STEELY DAN'S GOLDEN "AJA"

From Crawdaddy, written by Jim Trombetta

Willowy Donald Fagen led the way to the rear of Amigo Studio, located in the North Hollywood industrial zone, surrounded by a jumble of railroad sidings, electric towers, warehouse lots wrapped in cyclone fence, and adjoining a nuclear lab whose leaden sealed door offered "isotopes-tracers." "Let's do it in there," Fagen muttered. "I need some new isotopes ... my body can explode that much sooner... your body explodes every three weeks." But instead, we turned left into a rehearsal room: half empty, one corner appointed with a rented couch, a dusty coffee table, a single blond conga drum. Daylight waned; lightspill from another room was the only illumination. And there we sat, soaking up gamma rays, Fagen sticking a Marlboro between distended lips, explaining that his partner Walter Becker was feeling too peaked to attend. Fagen himself was stooped as though under the burden of consciousness. "I'll never go back to my old school," he once sang of his alma mater Bard College, but now he looked like a student recovering from a late-paper all-nighter.

Steely Dan - now not so much a band as a skeleton crew of specialists, responsible to the core auteurs, Becker and Fagen - was supposed to deliver two new albums to ABC by last March.

"We signed a paper a couple of years ago," Fagen said. "in an attempt to increase our royalty rate from almost nothing to almost nothing. For that, uh, grant, we have to meet some deadlines. However, the way things are going - slow as usual - it wouldn't even be very smart to worry about the deadlines, 'cause I don't think we're going to make them."

I was reminded of "Monkey in Your Soul" from Pretzel Logic: "I got one and you want four/It's so hard to help you." That song is a great retort to anyone who wants to usurp your conscience, and now I could imagine them singing it to a slave-driver record company. But Jim Hodder, the drummer who left the Dan after the first two albums, partly because of the leaders' reluctance to play in public ("When we start touring, I anticipate being ill," Fagen says), has no complaints. "I've been pretty well taken care of, and I know there's lots of European sales I haven't even seen yet."

Fagen and Becker, though, write the songs scintillating. danceable tunes with fourth-dimensional turns and ABC also controls the writers' royalties, "all that's permissible under law." Fagen said that it "seems likely" that Steely Dan will follow longtime producer Gary Katz to Warner Brothers when these two albums are done.

At this point there were five backing tracks in the can, and 18 songs in germinal stages. One of them is a five-minute ditty about Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. "It's anything but abstract, it's, uh, it's in your social studies book and everything." In conversation, Fagen's slurring and yawning hesitation - it would be the envy of the most dissipated glitter star - contrasts with his precise phrasing as a vocalist; on tape it sounds as if he's trying to swallow the recorder.

"But I don't think that'll be any more outstanding than any other song. We have one called 'Aja' [the title track of Steely Dan's new lp], about a young lady; we have a song called 'Were You Blind That Day, which is kind of a Third World fantasy; we have a song called 'I Got The News' it's an erotic, traditional rock 'n roll song - and we have some other ones."

The Dan's lyrics are as musical as words can probably get - colloquial, but full of nifty interior rhymes and unexpected consonances. Perplexing at first, they end up as anatomies of feelings that don't often find their way into songs (like envy in "Show Biz Kids"). They suggest a cornered mind forced onto the dissection table.

"Some are obviously fantasies, some are gleaned from our own experience uh, more than often we assume a role like an actor, though I'd be a very poor actor." Fagen will admit to satire, but "Nooooooo, the protagonist of a particular song may be a self-righteous bastard but, uh, we as the omniscient creators certainly don't have any moralistic attitudes. The songs are conceived in a great spirit of hilarity."

Fagen, who looks like a cross between Jagger and Lenny Bruce, posed anxiously for terrible pictures in a vast equipment room. "The rooms here are too small," he complained, "which makes it extremely inconvenient for traveling." And the Dan was on the run, camping in studio after studio; they'd come over the Hills from Hollywood to this one and would be heading for another in Santa Monica. Fagen shrugged. "I tend to get the most out of, you know, suffering."