Steely Dan have always delighted in inscrutability, refusing with an elitist sneer to be fully intelligible to "hoi polloi." Yet "Deacon Blues," the most puzzling song on their new record, "Aja" (ABC), seems enigmatic inadvertently. It's not a matter of mystifying juxtapositions here -- of "bad sneakers and a Pina Colada/My friend" -- but of where Walter Becker and Donald Fagen stand in relation to the song's narrator, who aspires to the romantic dissipation of the jazz musician's life. Are they scornful of his naive vow to "play just what I feel," of his simple dream of "Sharing the things we know and love/With those of my kind"? And how are we to take "I cried when I wrote this song"? Whose tears are these? Are Becker and Fagen trying to be, of all things, sincere? And are they capable of it?
Though these questions are unanswerable, they point to the problematic nature of "Aja," an album whose lyrics are preoccupied with home and with where (if anywhere) one belongs. And the record is Steely Dan's first failure because Becker and Fagen have lost their arrogant sense of place and purpose.
There was a time when no American rock band mattered more than Steely Dan, for they did as much as anyone to drag pop music, kicking and screaming, into the '70s. They did it by amassing a devastating critique of the sensibility of the '60s and by proffering their own as infinitely more sensible. And, for a while, it seemed so.
Consider, for instance, their all-out attack on the concept of freedom, that rallying cry of pop music and youth culture in the '60s which was amplified by an expanding economy and the baby-boom generation's strength in numbers. The Dan put it bluntly on their very first album in "Only a Fool Would Say That":
'I heard it was you
Talkin 'bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn't be
And only a fool would say that."
They came bearing George Santayana's bad tidings (from his "Classic Liberty"): "Any day it may come over us again that our modern liberty to drift in the dark is the most terrible negation of freedom."
According to Becker and Fagen, it wasn't the Establishment, our parents or our presidents that imprisoned pop's white, middle-class audience. Instead we were (are) the victims of our own obsessions, they said, of the "perversities" for which Steely Dan's lyrics have been so notorious. Becker and Fagen compiled a portrait (perhaps a shooting) gallery of compulsives: the gambler in 'Do It Again"; the man who couldn't say no to the rich woman's sexual demands ("I foresee terrible trouble/And I stay here just the same") in 'Dirty Work"; the cornered psychotic ("I hear my inside/The mechanized hum of another world") in 'Don't Take Me Alive'; the Randy Newman nut who was "never gonna do it/Without the fez on" in "The Fez." None of these people could control himself, nor could very many others in Steely Dan's underworld of mechanistic mentalities. Small wonder that one of their favorite words was "zombie."
What turned many of these characters into zombies was precisely what the '60s celebrated: the freedom to fuck and take drugs. With few exceptions ("Rose Darling" and, perhaps, 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and 'Any Major Dude Will Tell You," which may or may not be addressed to women), Steely Dan's lyrics have been violently misogynistic. That Becker and Fagen named their group after a dildo is apt, for many of the songs ("Fire In The Hole," for instance) have described the perils of intimacy with women. Even their early album titles -- "Can't Buy A Thrill, Countdown To Ecstasy" -- suggested that orgasms were strictly mechanical or couldn't be had for love nor money. "Torture (was) the main attraction" of the females in Steely Dan's songs: "Well I did not think the girl/Could be so cruel." They habitually deceived ("Then you love a little wild one/And she brings you only sorrow"), yet they were dangerously habit-forming ("All the time you know she's smiling/You'll be on your knees tomorrow"). When Fagen sang, "I fear the monkey in your soul," he (and/or the character) may have been addressing a woman who was a junkie, but he was also afraid of his addiction to her, the monkey in almost everyone's soul. Drugs and another substitute phallus, the syringe, also pervaded Steely Dan's music and debilitated their users. Like gambling, also a persistent image, dope offered only a fleeting illusion of freedom. And a gun, yet another sexual symbol on which Steely Dan's lyrics were fixated, didn't do much good, either. Unlike Californian neighbors (such as The Eagles) who romanticized outlaws' flings with freedom, Becker and Fagen portrayed the gunman as a deadly schlepp:
"When you're born to play the fool
And you seen all the Western movies
Weren't you the one who does it wrong?
...With a gun, with a gun
You will be what you are just the same..."
To twist "Reelin' In The Years" out of context, the "everlasting summer" of the '60s was "fading fast" when Steely Dan began writing the decade's obit in 1972. Many explanations of that demise have long been cliches: Altamont, the destructiveness of drugs, the dashing of revolutionary hopes, the belated realization that rock was simply another commodity in a capitalist economy, the entry of its audience into the adult work force just as that economy began to decline. But Steely Dan adduced another reason: (ab)normal psychology. The counterculture was an extension of orthodox liberalism insofar as it liked to believe that usually the causes of people's frustration were external: the environment (in the broader, not merely ecological, sense), the government, an uptight morality, whatever. One of its greatest shortcomings, which Steely Dan rectified to the point of redundancy, was its failure to recognize the unhappiness, if not the evil, that lurks within the hearts of men and women.
What little liberty Steely Dan's music enjoys is generally sandwiched into its guitar and saxophone solos, which are usually performed, ironically by hired guns -- session players. And their lack of faith in freedom has probably encouraged Becker and Fagen to cleave closely, despite their fondness for jazz, to conventional rock structures The constraints of their songs; formats have been the musical equivalents of their characters' confinement. Then, too, they distrust improvisation: whereas the '60s applauded Wordsworth's "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and enshrined the indulgent guitar solo, Becker and Fagen, probably convinced that any powerful feelings were vile, scorned romanticism and imposed on their music the strictest controls. Doubtless they were delighted as Steely Dan the group dwindled to just the two of them -- as 'Skunk' Baxter and Michael McDonald defected to the Doobie Brothers, there was no question who was issuing the orders, and who was following them.
But Becker and Fagen's fetish for control makes their relation to the jazz that flavors their music equivocal, to say the least. For jazz has almost always depended on, indeed celebrated, spontaneity and improvisation. Steely Dan's allusions to jazz have sometimes seemed little more than a means of expressing Becker and Fagen's condescension to rock, of showing off their hip superiority to the medium of the masses. Their best work, however, has given each its due by wittily juxtaposing them: quoting Horace Silver's "Song for My Father" and a snatch of the Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," for instance, or, on "My Old School," their greatest recorded performance, setting a lurching, almost epileptic, guitar solo against a backdrop of bemused saxophones.
The perplexity of "Deacon Blues" seems to acknowledge, wittingly or otherwise, Steely Dan's estrangement from genuine jazz. And "Aja," their most jazz-like album to date, fails because it cannot overcome, try though it might, a distance it mostly pretends not to recognize. There's no tension here between warring opposites, for instead of juxtaposing rock and jazz, Becker and Fagen have attempted to homogenize them. Sure, Wayne Shorter plays one solo, but this doesn't mean diddly-shit when the horns have been "arranged and conducted" by a schlock-meister like Tom Scott and the rhythm charts "prepared" by Larry Carlton, Dean Parks and Michael Omartian. Once distinguished by the quality of their sidemen, Steely Dan are now using the same drones everyone else in LA employs. "Aja" doesn't combine the best of both worlds; it reduces rock and jazz to supper-club pablum. Much of this album could have been recorded by Chicago. Becker and Fagen don't seem to have noticed that 'fusion" music has become commonplace -- or that a significant segment of the pop audience they have patronized since 1972 has grown considerably more sophisticated than they are (judging from "Aja") in its appreciation of jazz. Hermetically sealed in the recording studio, Becker and Fagen have lost touch.
The problem is this: Steely Dan's initial premises have outlived their usefulness. Becker and Fagen never stood for anything so much as they stood against the '60, but even Joni Mitchell, for instance, has spent the better part of her career insisting that "free love" is a contradiction in terms. Steely Dan must realize that the decade against which they have reacted so bitterly no longer needs to be debunked. (Pop music today suffers from too much technical perfection and too little sloppy feeling, which is one reason punk rock is so crucial.) The uncharacteristically benign lyrics of 'Aja" are concerned with home and where one belongs because the turf Becker and Fagen staked out has been swept out from under their feet. "This is the day/Of the expanding man," "Deacon Blues" begins, and Becker and Fagen must expand or else decline into being "nattering nabobs of negativism." Indeed, the negative impulse behind so much of their music (and lyrics) had begun to yield diminishing returns by 1975 when "Katy Lied" appeared. The formal perfection of that album did not gloss over its spiritual aridity. and instead of intriguing, the cryptic lyrics to many of the songs suggested that they were about nothing at all -- certainly nothing that mattered.
"Aja" is an attempt to escape Steely Dan's cul de sac, but bland fusion is another blind alley. At the end of the opening cut, a female chorus intones, rather listessly, "So outrageous." Yet there's nothing remotely outrageous about "Aja." And just as Becker and Fagen seem, what with their new manager (Irving Azoff) and impending label change (to Warner Brothers), to be on the brink of breaking big, they have become, if not irrelevant, drastically less important.