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"

Say "HELLO" to STEELY DAN - And The Six Who Make It Work

 From Hit Parader, written by Martin Fredric

To Steely Dan, everything comes down in the end to the music. Nothing else matters... nothing is allowed to break the concentration there's nothing in their lives they'd rather be doing not for love or for money or for just plain fun.

"It's a matter of everyone understanding the music is the most important thing," is the way they all put it. Their image even their very personal self-images relates to the music and the music alone. You might call them the complete musicians, guys who live for very little else, and the strength and the purity that comes out of that kind of concentration is what makes an unwavering and ever-growing circle of die-hard fans feel that this group is not merely of the moment. Relatively new as groups go their first birthday as a complete six has just about happened - it's already easy to see that they are classy, and in their way, classic, too solid to be just for today.

The nucleus of the Steely Dan is the songwriting team of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. It all began some five years ago, when Becker, a seventeen-year-old bass guitarist, ran into nineteen-year-old Fagen, already a keyboard wizard and vocalist. That was at Bard College and they've been playing and writing together ever since.

"Mostly writing together," they protest. "Our only playing experiences had been scattered studio work, pick-up band stuff, and about two years with Jay and the Americans in their little back-up
orchestra."

Not bad, but hardly what they were looking for even back then. But the break the step that would let them get on to what they thought they should be into didn't really come until little more than a year ago. It was then that their producer, Gary Katz, became staff producer at ABC/Dunhill in Los Angeles and took "everyone that he knew along with him. And that included me and Donald," Walter explains. "We went out as staff writers, but we began secretly in the basement of Dunhill offices to assemble a rock-and-roll band. Jeff Baxter and Jim Hodder came out when we did, and then there were four."

Jeff, a whiz on guitar and pedal steel guitar, just happened in L.A. at the time, trying, as he still is, to achieve his one big goal "to be the best stringed-instruments player in the world." With Steely Dan, he feels, it could happen. And that's the best thing he's felt since the days he was born and raised in Mexico City. Known to friends and foes alike as "Skunk" - "because I never used to change my socks" -his musical education began back in the old hometown where his generous parents treated him to eleven years of classical piano training. He repaid them by joining a rock-and-roll band that played at the "Gringo School" dances in Mexico.

He left Mexico to attend the Taft School for Boys in Connecticut, where he listened to rock music, began playing the guitar and met up with a young man named Dave Palmer, now his fellow Steely Danner. Dave remembers Jeff as "a little freaky seventeen-year-old dude, running around saying he loved music and everything." His real career as a rock musician began when he moved to Boston and began working in a record store. One day, a member of Ultimate Spinach happened by, mentioned in passing that the band was looking for a dynamite guitar player.

"Me!" Jeff cried, and that was that. Eventually, of course, Ultimate Spinach broke up, Jeff tired of "nothing happening" on the Boston scene, and followed his dream to L.A. - and Steely Dan.

Jimmy Holder, drummer, percussionist and vocalist, began his musical career in Boston as a child when he learned to play the accordion. But he knew even then that he was not following his natural calling because, "I was always banging on something."

Eventually, he got his first drum kit and just kept banging away until he joined the Bead Game, Boston's own resident hippy band.

"You know, we all lived together in one house, never rehearsed, and when we got on stage, we were really sloppy. But people came to hear us anyway."

At this point, Jimmy met Gary Katz, who became the producer of Bead Game, and was eventually brought out to L.A. to become the drummer for Steely Dan.

"I like what I play in this band. I like to play strong rhythms, nothing too fancy, but strong. I like to make things go."

And then, like the boys said, there were four.

Shortly thereafter, Denny Dias came out, making it five.

Denny, on guitar and electric sitar, began his love affair with the strings at age thirteen, in Hicksville, Long Island, east of Manhattan Island. "I picked up an acoustic guitar my father brought home for about five dollars. It only had three strings on it."

His career as a musician began nine months later when he formed his first band called the Saints, whose theme song, natch, was "When the Saints Go Marching In."

He studied guitar steadily for the next few years, and finally decided to drop out of school to devote all his time to his band.

School for Denny, by the way, was The Downstate Medical School, College of Health Related Professions, where he majored in Bio-medical Computer Science.

"I figured I'd devote my full time to music. Really, it doesn't matter how talented you are in music, you can flop just as easily, but I figured I'd give it a whirl. I had this band, and I quit school and then the bass player quit the band. So I put an ad in the Village Voice and ..."

"Guess who showed up?" interrupts Walter Becker at this point.

"A bass player and a piano player," laughs Denny, "Becker and Fagen showed up."

"The band disintegrated immediately," adds Walter.

So Denny wasn't doing much musically when the call came from California that his two old pals were trying to make things pop - and were maybe doing it.

"This band is what I've wanted to do since I met Walter and Donald and heard the songs they wrote," says Denny, a look of exquisite contentment on his face.

Together these five, almost-happy guys began putting an album together. About two-thirds of the way through, who should show up to make their happiness complete - not like a bad penny, but a good one - but David Palmer.

Dave, who handles the lead vocals, began singing with high school bands in Plainfield, New Jersey, "about fifty miles out of Newark." His first professional gig, just out of high school, was with a band called Middle class, which was produced by Jerry Goffin and Carole King. "We came to New York and started to play in the Village, at the Cafe Bizarre and that whole terrible scene. All those people who have become Village legends, I knew them all back then."

Ultimately, not even Goffin and King could prevent a common show-biz phenomenon among beginners from happening "Frustration. Futility. Poverty. Any number of things" that caused Middle Class to break up.

It was not the best of times for David who:

"Went to Florida, flipped out a month or two, went crazy.

"Came back up North and decided to go to Emerson College.

"Flipped out."

"Joined Jake and the Family Jewels."

On this period, he adds, "It was a good band. Jake is one of the best writers out of New York. He's great. He's a legend in his own time." But all the same, the band broke up within six months. So Dave:

"Joined a band in Martha's Vineyard (Cape Cod, Mass.) called Quinaimes, made an album for Elektra, broke up.

"Went to Boston; got a job in a factory.

"Came back to Jersey; got a job in a factory.

"That was the lowest point of my life, believe me. So when Jeff called and said, 'There are these two writers out here and they're completely insane - come right away,' I did. I was scared. But I looked at all my New York friends who were down and out, couldn't write, couldn't do anything, so I said all right. Took off across the country."

Says Walter Becker, remembering his arrival, "We saw his teeth and then we knew. Anyone with six eye teeth is okay with us."

"I'm not really trying for an effect," says Dave of his performing. "Just energy on stage which is good, healthy. That's all. I sweat a lot. I bathe a lot. I guess I'm working toward what makes us all the best... that's all."

"And that," say Becker and Fagen, "we trust, brings you up to date."

But what about the nucleus itself - the real Walter Becker and Donald Fagen?

Outside of their rock-and-roll band, both appreciate, in fact revere, certain jazz musicians - "the best from any period, the best. From post bebop to John Coltrane, and earlier stuff, too, like Bix Beiderbeck, Jelly Roll Morton, of course, Scott Joplin and his Maple Leaf Rag, Sonny Rollins and his Apache Haircut. Anyone who's good, really good, who doesn't have to think about anything when he's playing except playing." Don's also into certain classical composers of the twentieth century ... Igor Stravinsky, Berg ... "all those composers responsible for bringing classical music to an end."

As good as Steely Dan is as a whole, it is still the songs which are most unique, the most impressive aspect of the group's music. Don claims there is a kind of a formula to it. "The typical Steely Dan song would include a penetrating verse, a rousing chorus, an inspired bridge and, of course, a no-holds-barred instrumental of some sort. Pop songs with some kind of structure that's interesting and can be developed. We're actually pretty traditional in that, but the chords are usually more interesting than most rock and roll, I think.

"We have recurring themes, but we don't have any particular fixations. Anything is grist for our mill. There's no real limitations on it. We can write about anything.

"Our lyrics contain certain associations which we hope will evoke in our listeners the sensation that they are remembering something they forgot a long time ago. Perhaps thousands of years ago! Before they were even born!"

The music is certainly evocative -and maybe even provocative - and best of all to be listened to with a lot of pleasure.