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.
