The Steely Dan Session

From Circus, written by Bruce Meyer

'Aja' Reawakens Fans, Fagen and Becker May Tour Again

They're two of the most respected and successful musicians in rock, but if you met them on the street, you probably wouldn't take a second glance. And with good reason.

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have spent three years building a reputation as rock & roll recluses, known mostly to the beach freaks at Malibu and the squinty-eyed denizens of a dozen recording studios in LA and New York.

Even now, with the scent of change in the air, they're making no promises.

But it's beginning to look like Fagen and Becker - better known collectively as Steely Dan - will soon shed their self-imposed cocoon, put together a band and go out to meet their audience, face to face at last. At one point earlier this year, in fact, there were concrete plans for a Steely Dan tour, in support of the new album, AJA (ABC). Sprawled in the California-decadent atmosphere of Beverly Hills' opulent Hotel Bel-Air, Becker explains what happened.

"We had planned to do it, to tour, but at this point I'm just not sure what we're going to do. The album was originally going to be released considerably sooner and when we finally did finish with it, the record company wanted to hold it for a while.

"So the tour that we had planned was completely inappropriate, because it was going to happen before the record came out. And we decided we'd put it on the back burner for the time being."

The tour came closer to happening than it sounds. Becker and Fagen had already held a couple of rehearsals with a basic touring band, including original Steely Dan guitarist Denny Dias, keyboards player Paul Griffin and percussionist Victor Feldman. Now those musicians have returned to other tasks, but Fagen says they are "on call, if we need them."

Assuming such a tour does come off, AJA (pronounced Asia) provides a key to the kind of music the audiences should expect. It is, like all five previous Steely Dan LPs, a collection of sophisticated pop tunes; but it is far more heavily colored with jazz than anything Becker and Fagen have done before and should appeal to the fusion crowd.

Becker and Fagen see AJA as the result of a natural progression in their music going all the way back to the start, when they played as backup musicians for one of the great third-rate bands of the Sixties, Jay and the Americans.

"If there is a fusion in AJA," says Becker, "it's not like we're taking some jazz things here and some rock things and just stirring it together - and I think that's how it's done, a lot of times. We may have come up with such an album naturally."

Fagen agrees.

"We don't really have to cross over (from pop to jazz)," he says, "because we were sort of there already. Not stone jazz musicians, and at the same time, we were never really rock & rollers. It's all been heard in our records. I think if you look back at some of our earlier albums, you'll find things that are as jazz influenced but maybe not as successful."

True enough; the main differences between the music on AJA and previous jazz-tinged Steely Dan collections are not so much stylistic as quantitative. There's simply a lot more jazz in this album. And a lot of the success of that sound behind the familiar, slightly skewed Fagen Becker lyrics is due to reedman/arranger Tom Scott.

"We went over the tunes very carefully with him," says Fagen, "told him what we want. And generally his voicings follow the piano voicings. He does have a very fine working knowledge of how to do the proper voice at the right time."

"We've used horn players and stuff in the past," adds Becker. "And I'd say he contributed a lot more than any of them. Usually we've specified almost every detail. In Tom's case, we'd give him an idea of what he definitely should and shouldn't do, but that would leave a lot of leeway."

When - if - Steely Dan finally do make their appearance on the tour circuit, it will be with more than just a collection of back-up musicians, though Becker and Fagen will continue their intensive recording-writing schedule and any musician working with them will have to find some-thing to do with time between tours.

"We're in the studio most of the time," says Becker, "and when we're not, we're writing. So when we started to work on the idea of a band this time, we realized that you don't make a band just by picking up musicians, although we do that in the studio and it works."

So the (tentative, always tentative) plan is to ease into the idea of a new Steely Dan band.

"If we're gonna have it," says Fagen, "we're gonna have to start working with musicians on a sort of informal basis, to sort of work up to where we were the last time we had a band, before we can even think about putting it on the road. We'd probably spend a lot of time just rehearsing in a studio or in somebody's house."

The last time Fagen and Becker had a regular band, it collapsed under the combined weight of boredom and financial limitations. Jeff "Skunk" Baxter spent more time playing with the Doobie Bros. than with his own group and made a lot more money, as well; now, he's a full-time Doobie.

Fagen and Becker don't intend to let that situation happen again - they've just spent three years proving their point to the music industry: if you're good enough, touring is not necessarily required to sell records.

Which may be why, point proven, they are now on the brink again.

"These people assured us of our extinction if we didn't perform," says Fagen, with the hint of a self-satisfied smirk. "But it hasn't happened. We just try to make the best records we can. Because that's what we really like to do."