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..."