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.