She later asked them about how they were being received as opening act for Elton John. Donald replied that the audience were "more than tolerant. I think our music is somewhat sophisticated the way Elton Jobn's is, especially harmonically and lyrically, and they're very receptive."
Another question which amused them was: "What's your ambition as far as where the band's going to go, and what do you feel is the ultimate, the epitome that a band can reach?" Donald said, "I'll let you take this one", and after some more thought and a little stuttering, Walter said, "I'd like to make a couple great records -- records that are totally fulfilling to myself and I'd like to have a band that performs well live and has developed some degree of communication between the musicians."
When asked "How much do you care what people get out of Steely Dan's music?" Donald replied, "We set out to please ourselves more than the audience, I think it's obvious from our records that we're serious in our intent." Walter: "I would say I care more about whether what we're trying to do is ultimately successful to any extent than I care about how many people buy the record."
Talking about their song-writing routine, Walter said "We have a great time composing the songs," and Donald took it up from there: "It takes a great deal of thought and work and energy, but there is an awful lot of hysteria and general jocularity while we're composing these songs, as you can imagine -- I mean these songs are ridiculous, these songs are crazy, these songs should be locked up and put away." He continued on a more serious level. "But we write fiction, as opposed to relating personal experiences -- though, of course, all fiction derives from the author's personal experience anyway." More specifically, he referred to "Black Cow" as being about how a particular incident ("in this case it was a small luncheonette in Anywhere, U.S.A.") will stick out in a person's mind when a relationship ends.
"I would like to take this opportunity to dispel the rumor, which I've heard repeatedly from interviewers, that Don and I ever use codes," Walter said. "We use the English language as we understand it."
Ladd then asked a favorite Dan question, "Why are you fascinated with the Orient?"
Donald: "We used to listen to a lot of Duke Ellington records and he was fascinated with the Orient, and we figured if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for us." 'When Ladd asked if anyone had ever been upset with them at an interview, they said, "There was one Scottish guy who fell asleep in the middle of an interview in London. We took his wallet and took him down an alley and put him in a garbage can."
Donald then explained how they happened across Michael McDonald at an audition for the post Pretzel Logic tour. "He immediately impressed us and we snapped him up."
Under normal circumstances they didn't often discuss the meaning of song lyrics, but he did persuade them to expand on "Kid Charlemagne." Walter said, "He's a casualty of the '60s. Let's just say that society has passed him by somehow and he's a specialist in a specialty that no longer exists." Donald took up the story, "They changed the rules on him, and he's out there in a rented automobile trying to make do."
He then asked them how they regard the show biz aspect of rock In' roll. Not surprisingly, Walter says, I'm not particularly taken with it, I'm more interested in the music than show biz. To tell you the truth, I would've thought if a rock n' roll band set off a smoke bomb sometime during their performance, the audience would've just laughed and laughed and laughed. I would think that eventually that thing would become so obviously a sham that audiences would no longer crave that, but I've been wrong before in thinking that things are so laughable to me that they will soon die out. Maybe it'll just keep getting more and more carnival atmosphere and less musical."
Donald elaborated: "We've been jazz fans for a long time and they don' t make much show of their music, but most people need that if the music doesn't have that interest to sustain."
"When you're trying to cram a lot of information into what is basically a popular song form, you have to leave some holes. We always have a story in mind and try to present it in the most entertaining way we know how. Sometimes we leave a few holes, that's all. And the more zany interpretations they make, the better really," Donald said.
Erwin then said, "The public's interpretations often seem mind-boggling to them," and Walter illustrated his own lack of enthusiasm for explaining lyrical mysteries by saying, "I just usually say yes or no and leave it at that, with no regard as to whether that may or may not be the truth."
One particular incident involved an interviewer deducing that the "number"of Rikki fame was San Francisco slang for a marijuana cigarette. "But we didn't know that," Donald protested. "'The fact is we were simply referring to a phone number, so I think people should take the lyrics more literally to be on the safe side."
Walter was asked how they came by the group name. "We issued the name in a song once and we liked the sound of it and it created an interesting illusion that there was a guy named Steely Dan, or that the title had reference to a pedal steel player. But the relationship between us and William Burroughs is vastly overemphasized by some critics, who see similarities that just aren't there."
Erwin asked what their own worlds were like. "Steely Dan's music is dark because that is the shade of good drama," Donald said. "It's more interesting to write about somebody who's in a life-or-death situation or having trouble in a relationship. It goes back to Greek drama -- they didn't write about people who were having a lot of fun."
All the other musicians have been pared away, Erwin said. "Yeah, well., we didn't wanna be limited by the musicians that we had at the time. They're basically rock in' roll musicians and we wanted to expand harmonically and rhythmically and go for the experience of working with a lot of different musicians. I don' t think it had to do with not being able to fit in or get along with anybody, 'cause we always had a pretty good relationship with people we worked with."
He mentioned their recent unhappy experiences trying to get their first touring band for three years together. "It's very difficult to build a band from scratch when you're dealing with material of the complexity that ours is. To get a band together that really works together in a good way, we'd have to rehearse for a longer time than, well, at least longer than we anticipated on our last attempt a couple months ago."
Once again the conversation was steered around to their songwriting and lyrics. Walter: "We think of ourselves as comparatively detached from our writing, especially compared to other rock artists, who seem to bare their souls to the screaming masses, but it may be that we're not as detached as we think. When a song is written in the first-person neither one of us is really that person, but I still think it reflects things that we actually feel and think. We never set out to write confusing parables."
Gary Katz came in with an explanation concerning a line from "Any Major Dude Will Tell You." "For instance, like in "Any Major Dude," a squonk's tears, I had to ask Donald what the hell that was. A catchy enough phrase that didn't provoke too much thought, except if you wanted to know what a squonk was. But you have to know about it, you can't write about it unless you have known about it: it's a mythical woods animal who had the ability to cry himself into a bag of tears.
"They're into jazz and always have been. They know as much about jazz from its inception to now as any two people I know, from players to songs. "Parker's Band" is a song that was written long before we came to California."
Asked about the latest album,, Walter said, "It's not another way of spelling Asia."
"Aja is a young Oriental girl," Donald explained.
"Donald claims to have known a girl called Aja once, but I doubt it." The conversation ends with Donald claiming, "That song is basically an attempt to refute the idea that there's no rest for the weary."
"The nice thing about that band", Walter added with all the fondness he could muster, "was that we were in the band and there were four guys with suits in front of us. It was like being in the Four Tops."
Donald: "Yeah, I mean, we couldn't play shit, but we were in the band. It was nice, nice. They had uniforms and things. I remember the guy who ran the Seven Seas Lounge at the Newport Hotel in Miami Beach used to complain about the way the band dressed, because Jay and the Americans looked really swell but we were always not quite so natty."
"For that gig they had six horn players, right? Six bad horn players. Sammy Davis was in town and had every good musician in Miami Beach, and so Jay had one great musician who played about nine different instruments. You remember that sax player? And all the rest of the guys were, like, jive trumpet players who would take all the parts up an octave and blow it." Walter continued, "We were writing a lot, but had no vehicle for them. Jay wasn't interested, he thought we were amusing. So when we were offered a job writing songs and actually doing something besides playing "Only in America," it seemed like a nice idea for a change, plus it would pay us every week whether Jay had a club gig or not. I think we realized we wouldn't be writing songs for the Grass Roots for very long and that it was just a dodge. The original Steely Dan was already selected by the time we went to California and we would take them upstairs and say 'Hey, we've just found this fantastic guy and you've gotta sign him for our band' and after a while they stopped asking 'What band?" Then they realized we were gonna do an album."
Morgan asked them why they signed their record contract if it was allegedly so bad. "We'd been kicking around for a couple of years and we wanted to make a record", Donald said. "It seemed to us that if we signed this thing and went in and made a record, it would be good. I think we would've preferred to've grown up on the same block with five or seven guys who thought the same way we did and had a working unit for all these years, but it didn't work out that way and we were all strangers. They were very nice about the whole thing and more or less abdicated their own musical conscious and listened to us - I'm talking about our original band of.six, then five or whatever it was..."
"And then nobody here but us chickens."
He asked them to explain what happened when "FM" came out in 1978. "We had a song out called FM, and naturally the AM stations didn't wanna play a song called FM so they took the A from Aja, which was harmonically compatible, and did a little edit on that and we were surprised to hear AM coming out of the radio where FM should've been. Isn't it wonderful what you can do with technology these days?"
"There are some things that we should've done differently," Walter said. "I can see we overextended ourselves in certain instances and perhaps brought a bad idea to its nasty conclusion, but it would be hard to avoid that. There are very few artists that are even remotely perfect."
"That's right, can't all be winners."
A couple of the lighter stories are worth relating, however. He asked them if they were aware that a songwriting class was devoted to Steely Dan at Berklee. Donald said, "No, this is news to us, Bob. There was a piano teacher there that was very good, a jazz pianist and I remember I had a course with him, but he had to leave because he got a good gig. He had a series of lessons he was supposed to give over a period of 3 or 4 months, but at the last moment he decided the gig was more important, so in one lesson he gave three months' worth of lessons. He was sitting there saying 'Now the function of the half-diminished chord is...' he went through all of musical history in three hours."
In the second part, Klein asked Walter about a report that Mitch Miller, "although he really loves your music," had complained about him playing the guitar all night long. "Yeah, that's true. I live in the apartment below Mitch Miller, but I heard a thud last night. I'd like to get the apartment, right? And I figure if I hear the right thud, I can just tunnel up and answer his calls and live there, too."
"We get all our ideas from Mitch," Donald said. "We have a little microphone that we've snaked up through the pipes and when he's practicing his oboe we just flip on the recorder."
"Actually he can't play his oboe any more because his beard grew up and into his mouth."
Klein then asked Donald if a film score would interest them. "Yeah, we've talked about it from time to time. But our experience with FM wasn't that good - it's the "Heaven's Gate" of low-budget movies." Walter said, "We were warned up front that this might not be Lawrence of Arabia. Just do your song and that's it."
"Remember the time they were playing up in Queens and Jay got subpoenaed? That was no fun."
"That's right, the guy with the gun."
"We don't wanna get into that, if you wanna know the truth, because we could end up with a horse's head in our bed."
Moving on to how Gary Katz secured his job out in California, Walter said, "The situation then was that ABC had the Mamas and the Papas, Barry MacGuire, Three Dog Night, Grass Roots and Bobby Vinton, Tommy Roe, you know, they didn't have a big underground thing going. Gary had a certain type of moustache that convinced them that he would be a good underground producer."
Jeff Baxter took up the story. "Jay Lasker said 'Gary, you didn't tell me that I was gonna get a band with these two dummies.' So we had a band; Jay had a band and he had to go out and buy a PA system, so we could rehearse in one of the offices. It was great, it was like being in a family. I remember when Howard Stark gave me a check for $1,000. I went nuts! Wow! And he looked at me real serious and said 'You go get yourself a nice apartment and find yourself a nice girl and put some money in the bank.' I was flabbergasted.
"Rehearsals'd start around six, 'cause I was repairing guitars and we couldn't practice in the daytime anyway, I cause it was 9-to-5 in the office. So we'd go into our abandoned office around six o'clock with some sandwiches and rehearse until really late."
After rehearsals came the road work, which Jeff Baxter obviously enjoyed a great deal. "Touring? Now this was a touring band; this band knew how to tour. You know, I wish I could tell you some stories, some great stuff. We had Dinky Dawson, who was doing the PA, and the guy who mixed our monitors was interesting. He would set up the monitors so he could hear real well, he'd get a nice sound that he liked and he'd take his violin out and play with us throughout the set. Everything as really shaky."
Donald wasn't nearly as enthusiastic. "I dislike the rigours of the road. It's just I don't like to front a band, you have to talk to the audience) tell jokes. I don't like the jock atmosphere of a travelling rock 'n' roll band - it's corny, boring and silly."
Mary Turner asked Gary Katz about Jeff Baxter and Michael McDonald's departure. "Donald and Walter's music was evolving and it was opening into more sophisticated sort of an expansion of their own style. And they wanted the freedom to be able to use as many styled players as fit the tunes that were starting to be written then. Jeffrey had an opportunity at that time 'cause he had been playing off and on with the Doobie Bros as a guest, which afforded him the opportunity to be on the road a lot, which he enjoys. There was no big blowup or argument. It never happened."
She then brought up the subject of their very demanding studio standards. "We know what a song can sound like and if it's short of that, it's not good yet. So yes, it's boring on the twenty-fifth take but there's a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. So I can endure it, but it is boring sometimes. And it can be very difficult for the performer if you continue to do it, wanting it better than he just did."
Dick LaPalm then spoke about nurturing Steely Dan's talents. "When you're dealing with people as creative as Steely Dan, the atmosphere has to be conducive to creativity. We know the kind of cookies Gary Katz prefers and you can bet when we know that he's coming in, we're gonna have a lot of chocolate whatever-they-are. I know that Roger Nichols, their executive engineer loves Good n' Plenty."
He went on to further illustrate how high the studios' tolerance levels are. "One night we were having a problem with the right speaker, yes and no. It would work for 15 and start cutting out and, in the end it got to the point where we've gotta do something, so Gary Katz came up with the best idea. He picked up a can of cola and just threw it at the speaker and it worked, they did not have one problem from that moment on. The next morning someone came in and said 'Dick, the Valencia cabinet is broken and the grill is cracked - what happened?' Well, someone in the Steely Dan session - we think it was Gary - broke the cabinet, but the speaker worked from that moment on and everyone said, 'Isn't that wonerful?' Again, the important thing is to keep the creative juices flowing."
"Your lyrics are always really good, but they're hard to follow," Turner said.
"We're very much concerned with the sound of the words and the music. There are many instances when we're writing lyrics when we'll sacrifice literal meaning or linear storytelling effects for sound effects. That's the way we've been writing for a long time," Walter replied.
Donald: "I think we've gotten to the point where we rarely sacrifice literal meaning for the sound of the phonemes. I think we've come to the point where we can compromise and come up with a lyric that's both meaningful and poetic as you will, or as you won't."
She then confronted them with the criticism that using studio musicians takes away a lot of the excitement of the music. "Well, that's the critical point-of-view," Walter said, "and has to do with the belief that great rock 'n' roll is made by some primeval swamp savages mysteriously equipped with electric guitars. They crawl out of the marsh and they can hardly speak any English and they come in and record "Hound Dog" and that kind of thing, which is not true. A surprising number of your rock In' roll records that people think of as being groups are actually the same studio musicians."
"And also when we work with these musicians they know they're not gonna get a three-chord commercial for Uncle Ben's Rice. They're gonna have some challenging progressions and some interesting rhythms to play. They know we're looking for an atmosphere for each tune and we're looking for them to come up with parts to co-operate with us and help us with the arrangement and take part in the making of the record. As long as we're together, just the two of us, and we don't have a working band, we're never gonna have the kind of unified group sound that, say, The Band had for those years or The Rolling Stones. It's a different kind of thing and I think we accept that and look to our writing and arranging to keep a unified style."
She asked them why they thought Steely Dan was so popular. "I never doubted that this sort of thing would catch on," Walter said.
Donald explained, "No, musically we're working with basic pop song forms, though we may distort them, they're still basic forms that are derived from a balanced structure that people have been listening to for years -- the popular songs of the '30s and '40s. Basically, you have two themes, one of which is repeated several times in a recapitulation and so on. We're pretty traditional as far as that goes and I think that's the reason for the popularity of it aside, of course, from our own doubtful genius."
Donald began by talking about their days at Bard. "We had groups for different occasions. We had a little jazz trio for NAACP benefits and things like that and we could quickly get together a rock 'n' roll band for the Halloween party."
"Yeah, a dance, outdoors, indoors, anything. The art show - I'd rather not talk about the art show. Donald was using a borrowed piano which he blew up. I was soloing and the piano stopped and he left. He walked while I was struggling to make a piece of tonal music. But I didn't really wanna be there anyway."
"Yeah, I did walk. I left him to face the federality like Karl Malden did to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront."
Their stilted affection for their days with Jay and the Americans provided them with another opportunity to wring some more jokes out of them. "One of the musicians in the back-up band was so bad that anything we might do to change the songs would go unnoticed. We had little Motown bridges. The bridge for "She Cried" really took off like a 747."
Gary Katz relates the story of how he first met Donald and 'Walter. "I was producing independently in New York at the time and a friend of mine in Jay and the Americans said when you get finished come here and we'll go home. He said, 'I'm working with these two guys who are real interesting'. I met Donald and Walter and the first time I heard their music it was far out. It was different than anything I had heard. It was very adventurous in the music in the sense of chord structure and very odd vocally against those chords."
Amid rumours about alleged duck-hunting expeditions and intensive Scrabble playing sessions, she asked if they were all good friends. Gary Katz again: "Yeah, sure, but Donald and Walter are not the same people and they have different lives outside of their work. It's not like everybody hangs out, you know, when the studio's over we don't all go to somebody's house and get high and just hang out for 12 hours after that. We all have our own lives and a very settled life."
It's not like one person brings the music and one person brings the lyrics or one person brings rock and one person brings jazz. It's really an intermingling of all the above and testing the waters and throwing out an idea and it can come from any one of the three of us. I don't know any ego, I know it sounds really pompous to say, but I haven't seen any ego since I've been working with them. If anything, it's the opposite, continual self-putdown."
Talking about touring, Gary said, "Nobody felt prepared to do it at that time and in fact nobody was. The record was finished and put out pretty quickly and obviously no one expected such immediate acceptance, so all of a sudden there was immediate pressure to go out and support the album, especially from the record company."
Jeff Baxter, though, said touring was not without its lighter moments. "I was actually enjoying myself, everybody in the rhythm section was enjoying themselves, Donald and Walter hated touring - hated it with a passion. But Donald turned out to be a great performer. There's a streak in Donald that runs to be in a great stage presence, I mean, he'd literally go nuts. So I think deep down inside Donald there's a -- if not love - a certain genetic understanding of live performing. No, they didn't like it, but they had to like some of it 'cause it was pretty funny. Everybody really liked the band when we played. I guess we had something for everybody, 'cause we used to pound it out. Everybody would sweat their brains out.
We got panned at the Whisky A Go Go I cause we didn't look good. The reviewer said he wasn't sure about the music, but he definitely knew it, we were the ugliest band he ever saw. Anyway, we took this show on the road. Everybody really liked us. I was amazed - especially in Texas. I couldn't figure that out 'cause the band that would open for us would be unbelievably raunchy and funky and loud and boogieing and we get on - although I guess we did have that quality - every once in a while we could really crank it up and rock 'n' roll. 'Cause basically as much as everybody likes jazz and we all love to play that kind of music, there's nothing like rock 'n' roll for your soul."
Gary Katz explained their studio set-up. "It's not a written chart for each player, because the purpose of having the really great players that we enjoy working with is to be able to get their musicality that we hired them for. When the players come in we have this little ugly demo with just terrible electric piano sound and Donald's sort-of singing, maybe Walter playing the bass line and chord sheets and it's pretty clear what we're looking for. Then it's a process of going out and playing it down and hacking it out and getting what you like."
He was asked about how they found the soloist for "Deacon Blues." "Pete came about because we liked the saxophone player on the Tonight Show and we found out who it was. We kept hearing this one guy who was great, but could never figure out who in the band it was. We had one player come down thinking it was him and when it wasn't we called the other one and it was Pete and he was great. Pete's a free spirit; there's not much controlling Pete, which is exactly what we want. So you just run the music by him and he blows his brains out and it's great. He also plays on "FM."
Last modified on Mon Feb 24 00:56:54 1997