Say "HELLO" to STEELY DAN - And The Six Who Make It Work

 From Hit Parader, written by Martin Fredric

To Steely Dan, everything comes down in the end to the music. Nothing else matters... nothing is allowed to break the concentration there's nothing in their lives they'd rather be doing not for love or for money or for just plain fun.

"It's a matter of everyone understanding the music is the most important thing," is the way they all put it. Their image even their very personal self-images relates to the music and the music alone. You might call them the complete musicians, guys who live for very little else, and the strength and the purity that comes out of that kind of concentration is what makes an unwavering and ever-growing circle of die-hard fans feel that this group is not merely of the moment. Relatively new as groups go their first birthday as a complete six has just about happened - it's already easy to see that they are classy, and in their way, classic, too solid to be just for today.

The nucleus of the Steely Dan is the songwriting team of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. It all began some five years ago, when Becker, a seventeen-year-old bass guitarist, ran into nineteen-year-old Fagen, already a keyboard wizard and vocalist. That was at Bard College and they've been playing and writing together ever since.

"Mostly writing together," they protest. "Our only playing experiences had been scattered studio work, pick-up band stuff, and about two years with Jay and the Americans in their little back-up
orchestra."

Not bad, but hardly what they were looking for even back then. But the break the step that would let them get on to what they thought they should be into didn't really come until little more than a year ago. It was then that their producer, Gary Katz, became staff producer at ABC/Dunhill in Los Angeles and took "everyone that he knew along with him. And that included me and Donald," Walter explains. "We went out as staff writers, but we began secretly in the basement of Dunhill offices to assemble a rock-and-roll band. Jeff Baxter and Jim Hodder came out when we did, and then there were four."

Jeff, a whiz on guitar and pedal steel guitar, just happened in L.A. at the time, trying, as he still is, to achieve his one big goal "to be the best stringed-instruments player in the world." With Steely Dan, he feels, it could happen. And that's the best thing he's felt since the days he was born and raised in Mexico City. Known to friends and foes alike as "Skunk" - "because I never used to change my socks" -his musical education began back in the old hometown where his generous parents treated him to eleven years of classical piano training. He repaid them by joining a rock-and-roll band that played at the "Gringo School" dances in Mexico.

He left Mexico to attend the Taft School for Boys in Connecticut, where he listened to rock music, began playing the guitar and met up with a young man named Dave Palmer, now his fellow Steely Danner. Dave remembers Jeff as "a little freaky seventeen-year-old dude, running around saying he loved music and everything." His real career as a rock musician began when he moved to Boston and began working in a record store. One day, a member of Ultimate Spinach happened by, mentioned in passing that the band was looking for a dynamite guitar player.

"Me!" Jeff cried, and that was that. Eventually, of course, Ultimate Spinach broke up, Jeff tired of "nothing happening" on the Boston scene, and followed his dream to L.A. - and Steely Dan.

Jimmy Holder, drummer, percussionist and vocalist, began his musical career in Boston as a child when he learned to play the accordion. But he knew even then that he was not following his natural calling because, "I was always banging on something."

Eventually, he got his first drum kit and just kept banging away until he joined the Bead Game, Boston's own resident hippy band.

"You know, we all lived together in one house, never rehearsed, and when we got on stage, we were really sloppy. But people came to hear us anyway."

At this point, Jimmy met Gary Katz, who became the producer of Bead Game, and was eventually brought out to L.A. to become the drummer for Steely Dan.

"I like what I play in this band. I like to play strong rhythms, nothing too fancy, but strong. I like to make things go."

And then, like the boys said, there were four.

Shortly thereafter, Denny Dias came out, making it five.

Denny, on guitar and electric sitar, began his love affair with the strings at age thirteen, in Hicksville, Long Island, east of Manhattan Island. "I picked up an acoustic guitar my father brought home for about five dollars. It only had three strings on it."

His career as a musician began nine months later when he formed his first band called the Saints, whose theme song, natch, was "When the Saints Go Marching In."

He studied guitar steadily for the next few years, and finally decided to drop out of school to devote all his time to his band.

School for Denny, by the way, was The Downstate Medical School, College of Health Related Professions, where he majored in Bio-medical Computer Science.

"I figured I'd devote my full time to music. Really, it doesn't matter how talented you are in music, you can flop just as easily, but I figured I'd give it a whirl. I had this band, and I quit school and then the bass player quit the band. So I put an ad in the Village Voice and ..."

"Guess who showed up?" interrupts Walter Becker at this point.

"A bass player and a piano player," laughs Denny, "Becker and Fagen showed up."

"The band disintegrated immediately," adds Walter.

So Denny wasn't doing much musically when the call came from California that his two old pals were trying to make things pop - and were maybe doing it.

"This band is what I've wanted to do since I met Walter and Donald and heard the songs they wrote," says Denny, a look of exquisite contentment on his face.

Together these five, almost-happy guys began putting an album together. About two-thirds of the way through, who should show up to make their happiness complete - not like a bad penny, but a good one - but David Palmer.

Dave, who handles the lead vocals, began singing with high school bands in Plainfield, New Jersey, "about fifty miles out of Newark." His first professional gig, just out of high school, was with a band called Middle class, which was produced by Jerry Goffin and Carole King. "We came to New York and started to play in the Village, at the Cafe Bizarre and that whole terrible scene. All those people who have become Village legends, I knew them all back then."

Ultimately, not even Goffin and King could prevent a common show-biz phenomenon among beginners from happening "Frustration. Futility. Poverty. Any number of things" that caused Middle Class to break up.

It was not the best of times for David who:

"Went to Florida, flipped out a month or two, went crazy.

"Came back up North and decided to go to Emerson College.

"Flipped out."

"Joined Jake and the Family Jewels."

On this period, he adds, "It was a good band. Jake is one of the best writers out of New York. He's great. He's a legend in his own time." But all the same, the band broke up within six months. So Dave:

"Joined a band in Martha's Vineyard (Cape Cod, Mass.) called Quinaimes, made an album for Elektra, broke up.

"Went to Boston; got a job in a factory.

"Came back to Jersey; got a job in a factory.

"That was the lowest point of my life, believe me. So when Jeff called and said, 'There are these two writers out here and they're completely insane - come right away,' I did. I was scared. But I looked at all my New York friends who were down and out, couldn't write, couldn't do anything, so I said all right. Took off across the country."

Says Walter Becker, remembering his arrival, "We saw his teeth and then we knew. Anyone with six eye teeth is okay with us."

"I'm not really trying for an effect," says Dave of his performing. "Just energy on stage which is good, healthy. That's all. I sweat a lot. I bathe a lot. I guess I'm working toward what makes us all the best... that's all."

"And that," say Becker and Fagen, "we trust, brings you up to date."

But what about the nucleus itself - the real Walter Becker and Donald Fagen?

Outside of their rock-and-roll band, both appreciate, in fact revere, certain jazz musicians - "the best from any period, the best. From post bebop to John Coltrane, and earlier stuff, too, like Bix Beiderbeck, Jelly Roll Morton, of course, Scott Joplin and his Maple Leaf Rag, Sonny Rollins and his Apache Haircut. Anyone who's good, really good, who doesn't have to think about anything when he's playing except playing." Don's also into certain classical composers of the twentieth century ... Igor Stravinsky, Berg ... "all those composers responsible for bringing classical music to an end."

As good as Steely Dan is as a whole, it is still the songs which are most unique, the most impressive aspect of the group's music. Don claims there is a kind of a formula to it. "The typical Steely Dan song would include a penetrating verse, a rousing chorus, an inspired bridge and, of course, a no-holds-barred instrumental of some sort. Pop songs with some kind of structure that's interesting and can be developed. We're actually pretty traditional in that, but the chords are usually more interesting than most rock and roll, I think.

"We have recurring themes, but we don't have any particular fixations. Anything is grist for our mill. There's no real limitations on it. We can write about anything.

"Our lyrics contain certain associations which we hope will evoke in our listeners the sensation that they are remembering something they forgot a long time ago. Perhaps thousands of years ago! Before they were even born!"

The music is certainly evocative -and maybe even provocative - and best of all to be listened to with a lot of pleasure.