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..."
