The Prophecy of Walt/Don
W1P
The following interview with Donald and Walter first appeared in Musician
magazine, circa 1980.
STEELY DAN
Those consummate troublemakers, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, are finally
cornered, producing dangerously controversial observations on film, literature,
Free Jazz, touring and the music of Steely Dan, undermining nearly every tenet
of the music industry.
By David Breskin
Three years, two hundred out-takes, a few mistakenly erased tracks, and one
shattered shank after Aja, Steely Dan has come sauntering out of hibernation
with a ravishing new record, Gaucho. It's elegant, it's extravagant; it shows
again why Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the masters of Ellingtonian Backbeat
Coolpop-Jazzrock, are the closest thing this generation has to pre-war
sophistication of Porter and Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Weill and Waller. If Aja
convinced Woody Herman to let his big band loose on Steely Dan material (Chick,
Donald, Walter and Woodrow, 1978), prompted a Berklee College of Music
songwriting analysis course featuring their work, and elevated the taste of the
frat-dance college crowd, one wonders what kind of a dent Gaucho might make.
One thing it WON'T do is send Steely Dan back on the road, not even after
Becker's car-crunched leg heals completely. Nor will they perform in their
native New York. So we are left solely - and quite happily - with the music at
hand.
Which is, as may be expected by now, sublime and fragrant and audaciously
smooth. Steely Dan Inc.'s revolving door of studio sidemen hasn't stopped
swinging yet - some 36 grace Gaucho - and I mean this in the musical sense as
well: rarely have so many done so little spontaneous blowing for so much music
that sounds so fresh. But it probably won't sound that way upon first or second
listen; chances are it will sound soft and round, blandly pleasant, almost
superficial. With further listening, each or the record's seven tunes opens and
deepens, revealing the harmonic jewels and subtle understated solos. At first
obscured by the dominant colors of the surface, background colors become
apparent, much as they will in fine oil paintings as your eye moves closer and
closer to them; rythmic nuances make themselves FELT; each piece eventually
jumps out of bed with the others and goes its own way: the patina, a rather
mundane orgy of highgloss sensuality, gives way to the substance - seven
different compositions in profound intercourse with their own partners, their
indigenous lyrics.
As for the lyrics' subject matter, rest assured Steely Dan enters the '80s with
some timely tales of tawdry high-life and desultory desperation. Gaucho
overflows with mystics, coke dealers, sexual rivals, gosling girls ignorant of
'Retha Franklin, concupiscent Charlies out for "that cotton candy," playground
hoopers, Third World schemers mobilized on First World lawns, surprisingly gay
friends and bodacious cowboys. The stories are rich, richer than Aja's, the
metaphors subversive and witty.
I recently spoke with Messrs. Becker and Fagen at an MCA rented suite of the
Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South in New York. As I entered the room, the
two jokingly whined about the day's previous interviewers; every one, it seems,
had grazed over the parched grass of basic bio material, asking , "So did you
two really meet at Bard College?" With furious swipes of my pen, I mimed
scratching that one off the top of my list of questions and mumbled something
about my masterpiece being destroyed.
MUSICIAN: It HAS been a considerable time since Steely Dan first started: how
do you feel you've grown as artists, as musicians and lyricists, since that
time?
FAGEN: [Long pause] It's a matter of maturing. Becoming more selective with
material, knowing what to write about, being able to pick and choose - showing
more discretion than in earlier days. Musically, our harmonic vocabulary and so
on has expanded a great deal... so I feel we've progressed a lot since our
first records. They are plain embarrassing, if you listen to them.
MUSICIAN: When you look back at your older work - as all artists, regrettably
or enthusiastically, must do - do you think, "Oh God, that just wasn't it at
all?"
FAGEN: [laughs] Well, yeah, you know I don't listen to our old records, but if
I happen to hear one on the radio, my general feeling is humiliation. I don't
really understand some of our earlier stuff.
MUSICIAN: At what point can you begin to understand yourself, listening back?
1974?1975?
FAGEN: The next album I like pretty well. The one we haven't done yet. The rest
of them are fairly humiliating.
MUSICIAN: You don't feel Gaucho is what you want to sound like?
FAGEN: Well, on the humiliation scale each album gets lower and lower. I think
starting with Pretzel Logic, I began to like a few cuts here and there as
things I can really listen to.
MUSICIAN: How do you feel, Walter?
BECKER: Differently. But I don't listen to them either. I mean there were a lot
of things that were very shoddily done, and a lot of things that were just bad,
but probably different things for me than for Donald. We were doing the best we
could, but f-ck it, it wasn't very good.
FAGEN: It's like: have you ever seen a picture of yourself taken in 1969 or '70
with a group of girls in mini-skirts or something and you say...
BECKER: What is that a--hole doing there, or why was I wearing that sweater or
a shirt with a fake turtle-neck or something. It's just aged. But I don't think
it's aged that much. The stuff that is lousy was lousy then.
FAGEN: Yeah, that's true...well, harmonically we were naive.
BECKER: And we were miming a lot of things, we were clowning around.
FAGEN: We started out imitating, as most people do...
BECKER: [slyly] And we continue to, in a much subtler way. Nothing comes from
nothing. But Do It Again is a good f-cking record. Reelin' In The Years is a
good record.
FAGEN: I agree with that.
BECKER: It's only f-ckin' rock n' roll. It's for kids. It's not Gustav Mahler,
or even Tristin Fabriani. [laughs]
MUSICIAN: Come now, only for kids?
BECKER: Well you know what I mean...
MUSICIAN: Maybe, maybe not; I asked Donald about becoming older than your
audience.
BECKER: I don't know to what extent that's true, because I don't know for sure
who our audience is. There may be a lot of people older than me in our audience
but you must be right. O.K., let's assume you're right, so how do I feel about
that?
MUSICIAN: Yes, how do you feel about that in the context of your role as an
artist, which you must feel is now only to entertain - to stuff hooks into some
kid's ear - but also to create something meaningful for yourselves and your
audience.
FAGEN: Basically, we've always composed for ourselves, which is the same as
composing for your peers.
BECKER: Oh c'mon, you wouldn't do a thing like this for your peers.
FAGEN: I guess I assume that people our age are thinking the same way we are.
I'm not thinking of any individuals.
BECKER: But that's all we have to go by. It's always amazed me that somehow
I've felt we're good but I never knew if there was anybody that would think so.
Not good in any ultimate sense, but good compared to the bullsh-t you hear. But
I don't FEEL any older than my audience. I used to worry about getting old when
I was 17. I couldn't imagine being 30. Now that I'm 30 I can't see the
difference between being 30 and being 17.
MUSICIAN: Did you ever feel like a part of mainstream culture - which I guess
was mainstream counter-culture - in the '60s. I mean: how many times does '68
go into 1981?
BECKER: H-ll no, God, we were wallflowers. We were cranks. What do you say...
FAGEN: Aliens.
BECKER: Yeah, more alien...you got it. A lot of artists are aliens. They're
really a bunch of geeks when you get right down to it.
MUSICIAN: And classical losers too, in the sense that they just don't fit in.
FAGEN: That's right, in the sense that New York is the depository for misfit
Americans - there's a reason that we're here. And why we don't live in
Cincinnati.
MUSICIAN: If artists are geeks, they're also scavengers. Do you find you can
feed off the flesh of the city, the raw material so to speak? Is it a stimulus
to your art that Los Angeles wasn't?
FAGEN: I think New York has revitalized our stuff. But L.A. did a lot for us as
far as giving us a perspective on America.
FAGEN: It gave us something to really complain about, to b-tch about
creatively.
BECKER: You can look at the people you used to see three times a week and twist
them in your mind, treat them inhumanely in your mind, to create a character
without actually defaming them. But you can not accord them the respect that
you accord every other human being. [Long pause] If there were no outside
stimulus, I'd imagine we'd still have something to write about. Something we'd
remembered or imagined.
FAGEN: You can create or compose in a vacuum.
BECKER: [To Fagen] How many times has someone offered you a house or a place to
live and said, "This would be a great place to write a song," for you to "sit
and look out at the garden and write" and it doesn't mean a f-cking thing. You
couldn't care whether the garden is there or not, as long as you don't have to
spread the manure.
MUSICIAN: That reminds me of The Shining, where ole' Jack Nicholson goes into
the mountains, to a big empty hotel to write his novel, to write in peace. And
he ends up typing the same sentence over and over. He's removed himself.
BECKER: Keeping in mind that this is dance music, you are removing yourself
from something by writing about it.
MUSICIAN: Speaking of dance music, can you see a time when you won't be
concerned with prodding people out of their chairs?
FAGEN: I think we both really love rhythm-and-blues basically. A big backbeat.
I don't know if it's a matter of dance music, it's a matter of pulse or feel.
BECKER: Jump music. Rhythm music. Something like that.
FAGEN: [grinning] Race music.
MUSICIAN: I know you agonize over your lyrics. Does it ever frustrate you that
with many of the people listening, they may be going in one ear and, with
little in between to stop them, right out the other?
BECKER: I assume that's the case for most of the audience, or at least a big
part of it, and that's why we try to always make the lyrics not grab your
attention. We want them to SOUND good with the music, even if you're not an
English speaking person.
MUSICIAN: But for those that are listening, atlas and dictionary in hand, you
don't want the lyrics to be one-shot deals, like a comedy record that you put
on once, then tire of it.
BECKER: That's definitely a problem. We have to be clever, but not funny.
FAGEN: We have a problem, trying not to cross the comedy threshold.
BECKER: Everytime someone's in the next room when we're writing a song they'd
say, "Don't tell me you're f-cking writing songs in there, you're not working,
'cause you're f-cking screaming and laughing in there. You're not writing,
you're making up Pope jokes."
MUSICIAN: There's also a certain self-consciousness about being funny. Walter,
you once said you wanted to branch out into odd narrative styles and more
radical approaches as long as they were "funny in the end." What kind of humor
were you referring to?
BECKER: I'm talking about the possibility of maintaining one's sense of humor
under all possible circumstances. Funny as opposed to grave or solemn. Kurt
Vonnegut's not funny, there's nothing funny about Dresden for instance, but
it's FUNNY. And we can't even be that funny in music.
FAGEN: When you're writing about serious subjects, and I guess we are, we have
to remember that it's rock 'n' roll music and the risk of being pretentious is
real high, if you're not careful.
BECKER: I had this in mind in "Gaucho" for instance, which is a conversational
thing. I don't know if it makes sense to anybody.
FAGEN: But we try to give a sense of a situation. It's just too short a time to
really explain everything; it's not a short story, it's not a novel.
MUSICIAN: It has to be a miniature.
FAGEN: Yeah, a miniature and sometimes you can't fill in the details. So you
hope that you give the proper signals, so that people will get a sense of what
you're talking about.
MUSICIAN: Let's use that song as a jumping off point in terms of your lyrics.
Certain artists - perhaps writers or filmmakers more than songwriters - strive
for a certain amount of polysemy, or ambiguity in their work, in service of not
only their desire to create something right in meaning for their audience but
also to keep some of their work personal, kind of private. For instance, if
you're singing, "I Wanna Be Sedated," you have given the whole kernel of
thought to the audience in a very direct way. But if you sing about the
Custerdome, you're hinting at some things but keeping your statement personal,
retaining a certain amount of it for yourselves. Are you conscious of this sort
of strategy.
BECKER: We're just trying to use what fits. It's the exact opposite of the New
York Times, where it's "All The News That's Fit To Print." Here, we print what
will fit. Like you say, it's not even a short story, hardly a paragraph, so the
story doesn't always fit. If you get - as opposed to the Kernel of the thought
- the husk of the thought, maybe you can figure out what kind of story is
there. I don't feel like I'm being stripped of anything if I'm understood. Why
would anybody doing this sort of thing want to preserve something of keeping it
for themselves?
MUSICIAN: I'm not talking about international mystification or impenetrability,
but there is a school of thought which says, while the artist must communicate
to his audience, he may also keep certain details or underpinnings of the art
rather private. It has to do with a between-the- lines quality of a narrative -
meanings that people can guess at but which are not given to them in spoon-fed
fashion.
FAGEN: It depends on the song and the subject matter. The lyrics must be
subordinate to the music and you can only give as many clues as you have time
for.
BECKER: We're not trying to protect anything. It's just that some of the
smaller, pettier details in a story are the best ones. The little things that
you retain in your sense more than in your mind; they may not make sense but
they color something. It's really hard. There may be something to what you're
saying, in that, if something is open-ended, or means more than one thing, or
is elliptical or whatever, someone listening to it carefully enough will in
fact become creative, and fill in the spaces with their own intelligence. And
you'd be amazed at the letters people have written to us about our song. Some
guy wrote us and said "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" is about Eric Clapton and
the number is a joint.
FAGEN: Sometimes it frightens me when we get some weird stoned Moonie with
these weird ideations about these songs, and he starts talking about taking
some kind of ACTION against who knows what.
BECKER: There was a guy living in Las Vegas when our first album came out who
thought - his girlfriend had left him I guess - all of the songs were stories
his girlfriend had told us. He wasn't asking any questions; he just wanted his
girlfriend back. And we didn't know anything about the girl. But he thought
every one of those stories was about him.
FAGEN: It's your basic Arthur Bremmer syndrome. We get a lot of letters that
are written in very small printing with little pictures in the corner.
MUSICIAN: Well, you're talking about the perverse fringe of "active" listeners.
BECKER: No, this is the heart and soul of our audience, I've got news for you.
Those weird people on the street - every hundredth weirdest one has a Steely
Dan record at home.
MUSICIAN: People that are essentially out-takes.
BECKER: Right, or just flipped-out. Like that guy who hi-jacked that bus today
[a friend of theirs had been hijacked in midtown Manhattan] probably has
forty-seven copies of The Royal Scam at home.
MUSICIAN: The point is, despite the Vegas chump, a little restraint or open-
endedness or ambiguity in a lyric - call it what you will - allows one to go
back to a song time after time, and not just sing along, but get farther into
it or think anew about it.
BECKER: Right, it doesn't have to make sense in a narrative way. Something
tells me, though, that we've been better behaved in terms of being more
narrative lately. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. I think with the
narratives that we're undertaking [hearty chuckle] it doesn't really matter.
FAGEN: I think we are communicating a little more directly than we have in the
past.
MUSICIAN: Do either of you write poetry as poetry, that sort of sits around
just waiting for the right piece of music?
FAGEN: Not as poetry per se.
BECKER: I used to do that, a long, long time ago, but I found out poetry was in
much worse shape than any other art form, except maybe painting, which I also
gave up because I didn't like getting paint all over myself.
FAGEN: We have fragments of things.
BECKER: Little lines and couplets...
FAGEN: Story ideas and the like...
BECKER: But nothing in finished form. Rythmically, if you read our poetry on
the page it's nothing really.
MUSICIAN: So you have at least a skeleton of the music first, the chords,
roughly the tempo, etc. and then you work on the lyrics line-by-line, side-
by-side?
FAGEN: We work on them together. One of us will come up with the basic idea,
maybe a few words, and then we'll fill in the blanks together as needed.
MUSICIAN: How do you resolve the conflicts - possibly different strategies on
how to say something even if you both agree as to what will be said - without
resorting to bloodshed?
FAGEN: We often see it in the same way. We've been together for a while.
BECKER: But it usually doesn't make that much difference [if it][?] comes down
to one word.
FAGEN: Usually, if we disagree about something, it may be whether or not
something is singable phonetically.
BECKER: That's HIS story. My story is whether it's something else. That's how
we agree.
MUSICIAN: Walter, you mentioned dabbling in finger-painting and poetry. In all
interviews it seems the interviewer asks for the inevitable listing of musical
influences [and of course the answer is always B.B. King], but I'm particularly
interested in what other artists - could be writers, painters, filmmakers, etc
- have inspired you.
BECKER: You know, we've gotten into trouble on that with the "Steely Dan" thing
[the name of a dildo in Burrough's great novel, Naked Lunch. We've been invited
out to dinner with William Burroughs a few times too many now by people who
don't know us or William Burroughs. So with the caveat, I can say that I like
Samuel Beckett. I think it's ironic and amusing that the greatest living writer
in the English language writes in French.
MUSICIAN: It tells me that he doesn't want to be a show-off.
FAGEN: We both have our individual preferences. Vladimir Nabokov is mine. I'm
not visually oriented, but Walter likes very peculiar movies.
BECKER: A good cheap date. I have weird taste.
FAGEN: Walter's seen The King of Marvin Gardens quite a number of times.
BECKER: Donald goes for the value-per-dollar system.
FAGEN: Francis Ford Coppola stuff: The Godfather, Apocalypse Now.
MUSICIAN: Can you imagine yourselves working on a more expansive musical
project: a full soundtrack, a musical perhaps, or even the songs for a musical?
FAGEN: I'd like to, but the project would have to be perfectly suited to us. I
wouldn't want to write background music, or music that's subordinate to visual
material. Twyla Tharp, the choreographer, had a project she wanted us to write
the music for. The dancing was very good, but she had a script in which the
dancers would speak and the story was, uh... extremely confused, we thought.
BECKER: Mainly, the whole dance project was conceived without any concern for
the music. To her, it was a completed project. It was as if she had done a
painting, and all she needed was the frame. That is to say, the music.
FAGEN: Well we don't know shit about dance, so we sorta bowed out of that one.
But if she did something that had less structure as far as a story I could see
writing music for her.
BECKER: Ronnie Reagan is present, so I wouldn't mind doing a Kurt Weill or
Bertolt Brecht kind of thing. There's potential in that.
FAGEN: Socialist opera.
BECKER: Anarchist opera.
MUSICIAN: What about an extended work - a unified work of considerable length -
whatever you want to call it a suite or opera or whatever?
FAGEN: We've discussed this, like the idea of a concept album, but it's awfully
hard.
BECKER: I thought Aja itself was dangerously ambitious. I really did.
FAGEN: I dunno, I think we work best on miniatures. I like variety. We work
better with vignettes.
MUSICIAN: Anyway, how do you characterize the new record, as opposed to say,
Aja?
BECKER: [Half-kidding] Excellent, excellent. Newer, bluer.
FAGEN : That's a difficult question because we write the songs individually.
They are single audio objects; we don't plan the album conceptually. So it's
hard to characterize the thing as a whole.
MUSICIAN: Well if not different as a whole - I know it was recorded over a
two-year span - then do you see it as a little step forward?
FAGEN: It's possible that we took a few steps backward with this album. In a
way, it's rhythmically more simplistic than Aja.. But the harmonies are
interesting. I don't know if it's better or worse.
BECKER: I don't think there's a progression at this point - it's too deliberate
on our part. We're moving sideways. When you're writing one song at a time over
a long period and you don't know which ones are eventually going to get
recorded and which are then going to be on the record, and then you put them
together in a certain order and put it in a package, all of a sudden it's
SOMETHING.
FAGEN: It becomes something else.
BECKER: It becomes something you hadn't anticipated. It's taken as a whole,
even to me anyway, I take it as a whole. And it has a character as a whole that
the individual parts never had.
MUSICIAN: As your vocabulary grows, musically and lyrically, and you become
more aware of your artistic options, do you find it more difficult to finish a
song? That is, the more strategies you're familir[sic] with, the tougher it is
to decide which one to use?
BECKER: It got tough awhile ago. Yes, the last verse is hard to write. The more
you know, the more you might paint yourself into a corner.
FAGEN: But the way we write - it's more improvisational and instinctual. We
don't really use "strategies" consciously.
BECKER: But nevertheless there it is, the method. By the time you've finished
everything except that last piece or link of a song, you've got to make some
very, very conscious choices.
FAGEN: Alright, we've learned certain things in terms of how to present the
material. We now know what a bridge is supposed to do: it opens up the song
musically. And we tend to open it up lyrically as well - to talk about the
subject more generally than the verses do.
BECKER: And it's also a real release from the tension of the lyrics in the
verses. You're suspended in time for awhile.
FAGEN: [wryly] The traditional popular song form of the '30s and '40s has
served us well.
BECKER: Oh yes, right through the '80s.
FAGEN: I like it, it's a good thing. It's the closest thing we have to a
STRUCTURE for rock 'n' roll. It's blues, and traditional song form.
MUSICIAN: How do you feel about modern improvisational music that diverges from
that structure? Music that's come after the religious and political saxophoning
of the '60s - like The Art Ensemble, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, etc.?
BECKER: I don't like any of it. I'd like to think that I'm open-minded, but
nothing could be further from the truth.
FAGEN: We're real conservatives.
MUSICIAN: A post-modernist like Braxton uses many different kinds of
structures. He's a structuralist of sorts, though maybe not in the mode of
traditional song form.
BECKER: But he can't even play, so what does it matter? I can't figure it out.
He sounds like a guy who has no tone, plays outta tune, and I just don't know
why he's playing what he's playing. Maybe I just heard the wrong records. Now
Sam Rivers - the first album I heard of his sounded very interesting to me, but
lately he sounds exactly like Braxton.
MUSICIAN: Let's go back twenty years - before the advent of religious
saxophoning - you have Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, which sounded so far out
then, sounds almost quaint now - in that it swings like mad, it's fairly
orderly and well-structured and so on.
MUSICIAN: I know. The first time I put on an Ornette record I said, "This is
Charlie Parker music except the guy has a plastic saxophone and no chord
changes." I couldn't believe that people talked about how "modern" it was.
Ornette is not the greatest musician in the world. He has has some bad nights,
let's face it. And if you've ever had to go hear him play the violin, or hear
him with his son or with the electric guitarists, you have to ask, " How free
can a guy with that limited talent be?"
FAGEN: Not that many people can get away with...
BECKER: What he does.
FAGEN: With not having any structure. Very few do.
BECKER: He had a few very good ideas. And he had an incredible band.
MUSICIAN: Well what about some of the ECM artists of the last decade?
FAGEN: Very uninteresting on the whole.
BECKER: [sarcastically] Dance music. But Jan Garbarek is very good.
MUSICIAN: Are you familiar with a Keith Jarrett record Belonging, particularly
a tune called "Long as you know you're living yours"?
BECKER: Yes.
MUSICIAN: Have you ever listened to that up against "Gaucho"?
BECKER: No.
MUSICIAN: I'm not casting any aspersions now, but in terms of the tempo and the
bass line and the saxophone melody it's pretty interesting.
BECKER: Parenthetically it is, yeah [uneasy laughter]
MUSICIAN: At this point the reporter traditionally asks the cornered politican
or athlete to "go off the record."
FAGEN: Off the record, we were heavily influenced by that particular piece of
music.
BECKER: I love it.
[Becker and Fagen later approved their "off the record" responses for
publication.]
MUSICIAN: We were talking about borrowing...
FAGEN: Hell, we steal. We're the robber barons of rock 'n' roll.
MUSICIAN: Well, the only other thing on the record that seems obviously
borrowed is "Glamour Profession." The rhythm and feel of it, and the way the
synthesizer/horn vamp swings against the pulse sounds very much like Dr.
Buzzard's Original Savannah Band.
BECKER: I don't listen to them. Donald listens to them. But I see what you mean
though.
MUSICIAN: I'm not saying it was necessarily a conscious act of pilferage.
FAGEN: That song was influenced by disco music in general.
MUSICIAN: Nouveau Swing Disco?
FAGEN: What you're saying is basically valid. There are other things that are
borrowed too. The bridge on "Glamour Profession" is a take on the bridge of
Kurt Weill's "Speak Low."
BECKER: Which is taken from Ravel.
MUSICIAN: What about popular music? Anything going on that you might be a bit
more enthusiastic about?
BECKER: I've had a tough time with the radio lately. It's pathetic.
FAGEN: The Talking Heads are very interesting. They're a top band.
MUSICIAN: That's what happens when you go to the Rhode Island School of Design.
FAGEN: Fortunately, it's mainly their album covers that I like. The covers and
the guy's eyes are great. There's at least an intelligence behind them, which
is more than you can say for most groups.
BECKER: Further and further as time goes by... they're leaving it in the dust.
FAGEN: I like Donna Summers' records.
BECKER: I bought the single, "Turn Out The Lights." Had to have it.
FAGEN: I did like Dr. Buzzard's first record. But only that one.
MUSICIAN: So I guess it's pretty bleak out there, is that what you're saying?
BECKER: I guess, unless there's something out there that's being suppressed,
which is entirely possible.
FAGEN: Oh, you know what I went for in a way, Ian Drury and The Blockheads.
More of a comedy thing.
BECKER: Warne Marsh is the best I've heard in the past three years.
MUSICIAN: Do you plan to produce another album of his along the lines of the
one with Pete Christlieb?
BECKER: No, no more. Because it's too hard to get Warne what he wants. And he
wants Neils Henning Orsted Pederson, who used to be only great and now is just
RIDICULOUS.
FAGEN: One more thing, I heard a record the other day, a raggy sort of thing,
Scott Joplin rags, by some funny tenor player, Henry Threadgill.
MUSICIAN: That's Air, the supertrio out of the, ahem...AACM.
BECKER: On the other hand, how new is all that - Ragtime is only so recent you
know. But I still like boogie-woogie. Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons.
MUSICIAN: There's often a distinction made between folk-art (let's say
boogie-woogie) or pop-art (let's say rock) and art-art, that is SERIOUS art of
western civilization and all. Where does Steely Dan fit in?
BECKER: Whatever the difference is, we fit in the middle, we hope.
MUSICIAN: I wonder whether the distinction between high and folk art, with the
blues for instance traditionally falling in the latter category, is even
relevant anymore?
BECKER: No, no. Not anymore.
FAGEN: At one time perhaps it was relevant.
"It was a cruel song, but fair" Roger Waters, commenting on "You Gotta Be
Crazy," Los Angeles, California 4/26/75. You down with W1P? Yeah, you know
me.
W1P
Steely Dan - Who Are These Guys?
Rob Kemp
02/23/2001
Each time Donald Fagen and Walter Becker strode to the podium to pick up a
Grammy on Wednesday night, it was hard not to notice stark differences between
the two men and the artists they were up against.
The 50-something pair, who are the songwriting, arranging, and producing nexus
of Steely Dan, are not terribly colorful. Looking at best like relatively hip
accountants, they made cursory, brief remarks, thanking fans and associates and
behaving nothing like their usual eccentric selves.
Backstage, it was another story. Becker cracked wise about possibly apocryphal
Grammy perks: "Well, we get a free trip to Orlando. To Disney World for us and
our escorts. A weekend, an extended weekend."
"Four E tickets," Fagen reminded his partner.
"Four E tickets, and all our breakfasts are covered as long as they are
continental breakfasts," Becker said.
Steely Dan are nothing if not singular - an assertion only strengthened by the
duo's win in the Album of the Year category for Two Against Nature, their first
studio album since 1980's Gaucho. The record debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard
200 albums chart last March and has sold 803,429 copies, according to
SoundScan.
The very title of Two Against Nature conjures images of a united Becker and
Fagen defying the trends that have evolved and enveloped the pop music playing
field. Other recent Album of the Year recipients, such as Santana's
Supernatural last year and Lauryn Hill's Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999,
were by contrast self-evident as products of the pop music environments of the
time.
Steely Dan have always run counter to the prevailing pop music mold, dating
back to their initial run that began with 1971's soundtrack to the film You
Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It. But after winning four Grammys, Fagen joked, "I
think we're in real danger of losing our outsider status."
"Indeed what does he mean by that?" asked Becker. "I think what it shows,
amongst other things, is that our fans, the ones that have survived, have
exceeded to positions of power and influence. It's very flattering that there
are still so many people listening to what we're doing."
Despite their level of popularity, there is nearly no precedent whatsoever for
Steely Dan's music. It involves lyrics amounting to meta-narratives, abnormally
sophisticated harmonies, bewildering time changes, and a knack for a pop hook
that, despite the preceding qualities that seem to be commercial impediments,
regularly sent the duo's albums up the charts in the 1970s.
The pair's music has long been admired by other artists, and especially by
members of the audio community, which has lauded the faultless, exacting
standards of Steely Dan's recordings as the pinnacle of studio craft. This
quite possibly came to bear on the duo's Grammy wins, since audio professionals
make up a large portion of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences,
the group that hands out the awards.
Becker and Fagen grew up around New York and mutually developed a taste for
jazz music, as well as the song craft of the Brill Building. They met as
undergrads at Bard College in 1967, forming a variety of bands together. After
touring with the '60s pop band Jay & the Americans, Becker and Fagen resolved
to become songwriters. But their tunes were too abstract for most pop singers
in the early '70s, so with the encouragement of producer Gary Katz the two
recruited session musicians and formed Steely Dan.
Can't Buy a Thrill (1972) was the first proper Steely Dan record, finding
Becker playing guitar and bass and Fagen singing and playing keyboards. The
album's "Do It Again" (No. 6, 1972) and "Reelin' in the Years" (No. 11, 1973)
became radio standards, and the band embarked on its first tour. There would be
only one other, in 1974, until 1993.
From 1974 to 1980, Fagen and Becker became consummate studio rats, spending an
inordinate amount of time crafting songs with the best studio players of the
day. The ambitious Pretzel Logic included "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" (No.
4, 1974), and the knotty Aja featured "Peg" (No. 11, 1977) and "Deacon Blues"
(No. 19, 1978). Becker and Fagen hardly played on Gaucho, which included the
single "Hey Nineteen."
And that was it for Steely Dan for another 13 years. After completing his first
solo album, 1982's The Nightfly, Fagen busied himself with soundtrack work and
wrote about film music for Premiere magazine. It has been said that he began
work on a follow-up to The Nightfly the day after it was completed, but the
bluesy sci-fi-oriented Kamakiriad, which Becker produced, was not released
until 1993. Becker produced such artists as Rickie Lee Jones in the interim.
The pair's collaboration on Kamakiriad was occasioned by Becker and Fagen's
all-star pickup band the New York Rock and Soul Revue, which gigged around New
York in the early '90s. Once the album was released, the two assembled a band
for a genuine Steely Dan tour, which was followed by another in 1996.
Then it was on to the recording of Two Against Nature. The first Steely Dan
studio record in 20 years was a departure from its predecessor. In terms of
song form, it is more blues-based and not as compositionally elaborate.
Furthermore, its story lines are more clearly articulated.
Strange then, that Two Against Nature's "Cousin Dupree," which won Best Pop
Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal, didn't spark near the controversy
that rapper Eminem's lyrics did. The song details a man's lustful longings for
an underage cousin. Other songs on the album have lyrics about three-way sex
and drug use, but none of it is as gleefully explicit as Eminem's Marshall
Mathers LP.
"We don't actually have any lyrics about pedophilia, per se, in our songs and
most of our lyrics," Becker explained. "Most of our songs are about
relationships. As far as Eminem - I haven't really heard Eminem very much, so I
don't know what to say."
Fagen and Becker were typically obtuse as to why they thought they prevailed
over Eminem when they spoke to VH1's Rebecca Rankin backstage. Fagen said, "We
were both surprised, 'cause I think both of us figured probably Eminem would
win because he's such an attractive young man with so much to say, but we were
surprised."
"I'm beginning to think that maybe the whole thing is fixed, just like
professional wrestling or professional football or something like that," Becker
said, possibly alluding to the group's popularity with the Recording Academy's
many audio engineers.
Steely Dan's entrance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whether a fix or
merely another result of consensus among music industry professionals, will
take place March 19.