Red Beard: "There has always been something mysterious about the music of Steely Dan, the music they made was exotic and distant, different somehow from the rest of what was on the radio.
Pop music before Steely Dan came along had never been quite this edgy; it had never been quite this cool. What added to the mystery was the fact that Steely Dan was never really a band, not in the traditional sense; oh, there were musicians all right, wonderful musicians like Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and Elliot Randall and Denny Dias. Over the years, though, the musicians would change, but the heart of Steely Dan, the shadowy figures who created it, all remained constant. They continued to weave their strange musical tapestries into some of the most critically acclaimed and popular albums of the 1970s: their names Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and they were the ones who brought Steely Dan to life. They never meant to be pop stars and in most ways they never were; they didn't like to tour, they didn't like to pose for photos and they didn't like to do interviews. To this day, Donald Fagen doesn't really like the sound of his singing voice, to this day he's uneasy with the notion of being a star.
Donald Fagen: I didn't start out to be a singer, and I ended up being a lead singer of Steely Dan by accident really, when we just couldn't find someone who could convey the proper attitude that Walter and I envisioned. You know, I toured for two years with the band as a front man, but it was too stressful for me (chuckling). I'm basically a composer and I enjoy playing a lot, but singing to me makes it a job in a way. 'Cause it's not as easy for me to do as to play, and it doesn't flow as easily. But lately I've been getting back into it and I take a few lessons, singing lessons, from time to time, and maybe I'll start doing some more. (Plays "Do It Again")
RB: With Denny Dias playing the electric sitar, that's Steely Dan's first single (sic), "Do It Again," from their debut album "Can't Buy A Thrill," released in the fall of 1972. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met in the mid '60s when both were students at Bard College in upstate New York. Becker remembers when he first heard of Donald Fagen.
Walter Becker: When I got there Donald had already been there for two years, and he had this good band and all of the gigs that there were on the campus. So I told him that I wanted to play the bass in his band and he said "Well, gee, I've already got a bass player" and that was that. Then at some point subsequent to that he heard me playing the guitar and he had three guitar players in his band and none of them were really any good so we got a new band together. I was the guitar player and we started writing shortly after that.
DF: By that time, I had had a couple of bands with personnel that dropped in and out and I was looking for a good guitar player. I heard him practicing in this kind of campus club, and before I saw Walter I heard him playing from outside the club and I thought it was some kind of authentic blues person 'cause it was very ... just the technique he was using and the sound was really great-sounding, really authentic sounding. Then I went in this club and there was this white kid with blond hair playing the guitar -- a red Epiphone guitar, actually -- and the reason he sounded so authentic was he had learned from another kid called Randy California, who had a couple of bands in the '60s, and he was a neighbor in Queens and Randy in turn had learned from real blues people 'cause his father had been in blues bands for a long time. So actually Walter is in some sort of line of authentic blues players and we immediately got along very. We had a lot of things in common, we were both jazz fans who had also become interested in blues and rock 'n' roll and had a similar sense of humor and so we really hit it off right from the beginning. (Plays "Brooklyn Owes The Charmer Under Me.")
RB: That's "Brooklyn, written by a couple guys that know a little bit about Brooklyn, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, but that's not Donald Fagen singing the lead vocal. In 1969, Donald and Walter left Bard College and went to New York to try their hand at being pop songwriters. They worked for a while at being back-up musicians for Jay and the Americans, and they also met up with a producer named Gary Katz. It was Katz who, in November of 1971, got them jobs in Los Angeles as staff songwriters for ABC Dunhill Records.
WB: They gave us a little office and we were supposed to write songs that some of the other artists on the label could do, but as it turned out, the songs that we wrote none of them were really very suitable for. They had at that time The Grass Roots, Tommy Roe, Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds and Donald and I weren't very good at writing songs for other people -- especially for those people -- so we tried to write some songs that would be of interest to those people. And they weren't, so we decided we had better just continue along with what we had in mind, which was doing our own record featuring our own bizarre songs. (Plays "Kings")
RB: That's called "Kings," with a guitar solor by Elliot Randall. What originally had drawn Becker and Fagen together was their shared love of jazz, and certainly jazz influences were a big part of the Steely Dan sound. The obvious question is why didn't they become jazz musicians themselves, why did they turn towards pop?
WB: Jazz had kind of dead-ended in a modal, improvisational style that was not really interesting to me or Donald. And in fact most of the fire and creative energy that had once been invested in jazz music was now in pop music and that seemed like the direction to go in for both of us, so we were aware of the fact that although jazz was a wonderful kind of music, it wasn't necessarily of any interest to anybody else at the time. The things that we tried to do were primarily influenced by blues and the pop music scene in general as it existed at that time.
RB: With Gary Katz lobbying heavily on their behalf, executives at ABC Records finally decided to let Walter and Donald record their own songs -- material that had been considered too strange for more mainstream artists -- and if the music was unusual for more mainstream artists, so was the name they chose for their band.
WB: The name was borrowed a dildo that was in the book "The Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs. We were stuck for a name and we had used this particular name before in a song, and now we had a steel guitar player in the band. It seemed like a good name to us. In fact, it turned out it had a certain zing to it, and helped the band be popular at the beginning I think. (Plays "Midnite Cruiser")
RB: "Midnite Cruiser" with the lead vocal by Jim Hodder. There were a number of lead vocalists on "Can't Buy A Thrill," including David Palmer who was brought in halfway through the sessions to sing the songs "Brooklyn" and "Dirty Work." The reason was because Donald Fagen simply didn't feel comfortable as lead singer. I asked Donald how the band felt at his insistence that other people sing some of the songs.
DF: Well, I think they were ... they had a conflict about it on the one hand, because Walter and I wrote them and knew what they were about and understood the attitude that was best to convey them, they realized that I could do that. On the other hand, I had a very small range and really hardly any experience, and they sort of looked at it two ways, on the one hand they wanted somebody with a bigger voice, a kind of thrilling rock 'n' roll vocalist, but on the other hand I think everyone knew that we just weren't gonna find anybody who could convey the attitude which was really the most important thing, so they wanted me to do it. So there was some pressure, and finally after Dave Palmer did a few tracks -- which he did quite well -- it wasn't really representative of what the thing was all about. So finally Dave left and I was elected, really.
RB: By the end of their first tour, before the second album started, David Palmer was gone and Donald Fagen, like it or not, was the voice of Steely Dan.
WB: David Palmer left -- I guess now it can be told. It was obvious at the time to us that the real sound of the band was Donald's vocals, and moreover David's live performance style was kind of at odds with what we were trying to project as a musical entity, and so there was just an amicable parting of the ways. You know it had kind of been an afterthought that David joined the band, mainly for purposes of live performance, and it just didn't really pan out that well. (Plays "Dirty Work")
RB: With David Palmer on lead vocals that's "Dirty Work." Although "Can't Buy A Thrill" was released in late 1972 the first single, "Do It Again" didn't hit the charts until February of 1973, but it went higher than anyone could have guessed, going all the way to number six. Considering that most people had considered most of his songs uncommercial, I asked Donald Fagen if he was surprised at the extent of Stecly Dan's mainstream success right out of the shoot.
DF: We were very, very arrogant teenagers -- well, we were in our twenties but we were still basically teenagers -- and we always felt that we would ... one of our things would hit. We were extremely confident and although it was very exciting, I think we probably downplayed it among ourselves in a way, because for one thing we figured it would be just a one-hit deal, so we sort of said "Well it's a hit, but a lot of people have these one-hit records and so what?" and it was also something frightening about becoming known. (Plays "Fire In The Hole")
RB: Another fine one, that's "Fire In The Hole." The album soon went gold, peaking at number 17 in the chart. Steely Dan's first was a hit and that made Donald Fagen a little uncomfortable. DF: You know, before, we were having a lot of fun playing, and all of a sudden there's all this pressure and we start rehearsing more and trying to make it really tight. There was a lot of pressure on me, too, because all of a sudden I realized that, well, the sort of point of no return, where now I'm the lead singer of a rock In' roll band and is this really what I want to do? It was both very exciting and also frightening at the same time.
RB: In the years following "Can't Buy A Thrill," Becker and Fagen slipped further and further out of the public eye. By 1974 Steely Dan had stopped touring. Becker and Fagen never really fit into the music business machinery, something that Fagen realized even before the first Steely Dan tour.
DF: The whole pop scene had been changing while we were rehearsing this band and making a record, and by '72 or '73 it had become something unfamiliar to us. There was a lot of spectacle beginning to start in rock 'n' roll and we'd end up opening for bands with very high shoes. A lot of British bands with very high shoes, and also a lot of Texas blues bands, and we could just see both the audiences and the music was changing a lot.
I think for us having come out of jazz and the sort of New York Bleeker Street scene, folk scene and folk-rock scenes, the whole sort of visual spectacle part of touring was really not something that we were familiar with. 'Cause we used to go to see jazz in clubs and jazz musicians -- especially in the '50s -- although they had their own kind of show business, it didn't have that much spectacle aside from the spectacle of musicians playing and their personalities and so on. So when all this started happening, because we weren't that kind of performance, it seemed very strange and also the audiences started being a different kind of audience than we were used to.
We were touring in mid-America and the South, and people basically wanted to have a party and we got a lot of "Let's boogie!" Originally we were opening for a lot of heavy metal bands, because those bands always tour, they always need opening acts. So we did a lot of those. It was very strange even though the audiences really liked it, generally speaking; it was a very strange scene. I think we felt alienated from the whole thing soon after we started, really. (Plays "Only A Fool Would Say That")
RB: As Becker and Fagen retreated into the safety of their recording studios, Steely Dan's music reached more people than ever. The mystery surrounding its creators seemed only to add to its appeal.
WB: You know I spent the better part of a decade of my life working on those records and songs, and I'm glad that it's held up stylistically and is still appealing to people ten years later or twenty years later. I'm glad that it's held up better than some of the clothes I was wearing at that time or my haircut. I think that that's rewarding, and it's also nice to think that there are enduring values in things that will make them continue to be of interest, even at a time when styles are very different and that it's possible to tap into those values and make something that will last.
RB: I'd like to thank Donald Fagen and Walter Becker for reelin' in a few of the years with us this week. Congratulations to Walter Becker on his production of Rickie Lee Jones' new album and we'll be anxious to hear Donald Fagen's next solo LP. Thanks a lot guys."
Issue 15 contents | Metal Leg overview | The Steely Dan Internet Resource