A Summer's Sunday Picnic With Steely Dan

From Musician, written by Jon Pareles

THE ELUSIVE DUO RECENTLY SURFACED IN CENTRAL PARK ALONG WITH PRODUCER GARY KATZ FOR A RARE INTERVIEW ABOUT THEIR MUSICAL INFLUENCES, HOW THEY WRITE TUNES, THEIR METHODS IN THE STUDIO, DRAWING SPONTANEITY FROM SESSION PLAYERS AND THE REAL MEANING OF THEIR LYRICS... WELL, ALMOST.

Seven years along, it still makes no sense, If someone had suggested in 1972, when Steely Dan's debut album appeared, that a smartass band devoted to chromatic/modal harmonies; light, jazzy rhythms, and cynically oblique lyrics would make its way to the top of the pops, any rational observer would have scoffed. Pop success, the truism goes, depends on making a simple, usually optimistic point using elementary means. Late in 1972, however, a catchy little ditty about doomed romance, compulsive gambling and murder called "Do It Again" insinuated its way onto AM radio, soon to be followed by a failure-to-communicate shuffle called "Reelin' in the Years." Steely Dan had finessed themselves an audience.

They were smooth. Donald Fagen (vocals and keyboards) and Walter Becker (bass and guitar), the band's songwriting team, could make even the most perverse harmonic or lyrical twists seem natural, and they managed to warp every style from reggae to C&W to fit their own specifications. They were also low-profile professionals who quietly avoided media personality-mongering. It seemed that all they wanted to do was record perfect songs that were odd enough to interest them, but not so strange that the public would start to wonder what was going on. Even today there are people who think of Steely Dan as one more laid-back pop band. Becker and Fagen manage to simultaneously disdain and capitalize on pop's simple, universal appeal; as they wrote in "Doctor Wu," "All night long/We would sing that stupid song/And every word we sang/1 knew was true." Deftly balancing ambivalences, Steely Dan set an appropriately suave, cynical tone for the 70s.

The music demands that you listen between the lines. Their lyrics never completely spell anything out, although some can be deciphered with a little effort. "My Old School," on Countdown to Ecstasy, is a jaundiced memoir of Becker and Fagen's undergraduate years at artsy Bard College in Anandale, N.Y. (where the pair played in a band that included Chevy Chase on drums). "Parker's Band" (from Pretzel Logic). is a you-were-there tribute to Bird and the birth of bebop; the title cut of The Royal Scam is a parable about Puerto Rican immigration.

On the other hand, some songs are determinedly elusive. I'm still trying to figure out both "Your Gold Teeth" and "Your Gold Teeth II," particularly the line "There ain't nothing in Chicago for a monkey woman to do" - which, like the best Dan lyrics, rolls off the tongue, summons up strange images, and defies literal interpretation. From the beginning, Becker and Fagen have insisted on wringing double and triple meanings from seemingly innocent verbiage. They've also increasingly pared down the number of words per song. In "Green Earrings" (from The Royal Scam) and Aja's "I Got the News," the listener ends up filling in almost the whole storyline; the lyrics seem to be excerpts from a more elaborate tale.

Yet there has been a perceptible shift in Steely Dan's outlook. On their first three albums, the narrative voice is generally detached, merciless, but with The Royal Scam and Aja, Becker and Fagen begin to allow us some sympathy toward the songs' characters (who are placed in typically desperate situations). "Deacon Blues," Aja's evocation of the jazz life, even verges on sentimentality - the last thing anyone could have expected from this band.

As their lyrics have become both more open and more economical, Becker and Fagen's tunes grow relentlessly more sophisticated. Steely Dan travels down convoluted harmonic byways that most rockers (Paul Simon excepted) never dream of: impressionistic five-or six-note chords, polytonal superimposed triads. By now Becker and Fagen maneuver through the tonal system as gracefully as the jazzmen they admire like Duke Ellington and Bill Evans; no chord progression is too abstruse for them to try (listen to the chorus of "Peg," on Aja). Yet, like Ellington, they keep the blues as a touchstone; every Steely Dan album except The Royal Scam features at least one blues-based song. Usually, however, the blues borrowings are more figurative than literal. Katy Lied's "Chain Lightning," for instance, starts both its verses and its solo in the second bar of the progression.

Aja signalled a new phase of experimentation: toying with song form itself. When the band had played long tracks before, on Countdown to Ecstasy, they were jamming on the songs pre-established changes. But in "Aja." (the title cut), instrumental episodes introduce new material, equal in structural importance to the verses and choruses. Becker and Fagen also toy with bridges in "I Got the News," sprinkling bits and pieces of two different bridges through the song, then assembling them near the end.

Can't Buy a Thrill, Steely Dan's debut, is their only derivative-sounding album, because it uses stock arranging ideas like the Crosby Stills & Nash-flavored high harmonies on "Reelin' in the Years." From Countdown to Ecstasy onward, Becker and Fagen, with producer Gary Katz, have evolved a cooler, more seductive, more individual sound with each album. Detractors call Steely Dan an MOR outfit, but they're wrong: Becker and Fagen just happen to favor subtle detailing over raucousness or flash (while their slick veneer lets them slide into popular consciousness with greater ease). Their shadings of guitar tone, for instance, orchestrate their albums with astounding variety, from the snickering trills of "Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More" (on Katy Lied) to the paranoiac fuzztone of "Don't Take Me Alive" (The Royal Scam) to the incandescent open fifths that open "Josie" (Aja). True to their jazz leanings, Becker and Fagen use horns far more often than strings to augment the band, but they rarely lose the audio image of a small combo.

Becker and Fagen gravitated toward the studio, not the road, and the band slowly dissolved. Guitarist Jeff Baxter and vocalist/keyboardist Mike McDonald left to revitalize the Doobie Brothers, while drummer Jim Hodder and guitarist Denny Dias dropped from sight. By the time Katy Lied, their fourth album, came out, Steely Dan was for all practical purposes Becker and Fagen plus session players, an arrangement that has continued to the present. Yet Steely Dan albums rigorously avoid the lazy, cliched session-sound ambiance. Becker, Fagen and producer Gary Katz will do endless retakes to get a spontaneous sound. And it seems that the peculiar demands of Steely Dan songs force creativity out of even the most jaded session veterans.

Steely Dan's procedure is straightforward. When a song is ready, Becker and Fagen will record a piano-and-voice demo and have lead sheets made up. They then assemble a studio rhythm section - drums, bass, keyboards, guitars - rehearse until the musicians play the song to their satisfaction, and roll the tapes. Later solos, vocals and sundries will be overdubbed on the live rhythm track.

But it's not as simple as it sounds. "The songs are all really hard to play well," Gary Katz explains. "There are a lot of changes, and we demand maybe more than some people do in the final product. Session musicians come from fourteen jingle dates, or whatever, and they sit down and see those changes, and they have to, like, sit for a while and play. Negotiating all the chord changes, rhythmically correct, and as a unit - it's time-consuming. Most of these guys are used to going in, seeing a track, and ripping it off in two or three hours. That never happens. The only tune that ever happened with was "Aja"; Steve Gadd ripped that off, solos and all. That tune was done in an hour and a half, the only tune that has happened with in all the years. It freaked us out."

The second stage - solos and overdubs - is even more grueling. "Either it's great till the minute it's done," Katz says, "or it's as worthless as having never been done. Right now, I'm throwing away two tracks for this album that are sixty percent complete.... We punch in everything, anything, anywhere." 

Occasionally, however, a soloist susses out a song immediately. Phil Woods, whose alto solo on "Doctor Wu" is still Katz's favorite, looked at the chart and played it in one take. "It took about seven, eight minutes," Katz recalls. "It was so good that Donald said, 'You're the finest thing I've heard. Would you just play it a couple more times so I could hear it?'"

At the other extreme, Wayne Shorter wasn't satisfied with his 64-bar tenor sax solo in "Aja," according to Katz, until he took a break and wrote out sketches of the parts he wanted to play. And Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, who plays on the upcoming Steely Dan LP, asked for a tape of the track before coming into the studio so he could work on it privately.

Apparently Becker and Fagen aren't particularly interested in studio (or tape) technology. Although they once used an eight-bar tape loop for the rhythm track of "Show Biz Kids" (on Countdown to Ecstasy), they haven't used that technique again, and Katz says they rarely build a song layer by layer from a click track ("FM," from the movie, is an exception to that rule). All Steely Dan demand is enough tracks to record on, enough flexibility to clean up anything even vaguely out of kilter, and enough time to agonize over every note.

"We try to run Steely Dan sessions like jingle dates," Katz continues. "Everyone loves jingle dates. They go so quickly, they sound so great everything is laid out clearly. They don't go quite so quickly for us, but that's what we try for. With Donald and Walter, right from the first it was serious business. At the beginning, they knew exactly what they wanted in their music, but they had to learn the technique of making it work. It took work in the studio to bounce it back, to refine it."

Strangely enough, Katz insists that Steely Dan's overall sound is not premeditated. "After the basic rhythm track is done," he says, "the rest is trial and error, apart from a little bit of an idea. We try everything that we think might work, and reject them if we don't like it later." Mixdown is a three-man operation, replete with conflicting opinions and second guesses. "We play back through anything we can get our hands on," Katz says, "from a real expensive system to a cheap twenty-two-dollar stereo." Wherever it comes from, the sound Steely Dan gets is, by now, probably the most imitated style in pop music, particularly in Los Angeles. Now that Steely Dan is headquartered in New York, Katz doesn't expect them to sound radically different: "We fly so many people in," he says, "that it doesn't matter where we record."

Initially, Becker and Fagen intended to be staff songwriters, not performers. "They'd been trying to sell those songs for a long time," Katz recalls. "Nobody liked them. You have to understand - they'd sit down and sing these weird songs. It wasn't like Leon Russell, who can sit down at a piano and sing his brains out. The songs were real long, the structure was odd, and there were no football chords for people to sing to."

Kenny Vance, a veteran New York producer, snagged a soundtrack assignment for Becker and Fagen on the low-budget movie You Got to Walk It Like You Talk It, and for a short time the duo worked as sidemen for Jay and the Americans; they also contributed two songs to a Katz-produced album by Thomas Jefferson Kay. But it was only through Katz's intense lobbying efforts that Steely Dan finally got signed to ABC, at what were, it has been said, low royalty rates that have since been adjusted upwards. Once their ABC contract runs out, Steely Dan will be recording for Warner Brothers.

Lately, Steely Dan have been experimenting with song structures again, yet Aja which uses extended structures -has been their best-selling album to date. Katz was reluctant to speak about the band's upcoming album, but apparently it, too, will feature long tracks.

"Before we even went near the studio," Katz admits, "and before most of the tunes were written, one night we said, 'Listen this album we're gonna make short pop songs, we'll put ten songs on the album. But the tunes wound up being longer than that. To this day I couldn't tell you what happened. Donald said, 'Look, all right, I mean it's a verse, a chorus, a verse, a chorus, an instrumental, a chorus, and out I mean, what's so big?' And it comes out to be five-and-a-half, six minutes. It's not, like, excess, it just works out that way. There isn't a lot of dead space in their songs now; everything that we use from bar to bar has a good reason for being there. They're much tighter songs now, even though they run six minutes.

"Their roots aren't pop songs," Katz insists. "They don't feel there are boundaries they have to work within."

Interviewing Becker and Fagen turned out to have its own unusual structure. Katz informed me that the band would meet us on the northeast corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West, and we'd talk in the park. Shortly after the appointed hour, the pale, surprisingly slight, sunglassed pair arrived; Becker was clad in a plaid shirt, jeans and rose-colored glasses, Fagen in a Pierre Cardin T-shirt, jeans and incredibly scuffed, pointy-toed, gray-green Verdi footgear. They looked as if they hadn't seen daylight in a decade. As we wandered toward a suitably bucolic interview spot, it was all I could do to resist asking Fagen the question: "Where did you get those shoes?"

MUSICIAN: Gary (Katz) says you walk into the studio...
DONALD FAGEN: Sometimes we run in, but usually we walk in; it depends how fast we want to get there....
MUSICIAN: ... with demos that are basically the complete song.
FAGEN: Usually we have a layout, a chart musicians usually play off.
WALTER BECKER: There have been occasions where we have been known to go in with an incomplete lyric, but that really doesn't amount to much. I know there are people who go in with the very thinnest, barest bones of a composition, and hope that at some later date, after recording the track, that they'll be able to turn this into a song. I wouldn't feel very good about doing that. (to Fagen) Would you?
FAGEN: That would be a heavy risk - and probably a waste of money, unless you've got the knack for that sort of thing.
MUSICIAN: And the musicians come in cold, having not seen the charts before?
BECKER: With the exception of one or two of the players, who already have either prepared the charts or played the tune on a previous occasion, with another band, they come in without knowing the tunes. I wouldn't say they come in cold; in fact, they come in piping hot if anything's going to get done that day.
MUSICIAN: What song has gone through the most re-recordings?
BECKER: "Your Gold Teeth" did get recorded twice (on Countdown to Ecstasy and Katy Lied). I'd say that's some sort of landmark.
FAGEN: You mean how many times did we cut it before we used it?
BECKER: Or how many times did we change it and rewrite it before we cut it?
MUSICIAN: How many times did you cut it before using it.
BECKER: I think we're about to surpass ourselves in that regard. But I could tell you that many musicians have played on "Peg" (from Aja). Many, many musicians. Many guitar players have played the guitar solo on "Peg."
MUSICIAN: But it's just a simple "pantonal 13-bar blues."
BECKER: We explained that to them, but did they listen? No.
FAGEN: Rotten kids...
MUSICIAN: Have there been occasions when studio musicians got in the way of a song?
FAGEN: We just ask them to step aside...
BECKER: Unless it's someone very tall...
FAGEN: And then we tell Gary to ask him to step aside, and then walk past him.
MUSICIAN: How does your songwriting collaboration work?
FAGEN: I usually come up with a basic idea or format for a song, and Walter comes downstairs and we finish it up.
BECKER: Slowly.
FAGEN: It's gotten very slow. It's a slow decade.
BECKER: We've written our hundred-and-one most obvious lyrics already, I think, and now sometimes we have to try and come up with a new approach. Like a very radical approach to a subject, odd kinds of narrative form and stuff. Anything, so long as it's funny in the end.
MUSICIAN: Some songs seem to come directly out of a rhythmic groove, like "I Got the News" on Aja. How was that put together?
BECKER: Actually, it was put together partially from pieces of pre-existing songs called "I Got the News."
FAGEN: We'd had that song in a former incarnation; we actually wrote it with Victor Feldman in mind for the piano part he was playing. We let him play rather freely on the date.
BECKER: Of course, we did take the basic riff into consideration; we were writing lyrics over the riff. Always. when we're writing lyrics, we take into consideration how easy they are to sing and to pronounce, and how well they flow, and so on.
MUSICIAN: Do you usually write tunes first?
FAGEN: We usually write chord structures first.
BECKER: And song form - we lay out a song form.
FAGEN: And the melody and the lyrics are usually done together.
MUSICIAN: You use a lot of weird intervals. Are those generated by the chords?
BECKER: In part, yes, and in part because it makes for interesting melodies.
FAGEN: And we do it by ear, too - it sounds good.
MUSICIAN: Do you worry about what you can sing?
BECKER: I'd say it's come up once or twice.
FAGEN: I don't have a large range, so it has to be within a certain interval,
BECKER: You don't have that limited a range - it's not a Lou Reed monotone.
FAGEN: I can't go three octaves or anything like that. Actually, I have four very fine notes, in the middle of the keyboard there above middle C.
BECKER: And then it kind of tapers off.
MUSICIAN: Donald, you seem to sing one syllable per note almost exclusively, hardly using any melisma at all.
FAGEN: No, I don't really possess that technique.
BECKER: I think if more of our songs were in Latin, there'd be a greater tendency toward melisma. Or a Romance language, any Romance language.
MUSICIAN: The blues are melismatic, too.
BECKER: Well, most of those songs are in Latin, aren't they?
FAGEN: I know my limitations. I'm not a Van Morrison or a Ray Charles or anything.
BECKER: Donald is lacking the sharply defined pentatonic notches that are an absolute must for the crisp performance of a melisma.
MUSICIAN: In the first edition of the songbook for your first four albums, there's an introduction that says that the "Mu major chord" - a major chord with an added ninth - was the key to the Steely Dan sound? Is that still true?
FAGEN: That introduction was probably obsolete when we wrote it. It was kind of a gag anyway. We used to use it....
BECKER: There was more than a grain of truth to what we were saying....
FAGEN: But it's hardly original with us.
BECKER: Claiming that we invented it and named it was probably a little extravagant. We did name it, but it's probably appeared in the literature before.
MUSICIAN: So that's not the key to the Steely Dan sound?
BECKER: There may be a little more to it than that.
FAGEN: It's a device - one of many devices.
BECKER: We were, uh, limited by space.
MUSICIAN: One of those other devices is harmony built on superimposed triads. On Katy Lied, "Throw Back the Little Ones" ends with two major chords
BECKER: Michael Omartian just did that as a flourish, but various aberrations of that give you different sounds....
FAGEN: ... polytonal effects...
BECKER: In other cases it's structurally more important,
superimpositions of triads over bass notes that are not the root of the triad. Without it, there wouldn't be any Bee Gees today. The Bee Gees would be impossible if they ever had to sing a real dominant seventh chord - forget it.
FAGEN: It's a common device. Where'd it start? Probably Stravinsky, Debussy, or Charles Ives.
MUSICIAN: Do you ever set yourself songwriting exercises? Something like what Paul Simon did with songs on Still Crazy After All These Years, deliberately writing songs that used all the chromatic tones in their melodies.
BECKER: We once wrote a brief flurry that included all twelve tones. "Your Gold Teeth" came out of that.
FAGEN: We use intervallic inversion occasionally in melodies.
MUSICIAN: Is that a deliberate effort to be different, to break out of normal paths?
FAGEN: It's just a way of structuring a melody to make sense. There is a certain mathematical logic.
BECKER: And sometimes it is a certain problem-solving, a way of getting from point A to point B. I mean, if you need an idea to go on to suggest another.
MUSICIAN: Do you often work that way?
BECKER: Normally, melodies are pretty much
FAGEN: ... freely discovered...
BECKER: Rather than invented because of a formula, or modified according to a formula.
MUSICIAN: So how would the average Musician reader go about writing a Steely Dan song?
FAGEN: First of all, he'd have to get himself a partner.
BECKER: A friend.
FAGEN: And he'd have to somehow remove himself back into the '60s and grow up during that tumultuous era.
BECKER: To some extent at least. He wouldn't have to grow all the way up. And that should do it. I'm surprised that more people aren't writing those songs and sending them in. After all, we've solicited material from all sorts of people....
MUSICIAN: Do you actually get songs in the mail?
BECKER: No - poison pen letters.
MUSICIAN: The typical rap on Steely Dan is that you put jazz changes into pop songs and write hooks.
BECKER: I think we used to tell people something that ended up coming out like that. I think we were just trying to suggest on a much smaller scale that we occasionally would use a slightly different way of getting from key to key, and slightly different chord qualities than were heard in ninety percent of the music on rock & roll radio stations. But that's changed a little bit. In disco music, the characteristic, prevalent harmonic color is a little bit different than it was in rock & roll by and large before disco.
MUSICIAN: It's more modal.
FAGEN: Yeah, but it's become much more sophisticated harmonically.
BECKER: There will usually be a passage that contains some cocktail-ish sort of harmony...
FAGEN: ... the basic four-part jazz chords, five-part jazz chords...
RECKER: ... for a brief moment, and then they return to the basic vamp. Back to the groove.
FAGEN: The kind of harmony we use is based substantially on jazz harmony, which is also the basis of any kind of big-band arrangement or string arranging for popular music, which is what they use in disco music as a matter of course. I don't think we stand out harmonically as much as we used to in the rock & roll field.
MUSICIAN: Is that a challenge?
FAGEN: Well, we just have to write better songs.
MUSICIAN: Did you set out at the beginning to write hits?
BECKER: Well, no. But we were not entirely unaware of the fact that structurally our songs were suitable for, uh, framing. We were given many reasons to believe that our music would be vastly unpopular by people we approached over the years.
FAGEN: It was mainly the lyrical content that put people off, and possibly at the time the kind of harmony. What we ended up doing was writing the kind of lyric we like superimposed over a traditional song structure, which made sense to people Which made sense to me. Traditional song structure is extremely serviceable.
BECKER: It was what we believed in. Listening to jazz, you get on intimate terms with how songs work. That's probably one reason why we wrote a lot of bridges in our songs.
FAGEN: Jazz used popular standards as its grist, or did up until the '60s...
BECKER: And the advent of religious saxophoning
FAGEN: Political and religious saxophoning, of course, killed that.
MUSICIAN: You're still jazz listeners.
FAGEN: We listen to about everything. We listen to old records.
BECKER: We listen to jazz to the extent that it exists. I mean, to the extent that jazz with some harmonic structure is what we're primarily interested in.
MUSICIAN: Do you plan to do any other covers, like "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" (the Ellington tune on Pretzel Logic)?
BECKER: Not until we can find something else that everyone likes as much.
MUSICIAN: When I listened to the original, I was surprised at how well the pedal steel mimics the trombone's phrasing.
BECKER: If you listen again, you'll notice that the piano solo is a composite of four bad clarinet solos, with notes changed only where absolutely necessary. Duke didn't have a good clarinet player in that period, a few years later, he hired Barney Bigard.
MUSICIAN: Does the rigid structure of your pop songs get in the way of putting jazz ideas into them?
BECKER: Not really. When a soloist with a trio or quartet performs a pop tune, the liberties that can be taken with the structure are not that great. Essentially it's how many choruses is he gonna play, the sequence of solos, and those are very predictable things. He's not suddenly going to play another song. Although I have seen people do that, to the dismay of their friends in the band. Their former friends, I should say.
MUSICIAN: But your songs are structured tighter than that.
BECKER: We know how many choruses we're going to take.
FAGEN: They don't necessarily have a jazz feeling, either. What we try to do is encourage the musicians to play in a spirited fashion, with feeling, and not mechanically. I think this has a lot to do with any swing you may perceive
MUSICIAN: Is one of you more perfectionistic in the studio than the other? Who rejects songs when?
BECKER: Donald rejects songs constantly. I reject songs sporadically.
MUSICIAN: For what reasons?
FAGEN: Whatever's wrong with it, we find it and kill it.
BECKER: Whatever flaw may be hiding in a composition or performance, we ferret it out and damn it to hell.
FAGEN: Belt it out of the park, so to speak.
BECKER: Or consign it to a fate worse than death: limbo.
MUSICIAN: Or overdubbing?
BECKER: We don't overdub on anything that's not first-rate.
FAGEN: Well, we do occasionally. And then we throw it out later, after spending several hundred thousand dollars. But usually a clinker gets through somehow anyway.
BECKER: Well, they can't all be as fine fine superfine as the other. Actually, we've reduced the number of clinkers on the last couple of albums.
MUSICIAN: You haven't played concerts since the Pretzel Logic tour, but at one point there was supposedly an Aja band in the works. What happened?
BECKER: There was a sliding pay scale with that band, based on the amount of money to be lost by various musicians leaving town. When this became evident to some of the members who had, uh, slid considerably from the top of the pay scale, they had things to say like, 'How come him...? And me...?' And we said, 'Oh shit,' we felt like capitalists exploiting and repressing these musicians, so we cancelled the band after the first rehearsal.
FAGEN: We've never had employees before. The original band was a six-way split, or a five-way split, or whatever. It was partners involved in a musical enterprise, although we directed the music.
BECKER: Suddenly we felt like shopowners or something.
FAGEN: I didn't like the whole atmosphere of it.
BECKER: And yet, the only reason we had to do that was that even with that arrangement we were going to lose money at every concert, on every deal.
MUSICIAN: How about using less established musicians?
FAGEN: We've looked for some young players, and we haven't really found that many outside the studio clique.
BECKER: Which is not to say we work with a bunch of old people. But you mean undiscovered people - the last person that worked with us that would really fit the circumscription was Mike McDonald. He was the only McDonald we had, and we lost that one.
MUSICIAN: When you listen to records or live bands, are you always saying to yourselves, 'We could use this guy'?
BECKER: Sure. We came upon most of the musicians we're working with today by hearing them perform on records, or hearing about them from somebody and then going out and buying a record.
FAGEN: Or seeing them live.
BECKER: You know, people will say that so-and-so is a great player, but usually they're not descriptive enough about what it is he does, not enough to give us an idea of what's appropriate or how to use him.
FAGEN: There's plenty of great musicians in town, but not that many are right for what we do.
MUSICIAN: What you need are players who can run any set of changes. How about someone like Pat Metheny? Could he fit into a Steely Dan song?
FAGEN: He's a good guitar player. He sure could.
BECKER: In fact, we've thought about that.
MUSICIAN: Could you see yourselves doing a quick, one-take, ECM-type album?
FAGEN: Well, we did produce a jazz record (for Pete Christlieb and Warne Marsh) that was basically a one-shot type of thing.
MUSICIAN: Have you written any other tunes without lyrics since then?
BECKER: Only in conjunction with extended song forms. Back when we had our touring band (around 1974) we would write little interludes that would give Donald a break from singing and provide some kind of counterpoint to a guy singing all the time. It was vastly unpopular with audiences.
FAGEN: At one point our show was almost a constant, uh, din from beginning to end. We had bridges between every song.
BECKER: Once we started, we just wanted to get up there and play nonstop.
FAGEN: I was so fearful of speaking to the crowd...
MUSICIAN: When I saw you perform in Waterbury, though, you were a real motor-mouth.
BECKER: Was that when he was saying things like 'Yours truly, Mary Tyler Moore?'
FAGEN: That came late in a tour. Who knows what I may have said? I had to steel myself with intoxicants.
BECKER: That was our best band, as far as live performance. But we were not impressed with the degree of civilization in Waterbury.
MUSICIAN: Do you miss the concert stage?
BECKER: No, there are concert stages all over this town. Any day or night you want, you can go and look at them.
FAGEN: I do miss playing. Not singing.
MUSICIAN: It looks like our time is running out. While we have a minute, could you explain the lyrics?
BECKER: Well, it all actually boils down to a single sentence.
MUSICIAN: Really? What is it?
BECKER: I can't tell you that. If I do... well, there goes the house in the country.

No Static At All

 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..."

Early Steely

 From Record World, written by Pat Baird

Back in 1969, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (then under the wing of Jay & The Americans' JATA Productions) wrote the score for a "youth" film entitled "You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It (Or You'll Lose That Beat)." The film, produced by Peter Locke, had an even less than limited run in the theaters but Southern Music, the co-publisher of the score, put the original soundtrack out on their Spark label. Although the record did about as well as the film, Southern's Mario Conti purchased the master several years later.

Now that Fagen and Becker have gone on to so much greater things, the publishing company is again making the disc available as a "collector's item" through mail order ads in such publications as Rolling Stone and Melody Maker for $6 per. The record, produced by Kenny Vance, contains seven songs with such Steely-esque titles as "Flotsam & Jetsam" and "Dog Eat Dog" and, unlike so many artists" "catalogue" works, is an excellent representation of Fagen and Becker's early development.

 [...]

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."

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."

Steely Dan Dare To Give Sylvie Simmons A More-Open-Than-Usual Interview

From Sounds, written by Sylvie Simmons

It's not every day that Steely Dan bare their souls to the public. But amid the palm trees and coke bottles at the Bel Air Hotel, all was revealed - if not all, at least a lot for Steely Dan. Warning: at times this interview degenerates into the Becker and Fagen Laugh-In, a crazy double-act in which Walter B. (bass, vocals, long hair) and Donald F. (keyboards, vocals, Brooklyn drawl, shades) play off each other with the sole purpose of pushing unstable journalists over the edge. Beach boys Becker and Fagen left their Malibu home for nearby Bel Air to promote (promote?) their latest offering, 'Aja’ - follow-up to last year's 'Royal Scam', and their sixth album since the birth of the Dan in '72.

This one is not, despite the rumours they've spread to the contrary, a double album in the States (sense of humour, remember?) It just looks like one. They needed a gate-fold cover to fit all those sleeve notes on. Journalist Michael Phalen's terrifying tale of an interview rife with insults and threats and a CIA-like confiscation of the tape, a warning to would-be interviewers, balanced with some real nice guys-type praise from the president of ABC records; can they be talking about the same people?

Part I. Aja, an Oriental name of no significance, probably Korean.

Did you start out with any particular idea or concept in mind?

Fagen: We do it song by song. We don't really plan the shape of an album, except perhaps subliminally. First in this album we ended up with too many medium or slow-tempo songs, so we went in and cut a couple of up-number ones. 'Peg' was the last cut. We had a song slated for it, ‘Here At The Western World' that had originally been cut for the 'Royal Scam' album. It was laying around and we liked it a lot, but it didn't fit on 'Scam' and we thought we had too many songs in that tempo on this album, so it's still sitting around. We'll get it out sooner or later.

Are you influenced, or put under any pressure, by what your fans expect of you?

Fagen: No, not really. We really aim to please ourselves you know.

Becker: Plus we have no way of knowing what the audience expects of us.

Fagen: I think we put pressure on ourselves. I think we've topped ourselves every succeeding album in quality.

Becker: Good for you! I never know for sure. I have a good feeling about this one, but it's too hard to tell when you've been working on it for as long as we have. I mean, you can't listen to it objectively any more without dissecting it in your mind in a funny kind of way, because you know how it was put together. But I'm really proud of it. Now I can forget about it and start the next one.

Fagen: I usually think the one we just did is better than the last one. Must be something to do with our mood rings, I guess. When we were writing this our mood rings were green.

Any particular favourite?

Becker: The title song I like. It was an interesting cut. We'd gotten this drummer we didn't know but we'd heard a lot about named Steve Gadd - he was flown in from New York. We had a chart for the tune, and it was like eight pages long - three music stands in front of every musician. What's on the charts is very specific for some of the players - like the keyboards - but very open for others. Like, there's nothing written for the bass player except the chord symbols, the guitar player basically works on his own concept, and particularly the drummer - he really had to outdo himself on that one.

No track immediately offers itself as a single. Are you releasing one?

Becker: I'm sure we will, but I don't know which tune it will be. When we write the songs and prepare the album, we really don't concern ourselves with that, because we're not a good judge collectively of what's going to strike the public's ear in that way. And a lot of our things are too long - there's all kinds of restrictions in radio here, it can't be more than 2-1/2 minutes long or something.

Fagen: It's a very unlikely choice for American radio because of the length of the cut.

Becker: They're still a very puritanical society as far as the media goes. I think it's loosening up a bit, but not on Top 40 radio. You're allowed to have simulated orgasms on record

Fagen: Yes, as long as you do it quietly.

Part II. The Way We Were And The Way We Are Now.

You-started out as pop songwriters, didn't you? (After two years as back-up musicians for '60s pop-harmony group Jay And The Americans, Gary Katz, their producer, found them a cozy niche at ABC as staff songwriters. One of their pop songs, titled 'I Mean To Shine', was recorded by no less than Barbra Streisand).

Becker: Well, not really. We tried to be, but we weren't. When we came out to ABC we were hired as staff writers; we would be writing songs for their artists roster. We knew very well that what we were going to do was end up with our own band, recording our own songs, as no-one else particularly wanted to record our songs. Then and now. So we just kind of played at that for a while, then once we had the band assembled we said, hey, we're ready to record, and that's it.

We had what is now a studio at ABC, which was then under construction, making more offices for accountants or something. Anyway, there were these empty offices, and they were nailing up stuff during the day. We had all our amplifiers in one of these rooms. After six we went over there with the band and rehearsed for a couple of hours. That's where we got our first album together.

(Original members Jeff Baxter, Dave Palmer and Jim Hodder have long since passed on. The only old Dan remaining is guitarist Denny Dias. Otherwise it's session men - the best.)

How did you come across the musicians on Aja?

Becker: We hear them on records -

Fagen: We meet them at parties -

Becker: Yeah, and we ask other musicians about them, and go out and buy more records, and hear about them that way. Then we just call them up and hire them and see what happens. Sometimes we run into cases where we thought we had the perfect musicians for a particular thing, but then nothing happens and we all go home early. Usually something happens because we check out as much as we can, what kind of musicians they are, what they're capable of and best at.

They're quite happy to adapt to your concept?

Becker: It seems to happen by itself because of the nature of the songs, and because of the kind of freedom they have at the sessions. In other words, there are certain things - certain harmonics and certain motifs in our music - they do have to pay attention to. And I guess that's what takes care of the continuity in the sound. But they also have a certain freedom. There are always sessions where they can play a little more than they do at most of the other things, and do what they do best, rather than being too confined. We never ask anybody to consciously adapt to our style. In fact a lot of musicians come here, and I don't think they have any idea of what our style is - don't know or care.

Will you ever get a permanent band together?

Fagen: We use a lot of the same players anyway. On the last three albums - like, Victor Feldman's been on all three, Chuck Rainey's always at the sessions, and Larry Carlton. We' actually have a band with a few substitutions.

Part III. In which the Dan are contented to sit In Malibu and live off the royalties.

Rumour has it that you’ll be touring the States before long. (Steely Dan haven't toured since’74. Their only visit to Europe was a year earlier.)

Becker: Not that I know of! We had intended to tour, but the album release was delayed, so we put it off. Now we've no plans to tour.

Fagen: Making these records pretty well takes up our time. Once we've finished one we start the next. That's the reason we haven't been touring.

Becker: Touring is an expensive hobby.

Fagen: We spend money on a tour. We have an expensive set-up. We don't like playing big halls - the sound is bad. So we have 4,000 people coming in, and it's not enough money to meet the expenses of putting on a show.

Becker: And we spend a longer time preparing our albums, I guess, than other people do.

Fagen: Stevie Wonder spent 2-1/2 years on his record.

Becker: But we found from past efforts that being on the road wasn't enhancing what we were doing in the studio. So we decided that we'd do either one thing or the other.

Do you go see other bands?

Becker: Very rarely. In concert halls here you get a lousy sound, parking costs a buck and stuff like that. No.

Part IV. Lyrics, language problems, black humour and the American Dream.

Your lyrics have sometimes been called impersonal.

Becker: We don't feel the urgent need to bare our souls that Ted Nugent probably does, or Kiss or Queen or Black Death or The Bees Knees or …(collapses in laughter).

Fagen: We write the same way a writer of fiction would write. We're basically assuming the role of a character, and for that reason it may not sound personal. But I try to assume the role and make it believable - not to the extent of doing dialects

Becker: I've heard you do dialects -

Fagen: I say his words, try to express some of his emotions, some of his problems, hang-ups-primarily the hang-ups.

Becker: This is not the Loving Spoonful. It's not real good time music. Anyway, we think those are happy thoughts.

Fagen: It's a part of life, so why not enjoy it?

Becker: Also we feel that these give us the more fertile ground that we've been trampling on for the last five years. It's hard to keep trying to write a song about something you haven't written about before - you keep coming back to the same themes. There's some truth in the fact that happy situations tend to be more or less static and - not that interesting to hear about.

Fagen: When you read a novel in which there are no rough spots for the characters to get over, if everybody did The Hustle from the first page to the last, it wouldn't be much of a novel. It wouldn't enlighten you in any way.

Do you look on your lyrics as enlightening?

Becker: Not in a Buddhist sense.

Fagen: But they do shed light on certain situations. I think a lot of people in Britain know about Haitian divorces now that probably didn't before.

Becker: Of course, you can't get a Haitian divorce any more. You used to be able to go to Haiti and get a divorce real fast. They give you this document in French with ribbons and plumes and everything, and it's recognized by the American government. In a way that's enlightening. It's a situation people probably thought we made up. There are probably people out there who think we made up the name Haiti. We've been accused of everything else.

Fagen: There are people who think we made up the word 'Aja'.

But your lyrics are nothing if not obscure.

Becker: To us it, s a perfectly straightforward story. On the other hand, if anyone finds the lyrics obscure, there's always the music. So, even if you don't know anything about Haitian divorces -

Fagen: You can always look in the Steely Dan Listener's Companion.

Becker: We feel that we use basically the English language. In the United Kingdom, I don't know if people know what the word ‘scam’ means. There was some question as to whether the word 'pretzel' makes sense to English people. There were a lot of reviewers asking us what a pretzel was.

Fagen: So it's basically just a language problem.

Becker: We hadn't anticipated either of those things. So it may appear to people in the United Kingdom that we are writing very much in code.

They're pretty cynical though, and bitterly realistic.

Becker: A lot of what you'd call bitter or cynical, we'd call funny.

Fagen: We think these are very funny songs that we're writing. And when we're writing them, we really do have a grand old time yukking it up about the lyrics'

Becker: We may have a slightly blacker sense of humour than your average person. I'm always surprised that divorces and things aren't funnier than they are. The American Dream? That’s very funny too.

What about your home, California?

Becker: I think that's very funny - it's probably the funniest of the 50 states that I know of.

Fagen: We're not as negative as the Eagles. They're totally down on California.

Becker: When we first came out here it was pretty different from New York, and it does give you a creative vacuum in which to work. It gave us some new characters and new ideas, and it gave us a laboratory-type sterile atmosphere to work in. Because if you walk down the street here in California, you'll be the only person doing it. Nobody gets out of their cars here. It's a different kind of society.

Part V. Time to light another cigarette, get some fresh gum, and discourse on books, films and fans.

Becker: We're pretty bookish guys.

Fagen: In our profession, we're as bookish as I've met. But I think that's more a reflection on what everyone else is doing than what we're doing. I think people should be asking themselves why they're so god dam illiterate.

What do you read?

Becker: I like instruction booklets a lot, science fiction and recipes. My favourite author in the English language is Vladimir Nabokov. Of course he just recently died. So 1 feel that now he's dead, he won't be writing any more, so I have nothing new to look forward to until they start publishing whatever they can find in his apartment,

Fagen: I read novels, history, anything that's lying around. The only things I don't. read much are self-help manuals or poetry.

What would you say is the effect of your lyrics on the audience?

Becker: We hear from a few psychotic fans, threatening and maligning us, or alternatively renting huge football stadiums to perform in and telling us after the fact, or writing to us in strange languages -

Fagen: If a person's on the edge, you know, we could probably throw him off.

Becker: We're just trying to cheer people up. Also we're thinking about writing a movie.

How near to a reality is that?

Becker: Very far. It's just –

Fagen: Just a gleam in Irving Azoff’s eyes.

Becker: It's the potential ringing of cash registers in our manager's mind. Irving's been encouraging us. He keeps telling us, 'Hey, if you guys can write these songs you can write movies, it's the same thing. You just fill out a couple of hundred pages with the same story on it.'

Part VII. Heroes and villains; featuring a change of record company and Irving Azoff’s strange disease.

Another quote. Mike McDonald (keyboards on 'Katy Lied,’ back-up vocals on 'Aja’) said 'you'd have liked to have been Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker.’

Becker: I'd rather be Charlie Parker than anything.

Fagen: Everyone would like to be possessed of genius.

Becker: Those are a couple of our heroes. Do you mind being Duke if I'm Charlie?

Fagen: No, I'll be Duke Ellington.

Becker: We have other heroes, other jazz musicians, but those a two are particularly outstanding examples.

Fagen: Like Root Boy Slim. (sings: "put a quarter in the juke, boogie till you puke”) He’s the sound of the ‘70s. When Root Boy goes (sings: "Awl riite") that's the sort of thing that can really get us going.

Why are you changing record companies? (Steely Dan have one more album to do with ABC before moving to Warners.)

Becker: When we realized our contract was going to be up, we shopped around.

Fagen: We were just going to sign up with ABC, but they didn't want us enough.

Becker: They weren't putting up the same amount that Warner Brothers was. And they have this nice building at Burbank, Warners -

Fagen: Knotty pine -

Becker: Very ethnic. This move will mark a new development in the band's career, because from that point on, instead of that ABC label in the centre of the records, there's going to be a WB label with palm trees -

Fagen: Coconuts, everything.

Becker: Actually the reason we signed with them was because of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck being Warner Brothers characters. We try to catch the Bugs Bunny show in the afternoons when we can. Of course, you can't see it every day, so that influenced our decision a lot.

Any other reason?

Becker: Irving Azoff, our manager, wants us to come out and socialise, mix with the other guys from the other bands a lot more now.

Fagen: We were supposed to go to the Eagles' wedding.

Becker: No, that wasn't the Eagles' wedding; it was Jimmy Buffet's wedding-

Fagen: Or birthday party.

Becker: We couldn't make it. I was in San Francisco and the wedding was in Colorado. Irving got some kind of amoeba disease which we tried to keep secret. The water supply in Colorado is a little tainted, We want people to know that so they won't go there and ski.

Part VIII. The Future

Becker: We've already started writing our next album, and of course we'll be working on the theme song for Irving Azoff's forthcoming movie (eventually titled, ‘FM’). That's about all - Donald's going to learn how to drive his new Jaguar.

Fagen: We're buying up options on science-fiction stories to be made into movies, going down to Washington D.C. to see Root Boy a lot.

Becker: We're going to branch out and start to merchandise the Steely Dan name-

Fagen: Steely Dan breakfast meats-

Becker: Kewpie dolls and things like that. Anything we can put the Steely Dan name on and sell for some of the coin of the realm. That way we can become real capitalists. That's the only thing left for us.

Fagen: Except for politics, and that's so boring.

Becker: Anyway, Irving's going to run for governor of California next year.

So I guess we're just going to keep on doing the same thing we've been doing all along - whatever that is.

Los Angeles

From Melody Maker, written by Harvey Kubernik

Steely Dan are over at ABC studios working on two albums with a March deadline. The songs waxed so far signal a new direction for the brilliant Don Fagen/Walter Becker songwriting team, "Shanghai Breakdown," "Here At The Western World," and "The Gaucho" show the music getting more complicated. Ed Green, Jim Keltner and Steve Gadd have all done time behind the skins for Dan this last session. "The music is getting more erotic," says Fagen. "For the most part the tunes cut so far are pop songs with little things added to make it interesting."

Steely Dan Ready to Hit the Road Again

From The Los Angeles Times, written by Richard Cromelin

More often than not, the news on Steely Dan is no news. Compulsive recordmakers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the group's creative core, are usually ensconced in the studio, rejecting the conventional wisdom that a band must perform to survive. Finally, though, the first Steely Dan tour in well over two years appears on the horizon, and if the performing-makes-hits theorem proves true, it could give Steely Dan its first big-seller since '74's "Rikki, Don't Lose That Number." Not that Becker and Fagen care that much.

"I really thought that single was gonna go. It didn't." Fagen betrays only mild disappointment at the near-miss of "Kid Charlemagne" and a trace of amusement at the followup, a disco parody from "The Royal Scam." "They've put "The Fez' out, hoping they could get a disco hit... Well, you can dance to parts of it, you just have to stop in the middle once in a while."

Fagen, pacing the studio floor prior to putting the vocals on the latest Steely Dan tracks, inadvertently sheds some light on why he and his partner Walter Becker have trouble fighting through the welter of "Boogie Fevers" and "Shake Your Bootys" that occupy the Top 10 these days.

"There's this song we've been thinking about writing," he announces in his thick New York accent, "about the Congress of Vienna, which sealed Napoleon's tomb, so to speak. Which would be working from the angle of Napoleon being the reincarnation of the spirit of ancient Rome, the Roman state which wanted to unite the world, and the Congress of Vienna going back to the divisive thing.

"In translating that into a pop song, of course," he adds, "you have to really get down to the bones of it and simplify it so much that probably no one will understand what it's about anyway, so..."

Becker and Fagen, viewing the pop scene with a mixture of bemusement and contempt, aren't the sort to compromise their peculiar muse. Steely Dan having become a proven quantity with a steady following, they can count on enough album sales to insure that they'll be allowed to make another, which is really their primary concern. Fagen, between bites on his pre-session hamburger, discusses the current state of Steely Dan's jazz-influenced rock.

"Before, we used to knock off two in an evening and that was that, but now it's really hard. Now when we come into a session the sheets are like this" - he stretches his thin arms to maximum wingspread. "We're not trying to be more complicated or anything. They're still almost pop song forms, but there's little things you can do to make it interesting by way of development of the themes that are stated in the 'popular' part of the song.

"That's where the interest lies. Once you state your theme, then you have to do something with it or it's just static popular music. That's what's interesting about classical music and jazz Jazz music is spontaneous - the guy's making up notes on the spot, you've got lots of knowledge and experience behind it. Rock 'n' roll is just how much energy you can put into it. Most of the guitar work you hear, the hard-rock things, there's no thought behind it."

The Becker-Fagen personality is such that News-week headlined its Steely Dan story "Recluse Rock." Fagen protests, calling the label an exaggeration, but the team's long absence from the performing stage has furthered its somewhat contrary and mysterious aura. Actually, they were ready to start rehearsals with a new touring group after "The Royal Scam," but were forced back into the studio by a new two-album March deadline. The albums (after which, Fagen suggests, a new, more sophisticated Steely Dan style will emerge) will fulfill their contract with ABC, and the industry rumors have it that they'll follow their producer, Gary Katz, to Warner Brothers.

"We'll go out on tour eventually," Fagen promises, "as soon as we get all this business stuff straight. Do maybe 20 dates. I don't like to travel, but I'd like to do 20 dates. We'll see how it goes. If it's a good band we'll probably take it out again. It depends on how sick I am after the 20 dates."

Mixing The Modes For The Masses

From DownBeat, written by Jim Bickhart

Steely Dan tops the list of paradoxes in the mainstream music business these days. Pop and rock aficionados find them everything from dazzling and skillfully complex to hopelessly trivial while peer musicians respect them for their technical capabilities and consistency. But Steely Dan looks at it-self with a certain amount of cynical distance. Donald Fagen, the New Jersey-born keyboard player who along with Walter Becker forms the writing and playing core of Steely Dan, epitomizes the paradox. A long-time jazz fanatic, he finds the classic, formal approaches to music challenging, sees rock as simpleminded, and jazz stagnating. At the same time he accepts the enduring qualities of pop music which keep it in the forefront of the marketplace. And all this he does with a straight face, at least as straight as Donald Fagen's face ever gets.

Fagen's musical vehicle is the keyboard, which he handles with a fair amount of chordal and rhythmic acumen. "I used to listen to a lot of jazz radio in the east," he says. "My hero was Red Garland from Miles' quintet. My first instinct was to try to play like him, but I could never quite get the sound, so I fell into playing rock and roll."

The roots of Steely Dan lie at a small, upstate New York liberal arts college called Bard, where Fagen first met Becker. "I was there to study literature while Walter was there for ignoble reasons at best; he eventually flunked out. We seemed to be the only two people there who had listened to the old jazz radio shows. We were also into what was considered progressive rock at the time, Frank Zappa and the Beatles, the Byrds and so forth."

Bard, with its small enrollment and smalltown location (Annandale-on-Hudson), couldn't support too many desperate groups of musicians. What few there were inevitably ended up in close proximity. So it was with Fagen and Becker.

"Walter had been playing guitar. He was once in a group with Randy California, who's since gone on to Spirit. We played together and began writing songs and got into the music business through writing. We thought we would 'sell' our songs, peddle them in the New York sleazo music business. We figured $50 a song was a good price, but it turned out to be a little more complicated than that."

Their original intentions called for commercial material, and they tried to pen slick charts. But the duo didn't get very far. "We hired out as musicians to pay the bills. We played in the backing group for Jay and the Americans on the revival circuit, tried to form our own groups and did some sessions. Mostly demo sessions, to begin with.

"We did an album date for Eric Mercury, a black singer. Gary Katz was the producer. He was an independent producer - which is polite in New York for 'bum.' He heard some of our songs and found them interesting."

In song publishing, "interesting" usually means "I don't understand this, but I don't hate it and I can't use it." Yet Katz, for one, did not discourage the pair. 

"He got a job in LA at ABC Records and he talked the head of the company into bringing us out as staff songwriters. There was an underlying intention of forming a band, so he also brought out a couple of guys he'd found in Boston, including Jeff Baxter, and Denny Dias, with whom we played in a group in New York. We would rehearse after hours in an office at the record company.

"That was just as well. Trying to write for other singers wasn't working. We couldn't control the songs lyrically. The pop mold often demands a boy-girl love theme, which we weren't providing. People would hear the tunes, turn around and head out the door. One got covered by Barbra Streisand, with Richard Perry producing. He changed the bridge and messed around with the song a lot."

The distinctiveness of Steely Dan material is almost unanimously considered the band's strongest point. Even those who don't find much to relate to in the lyrics are intrigued by the nature of the songs. Fagen and Becker have evolved a cooperative writing style over the years they've been working together, one which involves collaboration on both lyrics and melody.

"One of us generally comes up with a germinal idea, usually from the same type of inspirations other writers draw upon. We usually work things out on piano. It's easier to develop harmonic interest that way, though you can sometimes find a nice tune without it. "I think of each piece as a composition, so the arrangements are integral to the actual composition. It's a classical approach, not so much formal as traditional. It's more traditional to western music than model, formless rock and roll."

Steely Dan's tunes tend to be very well thought out, very structured. There's not a lot of room for improvisation except in certain live situations, in which the band creates new sections of songs specifically to develop instrumental space. The recordings reveal songs whose form is true to established molds.

"I'm fond of the pop structure and the blues structure," says Donald. "It's fun to adhere to certain rules about length and structure and still put them through twists and grotesqueries. One of the most interesting things in pop music certainly is to set limitations and then take occasional liberties. Because of those liberties, people sometimes don't realize how much blues we do; usually at least one per album."

While the groundwork for Steely Dan may have originally rested in Fagen and Becker's material, the band began as an actual playing entity, one which did live gigs in the Southern California area well before anyone had ever heard of their records. As such, they allowed themselves to be portrayed as a recognizable unit of personnel. In rock circles, especially those concerned with commercial matters, that means audiences eventually come to care as much about who's in the band as what the band plays.

"It's obvious to anyone really interested that Steely Dan is a conceptual group, like jazz bands have always been. Not that I'm saying we're a jazz band by any stretch of the imagination. But whoever's in the band is in the band. We use different people for different purposes, and people we like to work with tend to reoccur in the rotation. It's a good way to avoid stagnation. That's a chronic problem with pop music, the stagnation caused by using the same people over and over. We choose the band to suit the piece."

Because they're not operating in a particularly dynamic musical scene, Steely Dan have to search for the musicians they want to augment their core group. They listen to records with that in mind, and keep an eye on musicians they meet at their own concerts.

"It takes a process of getting to know who's around and to know where to find them when you need them. Once you find people who will subordinate to your trip, you can get somewhere. The best musicians will be able to subordinate either to themselves or to someone else. It comes down to discipline."

Steely Dan's four albums feature a core of three performers, Fagen, Becker and guitarist Denny Diaz, plus several "band members" who have come and gone. In addition, there are large handfuls of session musicians, like guitarists Elliott Randall, Rick Derringer, Ben Benay. Dean Parks and Larry Carlton, percussionist Victor Feldman and saxophonist Jerome Richardson. Fagen, Becker and Katz weave the various combinations into a fairly homogeneous blend, with no particular song requiring anything so tangential as to erase the band's distinctive signature.

Amongst Steely's most noteworthy recorded moments are the album tracks in which riffs and solos leap out from the overall texture and take the spotlight. It doesn't happen often, given the nature of the premeditated arrangements. Reelin' In The Years, a major hit single off the band's first LP, features both improvised and set guitar parts which single-handedly have won them considerable attention amongst technicians in the audience.

"Elliott Randall, a guitar player we know from New York, played that. He was hot that day; he did it all in a few minutes. He's a masterful improvisor, but he's had a lot of bad breaks in terms of group affiliations, so you don't hear of him all that much.

"We write some of the solos much as we do other parts. For instance, Dean Parks played a written solo on Rose Darling from Katy Lied (the band's fourth and latest LP). Of our regular people, both Walter and Denny Diaz play guitar. Walter has an interesting blues style, not unlike Jeff Baxter's. He's very creative and rhythmically interesting. You'll find his solos on Black Friday and Bad Sneakers. Denny is versatile; he plays anything with a lot of changes, like Your Gold Teeth."

There seems to be a superficial drift away from commercial "hooks" on Steely Dan recordings. Perhaps as a result of the surfeit of time available prior to the first LP (released in 1972), the music had a rockish angularity to it, obviously the product of considerable thought and rehearsal. Reduced time to write, a shorter span between recording sessions, and weeks spent on the road all contribute to the reduction of advance work Fagen and Becker are able to do. The result is more fluidity.

"I find it hard to look for trends in what we're doing," says Fagen. "We write whatever we write and we arrange however we arrange.

But I think it's fair to say we're getting more spontaneous, going with the flow in the studio more than we used to. But it's never been a matter of contriving anything to be commercial; the most obvious examples, like Reelin' In The Years, were not contrived. They were composed and then improvised upon."
Donald doesn't abound with predictions about his or anyone else's specific future, but he's got plenty of thoughts on the evolution of contemporary music.

"I don't have any goals; I just enjoy making records. It's fun, it's something to do, you make a little bread, you know? I just bought a new synthesizer to fool around with, an ARP Odyssey. It's not too overwhelming, but the one I had before was even more elementary. I tend to have a low electronic consciousness. Electronic, even electric instruments tend to have comic purposes. They don't have that classic tone quality musicians and technicians worked for hundreds of years to develop. 20 years of electric instruments and it's all gone. I think it's one aspect of the End of Art.

"I'm a jazz fan. I listen to my local jazz station (KBCA), but I haven't heard anything really new at all since about 1965. I still like to listen to my old Blue Note and Prestige albums; the best new records are the Fantasy re-releases of old stuff. You might say both Walter and I have a somewhat narrow spectrum of taste when it comes to that sort of thing.

"I like Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane up to the point where he self-destructed jazz. He got a little too smart and ventured into realms where man should never tread. I also dig Mingus, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, sax players in general, and great rhythm sections. Also Miles' quintets.

"Chick Corea, Larry Coryell and all these people, what they are trying has all been done one way or another. It's all pseudo-Stravinsky. The only difference is your deterioration of tone quality due to electronics, and the subsequent difference in the overall sound. There haven't been a lot of opportunities for growth other than into atonality. Music is an art which self-destructs: you follow the harmonic series into higher intervals and on into atonality, where it all falls apart. That's what happened after Coltrane.

"Rock and roll is in the same boat to a lesser degree. Everything has already been done, partly because there wasn't all that much to do in the first place. I think we're rabid examples of the deterioration, but we're examples and commentators at the same time.

"It's interesting how rock and roll seems to be able to revive itself periodically. There's some strange regenerative quality in all that simplicity. You can get away with playing the same thing over and over again and audiences don't mind. In fact, they seem to prefer it."

Steely Dan, while identifiably purveyors of rock and roll of one sort or another, perform their version of the repetitive trick with chord progressions which take more than 20 seconds to learn. Consequently, the music sounds downright complex by simplistic pop standards, and the band has attracted a large number of fans who consider them sophisticated. It's an illusory sophistication, however, partly undone by the basically simple song structures and the ultimate realization that the lyrics actually mean something.

"None of it matters," concludes Fagen. "We're mainly in this for ourselves anyway. To become excessively popular, you have to cater to the whims of mass taste, which I don't feel we've done. Popularity is relevant to business but irrelevant to music, and we're only in business to the extent that we have to stay in business so we can afford to make music for fun. I'm pleasantly surprised at the level of acceptance we've attained. It's far beyond my mother's wildest dreams."

European tour cancellation article

 

From Circus Raves, written by ???

Steely Dan had to cancel a sold-out European tour when singer Donald Fagen came down with severe strep throat. Donald wanted to ignore the devastating pain, but when it kept getting worse and worse Elton John's personal physician was called in, and taking one look at the reddened tonsils of the moody Dan, he gave the strict orders to "Go Home!" The Steely Dans plan to make up the dates in December.

Steely Dan Shows Its Mettle (July 3, 1974 concert review)

From The Los Angeles Times, written by Richard Cromelin

Any doubts about Steely Dan's being America's most inventive band were resolved by the group's Wednesday Santa Monica Civic concert, which also took care of lingering reservations about its ability to excite as well as beguile (it packs a punch that could wake any nearby dead) and about its stage personality (subtle but intriguing, once you find it).

At every level, from Jeff Baxter's screeching, throaty rock 'n' roll guitar through Donald Fagen and Walter Becker's wry, enigmatic lyrics, the Dan effortlessly covers every possibility as it smashes out its sophisticated, highly personalized (and flawlessly amplified) jazz-flavored rock. The musicianship is incomparable, the interaction among the players nearly telepathic, and there are countless moments of uncanny exchange.

Rather than settle for mere musical accomplishment, Steely Dan uses it to powerfully express an attitude. Be it through venomous appraisal of past love affairs, a biting, sarcastic (and even moralizing) look at the California scene or a panorama of Dylanesque imagery, the persona (embodied onstage by the emaciated Fagen as a mad musical scientist) that grows from the music is uncommonly tangible and entire, aware and affecting.

Beyond that. Steely Dan is funny (both lyrically and musically), spoofing pop conventions as it creates exquisite pop songs. It's that humor that finally lifts Steely Dan above all but a very few working bands and which made the concert one of the year's best (and it happens again tonight).

Opening is Kiki Dee, a singer with the rare ability to make the pop ballad a genuine emotional experience. A lively, engaging performer, her brisk, solid set received a deservedly enthusiastic response.

Reelin' in from Woolies

From New Musical Express, written by Steve Clarke

YEP. WOOLWORTH'S WAS WHERE WALTER BECKER GOT TURNED ON AND DONALD FAGEN GOT HIS TICKET TO RIDE FROM THE BEATLES. TOGETHER THEY'RE THE CORE OF STEELY DAN, AN AMERICAN CULT BAND CATCHING ON IN BRITAIN

Woolworth's seems hardly the place to get turned on to rock music - that's where Walter Becker's ears started to twitch at the sounds of The Beatles' "No Reply" (side one, track one on "Beatles For Sale"). And that convinced him there was more to rock than three chords.

For Becker's songwriting partner, Donald Fagen - the two are the writing force behind Steely Dan - it was "Ticket To Ride," heard on the radio one summer that nibbled a hole in his prejudice against rock music.

Becker, however, is still prejudiced against rock and doesn't like it if there aren't enough chord changes, unless it's played extremely well.

Steely Dan, hailed as positively the best American band of the 70s, have finally made it to Britain after one false start. You remember, they were supposed to be coming before - and according to them that tour was never booked in the first place: "The story was a complete and utter fabrication," claims Becker.

Although each musician in the group counts, it's Becker and Fagen's songwriting that really makes Steely Dan something special. Both of them have similar backgrounds and attitude, getting into jazz a long time before appreciating rock.

Fagen, he says he's done this bio spiel about two million times now: he learned to play piano and a little alto - sax as a child, taking his licks from jazz records, and tried to play like Red Garland who is Miles Davis's old piano player. "I picked up that style. Later I found that I could pick up almost any style from records."

He admits one reason why he got info jazz was to be hip. But when he started buying good jazz records he realized the music was for him. Fagen and Becker met at Bard College. "Walter was the only person I knew who used to listen to the same jazz stations - New York jazz stations which are now defunct…so's jazz, as a matter of fact."

He whines his story in a definitive New York accent. Dressed in T-shirt, jeans and white sneakers with a red flash and wearing heavy-framed glasses, still looking like a college academic.

"We more or less thought along the same lines and we both had a rather bizarre sense of lyrics," he says.

The songwriting-partnership is a real one, although Fagen says he usually comes up with most of the source idea and then they take it from there, each one adding a line here, a line there.

Becker and Fagen eventually ended up as staff-writers for ABC Dunhill across the country in Los Angeles. That lasted only six months, during which time they wrote songs for, among others, Barbara Streisand.

Says Fagen: "We weren't doing so good 'cause we're sort of funny. When you're writing for other artists it's difficult to get them to do songs if the lyrics aren't absolutely banal."

And that's really why Steely Dan was formed.

The exact formation of the group is a little difficult to pin down, although Becker and Fagen and Gary Katz (their producer and also a long-time friend of theirs) stress that the process wasn't in any way loose.

"Every day we'd bring in another musician or two, and the president of the record company told him he was in the band.

"They (ABC Dunhill) really didn't know what was going on. See, we had a little office with a piano. Finally we moved out of the office and moved into this other little room and set up our equipment and stopped writing songs and started rehearsing.

"It was a sort of a secret."

"But we just weren't able to find all the musicians we wanted within one phone call. We needed people who could negotiate the chord changes and stuff and the same time we needed guys who'd work for nothing - and they're very difficult to find."

Fagen says Katz kept the record company cool - they were still under the impression Becker and Fagen were staff-writers - and kept them in the dark about what they were doing.

Anyway, there are currently eight in the band - a nucleus of five (Becker, Fagen, drummer Jim Holder, guitarists Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias) plus second drummer Jerry Porcaro, keyboard-player Mike MacDonald and percussionist Royce Jones.

"We're a big noisy band now," comments Fagen.

For one American tour the group were augmented by several black back-up chicks, but dropped them because that was getting too much like show business.

Fagen sees the band as a flexible, unit: "It's kind of a workshop…'cause we're always juggling musicians around - although lately the eight musicians we have now seem to be working out very well. The band as it stands is now quite stable."

At one time there was another singer, David Palmer, but things didn't work out and he ended up singing on only a couple of tracks on their debut "Can't Buy A Thrill" album.

Back to Fagen: "I did most of the singing on the first album and on the albums since. But then we realised that in order to sell records you have to go out and actually play."It was very difficult to convince me to get up in front of people and sing. But finally I got enough, courage to do it, And I've been getting into it slowly. Now it's come together pretty well."

"Can't Buy A Thrill" was recorded over a couple of months before the group ever worked live. In fact Becker and Fagen had done very little live work at all then, although the rest of the musicians had been on the road with various outfits.

"The first album was more or less experimental. I think the latest one comes closest to what we've been wanting to do," says Fagen.

Two American hit singles came from "Thrill," "Do It Again" and "Reelin' In The Years."

Now, if like me, you were under the impression Becker and Fagen didn't compose “Do It Again" (it's described on the sleeve as traditional) then you're wrong.

"You should never believe anything it ever says on a Steely Dan record. It's mostly a bunch of lies and bullshit that we write just to confuse the listener. But we did write it sort of like a ballad, and it told a story," illuminates Fagen.

And now let's talk a little about Becker and Fagen's fascinating lyrics.

"We don't necessarily try to communicate any specific thing to the listener. It's more or less we try to communicate an impression, and the listener has the freedom to interpret as he wants, says Fagen.

I can see what he means. I thought Pretzel Logic - the song, not the actual album - was a totally surreal lyric with no real meaning. But according to Fagen it's about time travel:

"When it says, 'I stepped up on the platform / The man gave me the news', we conceived the platform as a teleportation device. And there are other key lines like 'I've never met Napoleon but I plan to find the time'"

"What we're actually saying is I plan to find the time in that he lived in."

And here's Fagen's conception of "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," the single from "Pretzel Logic":

"That's a very simple love song to a young lady. I always thought it was a rather erotic, decadent sort of thing. Here you find a guy, a rather rich gentleman living in a resort, and he somehow manages to capture this young lady."

And what about "Show Biz Kids" from "Countdown To Ecstasy." Exactly what is it that those girls chant incessantly? "You go to Lost Wages," meaning Las Vegas. Like, it's a kind of joke in the United States to call Las Vegas 'Lost Wages' 'cause it's a gambling centre.

"'Through With Buzz' was just about a more-or-less platonic relationship between two young people. There's nothing really sexual about it until one of the young people in the relationship realises he's being used and starts having paranoid fantasies and breaks off the relationship. There's no symbolism or anything. We never used puns. It's a very saccharine sounding track with a very cynical lyric. We often do that for an ironic purpose. That is to juxtapose a rather bitter against rather sweet music."

I suggested that the "Pretzel Logic" album seemed their most accessible album.

"We really don't think about it. The record company was starting to get annoyed with us because they couldn't get a single off 'Countdown To Ecstasy'. The only thing we did was tightened up the arrangements. The songs weren't quite so long. And 'Night By Night' was basically written for commercial purposes."

When we recorded ‘Do It Again' we thought it was something we could sort of stretch out on and take solos. I did a long solo - about six minutes - it ended up as the single"