure our financial well-being. Casting our dignity aside, we plod from one sad town to the next, pitch our little tent and offer up our crisp yet generous program to the locals, who inundate us with cheers and applause and generally set us awash in a sea of glory. The next day we are pelted with dungballs by the entertainment reviewers of the local rags, who are generally predisposed against our suave, and dynamic renderings by years of hard drinking and coarse thinking, who are in some cases openly antisemitic, and who tend to view our humble efforts through the crusty lens of their own failed ambitions and dismal prospects for redemption. In spite of everything we carry on. We're hoping the end of this tour will find us each perched on a modest mountain of moolah, down whose generous slopes we might coast smoothly past the millennium and on into the 21st century.

Finally, to you, our good friend and beloved colleague, a word of caution: like us, you've passed life's halfway marker, you drift towards oblivion, wearing the bottoms of your trousers rolled. Andy, don't let the company rob you of your dreams. It happens to the best of sickies, y'know.

Yours always,

Donald & Walter

Steely Dan: Too good for the common folk?

From Stereo Review, written by John Pareles

These guys could almost be a comedy team. They're the right kind of visual mismatch: Donald Fagen, thirty-two, is dark, angular, all nervous energy from his close-cropped hair to his classy two-tone shoes; Walter Becker, thirty-one, sports shoulder-length-plus hair and a scraggly mustache and beard, and his Nikes are propped up on the coffee table. All they seem to have in common is a tendency to chain-smoke and a certain pallor that Becker proudly identifies as "cabaret grey." They talk like a comedy team too, Fagen in quiet New Yorkese, Becker in an all-American good-guy radio voice. They finish each other's sentences, contradict each other, wisecrack at every opportunity. But we're not at some Borscht Belt beanery, we're up on the forty-second floor of New York's snazzy Park Lane Hotel, and these guys are better known as Steely Dan, the shadowy pair responsible for some of the most devious pop hits of the Seventies. Their seventh album, "Gaucho," is about to be released. "We're the wave of the future," says Becker. "You wish," says Fagen.

 Becker and Fagen developed their comic timing over more than a decade as musical collaborators. They met in the mid-Sixties at Bard College (commemorated in My Old School on their second album, "Countdown to Ecstasy"), where they played jazz and rock in a number of bands, one of which included Saturday Night Live's Chevy Chase on drums. Out of college, they toured for two years in Jay & the Americans' back-up band. They were already writing songs together, and producer Gary Katz, impressed with their material, got them jobs as staff songwriters with ABC/Dunhill in Los Angeles, where they lived until they moved back to New York to make "Gaucho."

Their early songs, Becker told Musician magazine, were "structurally suitable for framing," but, as a current associate puts it, they were "too sick" for ABC acts like the Grass Roots and Three Dog Night. The pair did write a soundtrack for an extraordinarily obscure Richard Pryor film, You Got to Walk It Like You Talk It, and landed a song on a Katz-produced album by Thomas Jefferson Kaye, but they weren't making much headway. Eventually Katz, who is still their producer, suggested that Becker and Fagen form a group themselves if they wanted their songs recorded. The result was Steely Dan, named after a dildo in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

On their 1972 debut album, "Can't Buy a Thrill," Steely Dan was a sextet; on the next two LPs, "Countdown to Ecstasy" and "Pretzel Logic," they were billed as a quintet, but they'd begun to get substantial support from studio musicians. When lead guitarist Jeff Baxter quit in 1974 to join (and revitalize) the Doobie Brothers, Becker and Fagen retreated to the studio for all practical (and recording) purposes but retained the Steely Dan moniker.

For the foreseeable future, Steely Dan consists of Fagen on vocals and occasional keyboards, Becker on occasional guitar or bass, and whatever assortment of studio players best serves the songs. Becker and Fagen see themselves primarily as composers, they're fond of disparaging their own instrumental abilities. "The B band is me and Donald," Becker says, as Fagen nods in agreement. "The A band is anyone else - professionals. I prefer to have someone else play bass - I know who's better than me unless all else fails." "I'd rather have someone else play bass too," says Fagen dead-pan. "And I generally prefer a different keyboard player than myself." Apparently they won't be touring any time soon.

When Becker and Fagen set out to record a song now, they make a piano-and-voice demo, have it copied for sheet music, and teach it to session players, rehearsing in the studio so they can start taping as soon as the musicians are ready. The three-year gap between the multi-platinum "Aja" and "Gaucho" has enhanced the pair's reputation as persnickety perfectionists: haunting the studios, sending player after player through their songs like white mice through mazes, spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in search of the perfect take, endlessly tinkering, endlessly dissatisfied.

Despite the time and effort involved, Steely Dan's albums come out ultra-smooth, music that goes down as easy as B&B over ice. And the glossy sound ("You get what you pay for," says Fagen) hides the fact that Steely Dan is one of pop's most ambitious outfits. Their ambition is a far cry from the usual rock-star ego gratification; all Becker and Fagen want is to concoct perfect pop songs perfect, that is, by their unique standards. From the beginning, Steely Dan has specialized in a brilliant and peculiar variety of subterfuge: writing breezy pop tunes that happen to conceal all sorts of crafty delights among the hooks. They outwit anything that looks like a pop convention, then carefully cover their tracks to make the most eccentric songs sound like nonchalant amusements.

But it's more complicated than that. In Steely Dan's best songs, the lyrics tell only a tiny bit of the story, leaving the listener to figure out the rest, puns and other wordplay are optional extras. The melodies, or parts of them, tend to stick in the ear. The harmonies follow traditional rules (of the highly sophisticated jazz tradition) only to exploit every possible loophole; the rhythms swing and may offer a few loopholes of their own. And the performances, no matter how many takes it takes, are casually flawless. These songs exist, therefore, only as recordings; there's no way to reproduce them live.

Since their early singles successes - Do It Again and Reeling In the Years - Steely Dan's songs have become increasingly intricate and increasingly slick. The new "Gaucho" album at first seems to be nothing more than thirty-eight minutes of easy-going entertainment. But for all its seeming innocence, it contains some of the densest pop ever written. On the surface, the album couldn't sound more relaxed; all seven songs glide along at languid medium tempos with lots of rich vocal harmonies for cushioning. Most of the lyrics are fairly easy to make out; they're about favorite Becker/Fagen subjects failing romance, drugs, revelation and transformation.

The title cut, for instance, is neat but befuddling. It opens with a gospelly piano and saxophone lick that solidly establishes one four-square rhythm. When the vocal comes in, however, the rhythm follows the lyrics, stopping and starting and meandering along; the sax lick was just a decoy. "Where that sax is, on that site had been erected many things," Becker says. "Various piano things, things more thematically integrated with the rest of the song. Although it seems like an obvious conclusion, that sax took months to arrive at. As for the verses, it's really a very simple thing. If you ever listen to the most primitive blues, there is no twelve-bar blues. There's thirteen-bar blues, thirteen-and-a-half-bar blues, they'll throw in an extra beat of 'ahh-ha, hammmm,' and that's really what Gaucho does. Just use a little space where you have something to say, and if you don't have something to say, just skip right ahead to the next thing."

"Although that song is extremely angular rhythmically, it's very comfortable-sounding." Fagen adds. "I don't think it's awkward. Generally, if there's something that just doesn't make sense musically, we'll change it. It's a matter of taste. We stay away from anything where the musical effect is basically to shock; I don't like harsh, nasty-sounding things just for some kind of cultural shock or political statement."

The other songs on "Gaucho" have different quirks: the elaborately nested harmonies in Babylon Sisters, the serpentine melody of Glamour Profession, the not-exactly-a-blues guitar and Raymond Chandleresque lyrics of My Rival, and the solo work and horn arrangements throughout. Somehow, Becker and Fagen get studio players, whose normal output consists of clichés, to play inspired solos on their songs. Part of the reason is that the songs don't fit the clichés, part is that Becker and Fagen can afford to wait for the perfect solo, and part must be what they tell the musicians they want. "We prefer a basically melodic solo which follows traditional ways of improvising," Fagen says. "Showing off isn't the point of a solo. A lot of current styles of soloing have no idea of space they fill every space with notes."

The sound Becker and Fagen invented for Steely Dan has been imitated far and wide, although it's rarely applied to such well-written songs. "Gaucho" repays careful listening ("You're not gonna hear the sperm-whale noise right off," Becker jokes), yet, at the same time, it does everything in its power to discourage careful listening. The richness of sound is designed to seduce you be-fore you get a chance to examine it, and it's too smooth a ride to pass up. But big things often come in small paradoxes, so it is just possible that the Fagen/Becker undercurrent will become the Wave of the Future.

A Summer's Sunday Picnic With Steely Dan

From Musician, written by Jon Pareles

THE ELUSIVE DUO RECENTLY SURFACED IN CENTRAL PARK ALONG WITH PRODUCER GARY KATZ FOR A RARE INTERVIEW ABOUT THEIR MUSICAL INFLUENCES, HOW THEY WRITE TUNES, THEIR METHODS IN THE STUDIO, DRAWING SPONTANEITY FROM SESSION PLAYERS AND THE REAL MEANING OF THEIR LYRICS... WELL, ALMOST.

Seven years along, it still makes no sense, If someone had suggested in 1972, when Steely Dan's debut album appeared, that a smartass band devoted to chromatic/modal harmonies; light, jazzy rhythms, and cynically oblique lyrics would make its way to the top of the pops, any rational observer would have scoffed. Pop success, the truism goes, depends on making a simple, usually optimistic point using elementary means. Late in 1972, however, a catchy little ditty about doomed romance, compulsive gambling and murder called "Do It Again" insinuated its way onto AM radio, soon to be followed by a failure-to-communicate shuffle called "Reelin' in the Years." Steely Dan had finessed themselves an audience.

They were smooth. Donald Fagen (vocals and keyboards) and Walter Becker (bass and guitar), the band's songwriting team, could make even the most perverse harmonic or lyrical twists seem natural, and they managed to warp every style from reggae to C&W to fit their own specifications. They were also low-profile professionals who quietly avoided media personality-mongering. It seemed that all they wanted to do was record perfect songs that were odd enough to interest them, but not so strange that the public would start to wonder what was going on. Even today there are people who think of Steely Dan as one more laid-back pop band. Becker and Fagen manage to simultaneously disdain and capitalize on pop's simple, universal appeal; as they wrote in "Doctor Wu," "All night long/We would sing that stupid song/And every word we sang/1 knew was true." Deftly balancing ambivalences, Steely Dan set an appropriately suave, cynical tone for the 70s.

The music demands that you listen between the lines. Their lyrics never completely spell anything out, although some can be deciphered with a little effort. "My Old School," on Countdown to Ecstasy, is a jaundiced memoir of Becker and Fagen's undergraduate years at artsy Bard College in Anandale, N.Y. (where the pair played in a band that included Chevy Chase on drums). "Parker's Band" (from Pretzel Logic). is a you-were-there tribute to Bird and the birth of bebop; the title cut of The Royal Scam is a parable about Puerto Rican immigration.

On the other hand, some songs are determinedly elusive. I'm still trying to figure out both "Your Gold Teeth" and "Your Gold Teeth II," particularly the line "There ain't nothing in Chicago for a monkey woman to do" - which, like the best Dan lyrics, rolls off the tongue, summons up strange images, and defies literal interpretation. From the beginning, Becker and Fagen have insisted on wringing double and triple meanings from seemingly innocent verbiage. They've also increasingly pared down the number of words per song. In "Green Earrings" (from The Royal Scam) and Aja's "I Got the News," the listener ends up filling in almost the whole storyline; the lyrics seem to be excerpts from a more elaborate tale.

Yet there has been a perceptible shift in Steely Dan's outlook. On their first three albums, the narrative voice is generally detached, merciless, but with The Royal Scam and Aja, Becker and Fagen begin to allow us some sympathy toward the songs' characters (who are placed in typically desperate situations). "Deacon Blues," Aja's evocation of the jazz life, even verges on sentimentality - the last thing anyone could have expected from this band.

As their lyrics have become both more open and more economical, Becker and Fagen's tunes grow relentlessly more sophisticated. Steely Dan travels down convoluted harmonic byways that most rockers (Paul Simon excepted) never dream of: impressionistic five-or six-note chords, polytonal superimposed triads. By now Becker and Fagen maneuver through the tonal system as gracefully as the jazzmen they admire like Duke Ellington and Bill Evans; no chord progression is too abstruse for them to try (listen to the chorus of "Peg," on Aja). Yet, like Ellington, they keep the blues as a touchstone; every Steely Dan album except The Royal Scam features at least one blues-based song. Usually, however, the blues borrowings are more figurative than literal. Katy Lied's "Chain Lightning," for instance, starts both its verses and its solo in the second bar of the progression.

Aja signalled a new phase of experimentation: toying with song form itself. When the band had played long tracks before, on Countdown to Ecstasy, they were jamming on the songs pre-established changes. But in "Aja." (the title cut), instrumental episodes introduce new material, equal in structural importance to the verses and choruses. Becker and Fagen also toy with bridges in "I Got the News," sprinkling bits and pieces of two different bridges through the song, then assembling them near the end.

Can't Buy a Thrill, Steely Dan's debut, is their only derivative-sounding album, because it uses stock arranging ideas like the Crosby Stills & Nash-flavored high harmonies on "Reelin' in the Years." From Countdown to Ecstasy onward, Becker and Fagen, with producer Gary Katz, have evolved a cooler, more seductive, more individual sound with each album. Detractors call Steely Dan an MOR outfit, but they're wrong: Becker and Fagen just happen to favor subtle detailing over raucousness or flash (while their slick veneer lets them slide into popular consciousness with greater ease). Their shadings of guitar tone, for instance, orchestrate their albums with astounding variety, from the snickering trills of "Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More" (on Katy Lied) to the paranoiac fuzztone of "Don't Take Me Alive" (The Royal Scam) to the incandescent open fifths that open "Josie" (Aja). True to their jazz leanings, Becker and Fagen use horns far more often than strings to augment the band, but they rarely lose the audio image of a small combo.

Becker and Fagen gravitated toward the studio, not the road, and the band slowly dissolved. Guitarist Jeff Baxter and vocalist/keyboardist Mike McDonald left to revitalize the Doobie Brothers, while drummer Jim Hodder and guitarist Denny Dias dropped from sight. By the time Katy Lied, their fourth album, came out, Steely Dan was for all practical purposes Becker and Fagen plus session players, an arrangement that has continued to the present. Yet Steely Dan albums rigorously avoid the lazy, cliched session-sound ambiance. Becker, Fagen and producer Gary Katz will do endless retakes to get a spontaneous sound. And it seems that the peculiar demands of Steely Dan songs force creativity out of even the most jaded session veterans.

Steely Dan's procedure is straightforward. When a song is ready, Becker and Fagen will record a piano-and-voice demo and have lead sheets made up. They then assemble a studio rhythm section - drums, bass, keyboards, guitars - rehearse until the musicians play the song to their satisfaction, and roll the tapes. Later solos, vocals and sundries will be overdubbed on the live rhythm track.

But it's not as simple as it sounds. "The songs are all really hard to play well," Gary Katz explains. "There are a lot of changes, and we demand maybe more than some people do in the final product. Session musicians come from fourteen jingle dates, or whatever, and they sit down and see those changes, and they have to, like, sit for a while and play. Negotiating all the chord changes, rhythmically correct, and as a unit - it's time-consuming. Most of these guys are used to going in, seeing a track, and ripping it off in two or three hours. That never happens. The only tune that ever happened with was "Aja"; Steve Gadd ripped that off, solos and all. That tune was done in an hour and a half, the only tune that has happened with in all the years. It freaked us out."

The second stage - solos and overdubs - is even more grueling. "Either it's great till the minute it's done," Katz says, "or it's as worthless as having never been done. Right now, I'm throwing away two tracks for this album that are sixty percent complete.... We punch in everything, anything, anywhere." 

Occasionally, however, a soloist susses out a song immediately. Phil Woods, whose alto solo on "Doctor Wu" is still Katz's favorite, looked at the chart and played it in one take. "It took about seven, eight minutes," Katz recalls. "It was so good that Donald said, 'You're the finest thing I've heard. Would you just play it a couple more times so I could hear it?'"

At the other extreme, Wayne Shorter wasn't satisfied with his 64-bar tenor sax solo in "Aja," according to Katz, until he took a break and wrote out sketches of the parts he wanted to play. And Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, who plays on the upcoming Steely Dan LP, asked for a tape of the track before coming into the studio so he could work on it privately.

Apparently Becker and Fagen aren't particularly interested in studio (or tape) technology. Although they once used an eight-bar tape loop for the rhythm track of "Show Biz Kids" (on Countdown to Ecstasy), they haven't used that technique again, and Katz says they rarely build a song layer by layer from a click track ("FM," from the movie, is an exception to that rule). All Steely Dan demand is enough tracks to record on, enough flexibility to clean up anything even vaguely out of kilter, and enough time to agonize over every note.

"We try to run Steely Dan sessions like jingle dates," Katz continues. "Everyone loves jingle dates. They go so quickly, they sound so great everything is laid out clearly. They don't go quite so quickly for us, but that's what we try for. With Donald and Walter, right from the first it was serious business. At the beginning, they knew exactly what they wanted in their music, but they had to learn the technique of making it work. It took work in the studio to bounce it back, to refine it."

Strangely enough, Katz insists that Steely Dan's overall sound is not premeditated. "After the basic rhythm track is done," he says, "the rest is trial and error, apart from a little bit of an idea. We try everything that we think might work, and reject them if we don't like it later." Mixdown is a three-man operation, replete with conflicting opinions and second guesses. "We play back through anything we can get our hands on," Katz says, "from a real expensive system to a cheap twenty-two-dollar stereo." Wherever it comes from, the sound Steely Dan gets is, by now, probably the most imitated style in pop music, particularly in Los Angeles. Now that Steely Dan is headquartered in New York, Katz doesn't expect them to sound radically different: "We fly so many people in," he says, "that it doesn't matter where we record."

Initially, Becker and Fagen intended to be staff songwriters, not performers. "They'd been trying to sell those songs for a long time," Katz recalls. "Nobody liked them. You have to understand - they'd sit down and sing these weird songs. It wasn't like Leon Russell, who can sit down at a piano and sing his brains out. The songs were real long, the structure was odd, and there were no football chords for people to sing to."

Kenny Vance, a veteran New York producer, snagged a soundtrack assignment for Becker and Fagen on the low-budget movie You Got to Walk It Like You Talk It, and for a short time the duo worked as sidemen for Jay and the Americans; they also contributed two songs to a Katz-produced album by Thomas Jefferson Kay. But it was only through Katz's intense lobbying efforts that Steely Dan finally got signed to ABC, at what were, it has been said, low royalty rates that have since been adjusted upwards. Once their ABC contract runs out, Steely Dan will be recording for Warner Brothers.

Lately, Steely Dan have been experimenting with song structures again, yet Aja which uses extended structures -has been their best-selling album to date. Katz was reluctant to speak about the band's upcoming album, but apparently it, too, will feature long tracks.

"Before we even went near the studio," Katz admits, "and before most of the tunes were written, one night we said, 'Listen this album we're gonna make short pop songs, we'll put ten songs on the album. But the tunes wound up being longer than that. To this day I couldn't tell you what happened. Donald said, 'Look, all right, I mean it's a verse, a chorus, a verse, a chorus, an instrumental, a chorus, and out I mean, what's so big?' And it comes out to be five-and-a-half, six minutes. It's not, like, excess, it just works out that way. There isn't a lot of dead space in their songs now; everything that we use from bar to bar has a good reason for being there. They're much tighter songs now, even though they run six minutes.

"Their roots aren't pop songs," Katz insists. "They don't feel there are boundaries they have to work within."

Interviewing Becker and Fagen turned out to have its own unusual structure. Katz informed me that the band would meet us on the northeast corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West, and we'd talk in the park. Shortly after the appointed hour, the pale, surprisingly slight, sunglassed pair arrived; Becker was clad in a plaid shirt, jeans and rose-colored glasses, Fagen in a Pierre Cardin T-shirt, jeans and incredibly scuffed, pointy-toed, gray-green Verdi footgear. They looked as if they hadn't seen daylight in a decade. As we wandered toward a suitably bucolic interview spot, it was all I could do to resist asking Fagen the question: "Where did you get those shoes?"

MUSICIAN: Gary (Katz) says you walk into the studio...
DONALD FAGEN: Sometimes we run in, but usually we walk in; it depends how fast we want to get there....
MUSICIAN: ... with demos that are basically the complete song.
FAGEN: Usually we have a layout, a chart musicians usually play off.
WALTER BECKER: There have been occasions where we have been known to go in with an incomplete lyric, but that really doesn't amount to much. I know there are people who go in with the very thinnest, barest bones of a composition, and hope that at some later date, after recording the track, that they'll be able to turn this into a song. I wouldn't feel very good about doing that. (to Fagen) Would you?
FAGEN: That would be a heavy risk - and probably a waste of money, unless you've got the knack for that sort of thing.
MUSICIAN: And the musicians come in cold, having not seen the charts before?
BECKER: With the exception of one or two of the players, who already have either prepared the charts or played the tune on a previous occasion, with another band, they come in without knowing the tunes. I wouldn't say they come in cold; in fact, they come in piping hot if anything's going to get done that day.
MUSICIAN: What song has gone through the most re-recordings?
BECKER: "Your Gold Teeth" did get recorded twice (on Countdown to Ecstasy and Katy Lied). I'd say that's some sort of landmark.
FAGEN: You mean how many times did we cut it before we used it?
BECKER: Or how many times did we change it and rewrite it before we cut it?
MUSICIAN: How many times did you cut it before using it.
BECKER: I think we're about to surpass ourselves in that regard. But I could tell you that many musicians have played on "Peg" (from Aja). Many, many musicians. Many guitar players have played the guitar solo on "Peg."
MUSICIAN: But it's just a simple "pantonal 13-bar blues."
BECKER: We explained that to them, but did they listen? No.
FAGEN: Rotten kids...
MUSICIAN: Have there been occasions when studio musicians got in the way of a song?
FAGEN: We just ask them to step aside...
BECKER: Unless it's someone very tall...
FAGEN: And then we tell Gary to ask him to step aside, and then walk past him.
MUSICIAN: How does your songwriting collaboration work?
FAGEN: I usually come up with a basic idea or format for a song, and Walter comes downstairs and we finish it up.
BECKER: Slowly.
FAGEN: It's gotten very slow. It's a slow decade.
BECKER: We've written our hundred-and-one most obvious lyrics already, I think, and now sometimes we have to try and come up with a new approach. Like a very radical approach to a subject, odd kinds of narrative form and stuff. Anything, so long as it's funny in the end.
MUSICIAN: Some songs seem to come directly out of a rhythmic groove, like "I Got the News" on Aja. How was that put together?
BECKER: Actually, it was put together partially from pieces of pre-existing songs called "I Got the News."
FAGEN: We'd had that song in a former incarnation; we actually wrote it with Victor Feldman in mind for the piano part he was playing. We let him play rather freely on the date.
BECKER: Of course, we did take the basic riff into consideration; we were writing lyrics over the riff. Always. when we're writing lyrics, we take into consideration how easy they are to sing and to pronounce, and how well they flow, and so on.
MUSICIAN: Do you usually write tunes first?
FAGEN: We usually write chord structures first.
BECKER: And song form - we lay out a song form.
FAGEN: And the melody and the lyrics are usually done together.
MUSICIAN: You use a lot of weird intervals. Are those generated by the chords?
BECKER: In part, yes, and in part because it makes for interesting melodies.
FAGEN: And we do it by ear, too - it sounds good.
MUSICIAN: Do you worry about what you can sing?
BECKER: I'd say it's come up once or twice.
FAGEN: I don't have a large range, so it has to be within a certain interval,
BECKER: You don't have that limited a range - it's not a Lou Reed monotone.
FAGEN: I can't go three octaves or anything like that. Actually, I have four very fine notes, in the middle of the keyboard there above middle C.
BECKER: And then it kind of tapers off.
MUSICIAN: Donald, you seem to sing one syllable per note almost exclusively, hardly using any melisma at all.
FAGEN: No, I don't really possess that technique.
BECKER: I think if more of our songs were in Latin, there'd be a greater tendency toward melisma. Or a Romance language, any Romance language.
MUSICIAN: The blues are melismatic, too.
BECKER: Well, most of those songs are in Latin, aren't they?
FAGEN: I know my limitations. I'm not a Van Morrison or a Ray Charles or anything.
BECKER: Donald is lacking the sharply defined pentatonic notches that are an absolute must for the crisp performance of a melisma.
MUSICIAN: In the first edition of the songbook for your first four albums, there's an introduction that says that the "Mu major chord" - a major chord with an added ninth - was the key to the Steely Dan sound? Is that still true?
FAGEN: That introduction was probably obsolete when we wrote it. It was kind of a gag anyway. We used to use it....
BECKER: There was more than a grain of truth to what we were saying....
FAGEN: But it's hardly original with us.
BECKER: Claiming that we invented it and named it was probably a little extravagant. We did name it, but it's probably appeared in the literature before.
MUSICIAN: So that's not the key to the Steely Dan sound?
BECKER: There may be a little more to it than that.
FAGEN: It's a device - one of many devices.
BECKER: We were, uh, limited by space.
MUSICIAN: One of those other devices is harmony built on superimposed triads. On Katy Lied, "Throw Back the Little Ones" ends with two major chords
BECKER: Michael Omartian just did that as a flourish, but various aberrations of that give you different sounds....
FAGEN: ... polytonal effects...
BECKER: In other cases it's structurally more important,
superimpositions of triads over bass notes that are not the root of the triad. Without it, there wouldn't be any Bee Gees today. The Bee Gees would be impossible if they ever had to sing a real dominant seventh chord - forget it.
FAGEN: It's a common device. Where'd it start? Probably Stravinsky, Debussy, or Charles Ives.
MUSICIAN: Do you ever set yourself songwriting exercises? Something like what Paul Simon did with songs on Still Crazy After All These Years, deliberately writing songs that used all the chromatic tones in their melodies.
BECKER: We once wrote a brief flurry that included all twelve tones. "Your Gold Teeth" came out of that.
FAGEN: We use intervallic inversion occasionally in melodies.
MUSICIAN: Is that a deliberate effort to be different, to break out of normal paths?
FAGEN: It's just a way of structuring a melody to make sense. There is a certain mathematical logic.
BECKER: And sometimes it is a certain problem-solving, a way of getting from point A to point B. I mean, if you need an idea to go on to suggest another.
MUSICIAN: Do you often work that way?
BECKER: Normally, melodies are pretty much
FAGEN: ... freely discovered...
BECKER: Rather than invented because of a formula, or modified according to a formula.
MUSICIAN: So how would the average Musician reader go about writing a Steely Dan song?
FAGEN: First of all, he'd have to get himself a partner.
BECKER: A friend.
FAGEN: And he'd have to somehow remove himself back into the '60s and grow up during that tumultuous era.
BECKER: To some extent at least. He wouldn't have to grow all the way up. And that should do it. I'm surprised that more people aren't writing those songs and sending them in. After all, we've solicited material from all sorts of people....
MUSICIAN: Do you actually get songs in the mail?
BECKER: No - poison pen letters.
MUSICIAN: The typical rap on Steely Dan is that you put jazz changes into pop songs and write hooks.
BECKER: I think we used to tell people something that ended up coming out like that. I think we were just trying to suggest on a much smaller scale that we occasionally would use a slightly different way of getting from key to key, and slightly different chord qualities than were heard in ninety percent of the music on rock & roll radio stations. But that's changed a little bit. In disco music, the characteristic, prevalent harmonic color is a little bit different than it was in rock & roll by and large before disco.
MUSICIAN: It's more modal.
FAGEN: Yeah, but it's become much more sophisticated harmonically.
BECKER: There will usually be a passage that contains some cocktail-ish sort of harmony...
FAGEN: ... the basic four-part jazz chords, five-part jazz chords...
RECKER: ... for a brief moment, and then they return to the basic vamp. Back to the groove.
FAGEN: The kind of harmony we use is based substantially on jazz harmony, which is also the basis of any kind of big-band arrangement or string arranging for popular music, which is what they use in disco music as a matter of course. I don't think we stand out harmonically as much as we used to in the rock & roll field.
MUSICIAN: Is that a challenge?
FAGEN: Well, we just have to write better songs.
MUSICIAN: Did you set out at the beginning to write hits?
BECKER: Well, no. But we were not entirely unaware of the fact that structurally our songs were suitable for, uh, framing. We were given many reasons to believe that our music would be vastly unpopular by people we approached over the years.
FAGEN: It was mainly the lyrical content that put people off, and possibly at the time the kind of harmony. What we ended up doing was writing the kind of lyric we like superimposed over a traditional song structure, which made sense to people Which made sense to me. Traditional song structure is extremely serviceable.
BECKER: It was what we believed in. Listening to jazz, you get on intimate terms with how songs work. That's probably one reason why we wrote a lot of bridges in our songs.
FAGEN: Jazz used popular standards as its grist, or did up until the '60s...
BECKER: And the advent of religious saxophoning
FAGEN: Political and religious saxophoning, of course, killed that.
MUSICIAN: You're still jazz listeners.
FAGEN: We listen to about everything. We listen to old records.
BECKER: We listen to jazz to the extent that it exists. I mean, to the extent that jazz with some harmonic structure is what we're primarily interested in.
MUSICIAN: Do you plan to do any other covers, like "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" (the Ellington tune on Pretzel Logic)?
BECKER: Not until we can find something else that everyone likes as much.
MUSICIAN: When I listened to the original, I was surprised at how well the pedal steel mimics the trombone's phrasing.
BECKER: If you listen again, you'll notice that the piano solo is a composite of four bad clarinet solos, with notes changed only where absolutely necessary. Duke didn't have a good clarinet player in that period, a few years later, he hired Barney Bigard.
MUSICIAN: Does the rigid structure of your pop songs get in the way of putting jazz ideas into them?
BECKER: Not really. When a soloist with a trio or quartet performs a pop tune, the liberties that can be taken with the structure are not that great. Essentially it's how many choruses is he gonna play, the sequence of solos, and those are very predictable things. He's not suddenly going to play another song. Although I have seen people do that, to the dismay of their friends in the band. Their former friends, I should say.
MUSICIAN: But your songs are structured tighter than that.
BECKER: We know how many choruses we're going to take.
FAGEN: They don't necessarily have a jazz feeling, either. What we try to do is encourage the musicians to play in a spirited fashion, with feeling, and not mechanically. I think this has a lot to do with any swing you may perceive
MUSICIAN: Is one of you more perfectionistic in the studio than the other? Who rejects songs when?
BECKER: Donald rejects songs constantly. I reject songs sporadically.
MUSICIAN: For what reasons?
FAGEN: Whatever's wrong with it, we find it and kill it.
BECKER: Whatever flaw may be hiding in a composition or performance, we ferret it out and damn it to hell.
FAGEN: Belt it out of the park, so to speak.
BECKER: Or consign it to a fate worse than death: limbo.
MUSICIAN: Or overdubbing?
BECKER: We don't overdub on anything that's not first-rate.
FAGEN: Well, we do occasionally. And then we throw it out later, after spending several hundred thousand dollars. But usually a clinker gets through somehow anyway.
BECKER: Well, they can't all be as fine fine superfine as the other. Actually, we've reduced the number of clinkers on the last couple of albums.
MUSICIAN: You haven't played concerts since the Pretzel Logic tour, but at one point there was supposedly an Aja band in the works. What happened?
BECKER: There was a sliding pay scale with that band, based on the amount of money to be lost by various musicians leaving town. When this became evident to some of the members who had, uh, slid considerably from the top of the pay scale, they had things to say like, 'How come him...? And me...?' And we said, 'Oh shit,' we felt like capitalists exploiting and repressing these musicians, so we cancelled the band after the first rehearsal.
FAGEN: We've never had employees before. The original band was a six-way split, or a five-way split, or whatever. It was partners involved in a musical enterprise, although we directed the music.
BECKER: Suddenly we felt like shopowners or something.
FAGEN: I didn't like the whole atmosphere of it.
BECKER: And yet, the only reason we had to do that was that even with that arrangement we were going to lose money at every concert, on every deal.
MUSICIAN: How about using less established musicians?
FAGEN: We've looked for some young players, and we haven't really found that many outside the studio clique.
BECKER: Which is not to say we work with a bunch of old people. But you mean undiscovered people - the last person that worked with us that would really fit the circumscription was Mike McDonald. He was the only McDonald we had, and we lost that one.
MUSICIAN: When you listen to records or live bands, are you always saying to yourselves, 'We could use this guy'?
BECKER: Sure. We came upon most of the musicians we're working with today by hearing them perform on records, or hearing about them from somebody and then going out and buying a record.
FAGEN: Or seeing them live.
BECKER: You know, people will say that so-and-so is a great player, but usually they're not descriptive enough about what it is he does, not enough to give us an idea of what's appropriate or how to use him.
FAGEN: There's plenty of great musicians in town, but not that many are right for what we do.
MUSICIAN: What you need are players who can run any set of changes. How about someone like Pat Metheny? Could he fit into a Steely Dan song?
FAGEN: He's a good guitar player. He sure could.
BECKER: In fact, we've thought about that.
MUSICIAN: Could you see yourselves doing a quick, one-take, ECM-type album?
FAGEN: Well, we did produce a jazz record (for Pete Christlieb and Warne Marsh) that was basically a one-shot type of thing.
MUSICIAN: Have you written any other tunes without lyrics since then?
BECKER: Only in conjunction with extended song forms. Back when we had our touring band (around 1974) we would write little interludes that would give Donald a break from singing and provide some kind of counterpoint to a guy singing all the time. It was vastly unpopular with audiences.
FAGEN: At one point our show was almost a constant, uh, din from beginning to end. We had bridges between every song.
BECKER: Once we started, we just wanted to get up there and play nonstop.
FAGEN: I was so fearful of speaking to the crowd...
MUSICIAN: When I saw you perform in Waterbury, though, you were a real motor-mouth.
BECKER: Was that when he was saying things like 'Yours truly, Mary Tyler Moore?'
FAGEN: That came late in a tour. Who knows what I may have said? I had to steel myself with intoxicants.
BECKER: That was our best band, as far as live performance. But we were not impressed with the degree of civilization in Waterbury.
MUSICIAN: Do you miss the concert stage?
BECKER: No, there are concert stages all over this town. Any day or night you want, you can go and look at them.
FAGEN: I do miss playing. Not singing.
MUSICIAN: It looks like our time is running out. While we have a minute, could you explain the lyrics?
BECKER: Well, it all actually boils down to a single sentence.
MUSICIAN: Really? What is it?
BECKER: I can't tell you that. If I do... well, there goes the house in the country.

No Static At All

 From Walrus, written by Rob Patterson

Steely Dan is an anonymous non-group who defy almost all the rules for commercial success. They don't tour, give rare interviews, and make their music under a shroud of mystery, but in the process have cultivated more mystique than anyone else in rock.

Yet with a public profile approaching negative, Steely Dan has received rather amazing acceptance, (amazing even to them) by all facets of pop music radio.

"It has always surprised me that we've gotten as much radio play as we have," commented Walter Becker, one half of the mysterious duo. "Considering some of the things the songs say, IT'S SURPRISING MORE PEOPLE DON'T HATE US."

"We've never tried to make music with a hit single in mind" interjected Donald Fagen, the eerie nasal voice of Steely Dan.

"In fact, I think we've almost consciously tried to make music that wouldn't be hit single material. But the people who decide those type of things find us right up their alley. That's okay with us."

"There's something delightful about the fact that more people don't take offense or frequently jump up and say 'these guys are CRAZY!' and stuff like that." added Becker. "I've always liked the fact we could do what we do and get away with it. Which goes to show that if something's well crafted, it won't offend any people as long as it's skillfully put together."

Much interest has arisen around Becker and Fagen's craft as well as the gentlemen themselves. Just who are these two guys - whose music yields hit AM singles, while still the darlings of progressive radio and stuffy rock critics; who have slid onto the tightest AOR playlists with ease, at the same time garnering a respectful jazz audience - and just how do they do it?

Face to face Becker and Fagen no more fit the frequent photographic image of intense intellectual hepsters than they do the rumors of savage sarcastic attacks on reporters.

Both men are slight and less imposing than in their photos.

Walter is eagerly straightforward and talkative, while Donald's sarcasm rarely bites, but frequently touches.

In short, two friendly and quite modest gentlemen, seemingly unlike the kind of people mystique builds around.

"Yeah, I don't know why that is," commented Fagen on their considerable mystique. "WE BOTH BATHE REGULARLY. I do," he said, motioning to Becker, "I assume you do."

"I guess it's probably because we have deliberately tried to create the optical illusion of a rock and roll band when there actually isn't one... which is fun," added Becker. "But I guess since AJA that illusion really doesn't exist anymore,"

"It's more the aural illusion than an optical illusion," interjected Fagen. "We have a 'travelling band,' extremely protean.

"Actually, we just had this tremendous variety of songs we had to get on tape." he continued, "and we felt we needed, and it would suit our purposes better, to have different musicians play, per song, if necessary."

"On PRETZEL LOGIC we started to shuffle things around" Becker pointed out.

"We've been working that way for the past four years. In the studio for us it's turned out to be the most successful way of going about it."

As for their description of the creative process...

"We get together" said Fagen, "and throw out ideas and put together a song. It's always hard to describe how they come about - we just fool around.and IT'S NOT GETTING EASIER."

"You get more exacting..." added Becker.

"The songs are much tighter than they used to be musically and lyrically as well," Fagen commented. "Just to make something more concentrated takes more time and is more difficult. Because after all, we are just using the traditional popular song structures."

"When we go into the studio," said Becker, "we have the complete arrangements and so on... though subject to change. There's always a lot of freedom - a lot of space for the musicians to contribute."

They both admitted that those arrangements were the key to the consistency that creates the aural illusion of a band, along with choosing the right player for the particular cut.

"Actually," admitted Fagen, "we are thinking for the next album we are doing for ABC of using musicians more consistently, that is, using fewer musicians and trying to work with those certain musicians, maybe one band for each side of the record or something."

"I don't know if that will happen" cautioned Becker.

"That's something we're looking at as an ideal circumstance."

There is much talk of the technical tricks that abound on Steely Dan albums, but Becker admitted that "though we've done some fairly outrageous things in the cause of making Steely Dan albums, mainly what we go for these days is something that works.

"Like we made a very large 16 track tape loop once for "Show Biz Kids..."

"An eight bar loop" Fagen pointed out.

"Of drums, bass, background singers, electric guitar and piano" picked up Becker.

"And we looped it," said Fagen, "and made a seven or eight minute long cut and then started working with that tape

"And then overdubbed anything that didn't repeat continuously" said Becker.

"The drummer played eight bars and then said 'Is that it?'"recalled Fagen.

"We could have done it either way," said Becker, "but we just decided to do it that way. There's a certain effect you get it is absolutely repetitive."

"Roger (Nichols, their engineer) had a very long tap loop," Fagen remembers.

"That's two inch tape running at 30 ips."

Probably running very quickly out the control room door, down the hallway and back.

"You get the idea" concluded Fagen. "That's an example, though there are various other things I really couldn't explain to you."

It seems that with AJA Steely Dan have hit a comfortable style for their songs, less hard-edged and rocking than earlier songs like "Reelin' In The Years," "Show Biz Kids," "Bodhisattva," and "My Old School," and more tinged by a growing jazz influence.

"I don't know if you could say that," countered Becker. "I don't see that progression. There is a progression harmonically of sorts - I think it's towards more sophisticated harmonic structures and stuff but it surely isn't towards jazz.

"I don't think of AJA as any kind of fusion music. As far as I'm concerned it's just rock and roll.

"When we say jazz, I think of JAZZ. And I don't think the music we're doing resembles jazz that closely. The spontaneity's not there. It's a different sort of thing." "But we do use the elements of
jazz aside from the spontaneity." Fagen admitted. "Such as the harmonics, and certain instrumentation." He admitted later that one reason he thought AJA achieved such huge success was that "the audiences are being conditioned to getting more used to jazz harmonies because of all this fusion business that may have something to do with it."

"But the other thing." added Becker, referring to their earlier, more rocking material, "it could pop up at any moment."

As for the music to come, said Becker: "We're not going to get a lot different. There aren't going to be any revolutionary departures in the immediate future, but we're always trying to do something a little different from what we've done in the past, rather than try to exploit it.

"We're always trying to do something different just so's not to repeat ourselves; to keep it interesting. But we're not going to start using sitars or anythings."

Few programmers will argue with the contention that Steely Dan represent a large quantity of quality music which FM radio can offer its listeners, and it is almost more than coincidentally that they composed the hit theme to the movie - "FM."

"The song was a hit," said Fagen, "but I think we should have seen the movie before we committed ourselves. But I enjoyed doing it, and I thought it was a very successful piece of movie music. As you know, it wasn't a successful movie."

"I'll tell you, there's something very tough about writing songs for movies," said Becker. "It's a little corny. although I really like it when a good old rock and roll song pops up in a movie.

"We were going to put "FM" on our GREATEST HITS album, but we decided not to. But they sent us over all the tracks from the soundtrack, so we were thinking of putting "More Than A Feeling" by Boston on our GREATEST HITS too."

"We have also recently been talking with a German animator named Klaus Gorman about doing music for an animated film he's making," said Fagen, "tentatively titled 'The History Of The CIA'." Becker and Fagen have reached their heights of success musically and commercially by having a strong sense of how to craft good music, and it's a subject that obsesses them.

"As Walter once said," explains Fagen, "'I think we win by default.' There's not much to compare with what we do that's even worth listening to, let's face it."

"Rock and roll seems to have taken a turn for the deliberately plodding and stupid," said Walter, "much more now than in the past when it was just a fact of the existence of the people involved in making the music. Now it seems to be a genuinely desirable pose-musically anyway - really primitive sounding things.

"We both like rock and roll when it's good the principal elements of rock and roll appeal to us very much. We don't even like most of what's being done. But it's no strain to work within the confines of rock and roll. In fact, it would be a strain to do anything else. One hopes that rock and roll will get better, but ask me if it's possible, or even probable, based on any evidence that is happening right now... well, that's another story."

"It is a shame," said Fagen, "That there are so many great musicians now guys who are technically gifted and have worked at it more than the people who began rock and roll. but they don't have the music to play.

"The thing about jazz is that you have all these great players, plus you have this incredibly wonderful body of material to work with all these popular songs, so well crafted...

"And on top of that," added Becker, "you have all these guys who were great composers and players like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington."

"I hope people pick up on it and start experimenting again." lamented Fagen. "I guess there's just a lot of good musicians with no vision...no concept of what they want to do."

"It's hard for musicians to find new directions to devote themselves to when you consider what the commercial realities of music are. That is: one is encouraged to imitate really strongly, especially jazz musicians, if they are to survive, are encouraged to play 'crossover' music.

"But when you combine various elements of music you end up with some sort of mish-mash that inevitably loses impact in a number of ways. The other thing is that when people are encouraged to be different, it is JUST to be different, in some striking way just for the sake of being different."

Steely Dan have skirted those pitfalls without yet hitting a trap. Their music crosses over boundaries and formats, yet it is cleanly delineated and defined. They are quite different from 99% of the groups and artists now creating popular music, not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of quality.

Over the six carefully and well crafted albums they have released, they have stamped enough good songs in the public mind to merit a GREATEST HITS set of two discs, of which Fagen is sure "that somebody will find something to object to our leaving off the album." They have gained more respect and acceptance than almost any Seventies rock and roll act through the sheer quality of their music.

"WE NEED SOME GENIUS," said Fagen after despairing the state of rock and roll, "and there just seems to be a big hole."

But genius is exactly the term that pops to mind when many describe Steely Dan.

"Well... I don't know if it even applies," answered Fagen, "but at least we're giving it a shot. It's perfectly natural for us to do what we do. It's not like we try to do anything different..."

Early Steely

 From Record World, written by Pat Baird

Back in 1969, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (then under the wing of Jay & The Americans' JATA Productions) wrote the score for a "youth" film entitled "You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It (Or You'll Lose That Beat)." The film, produced by Peter Locke, had an even less than limited run in the theaters but Southern Music, the co-publisher of the score, put the original soundtrack out on their Spark label. Although the record did about as well as the film, Southern's Mario Conti purchased the master several years later.

Now that Fagen and Becker have gone on to so much greater things, the publishing company is again making the disc available as a "collector's item" through mail order ads in such publications as Rolling Stone and Melody Maker for $6 per. The record, produced by Kenny Vance, contains seven songs with such Steely-esque titles as "Flotsam & Jetsam" and "Dog Eat Dog" and, unlike so many artists" "catalogue" works, is an excellent representation of Fagen and Becker's early development.

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