Originally published on July 7, 2000
By Dan Aquilante
New York Post
There’s no middle ground. Either you love Steely Dan for its cerebral lyrics that float on its jazz-funk-pop fusion – or you hate their egghead noodling that is the epitome of boring ’70s pop.
Steely Dan, which some call more of a concept than a band, is keyboardist Donald Fagen, 52, and guitarist Walter Becker, 50.
Much to the delight of their very loyal fans, these pop geezers are in the midst of a comeback.
Their recently released Two Against Nature, their first album since Gaucho (1980), has them touring. They appear at New Jersey’s PNC Bank Arts Center tonight and at the Jones Beach Theater tomorrow.
The new album shows that time hasn’t dulled the duo. Their lyrics and music are still as slick as they were when Pretzel Logic, Aja and Countdown to Ecstasy ruled the airwaves a generation ago.
Taking their name from a steam-powered sex toy in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch, the pair first met in upstate Bard College in the late ’60s.
Despite their oddball jazz harmonies and cryptic lyrics, Steely Dan was a hit machine whose greatest successes included songs such as “My Old School,” “Peg” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”
Eventually, citing the rigors of the road and an inability to deliver studio-like musical precision in live performances, the pair didn’t want to tour anymore. And in 1981, Steely Dan ran out of steam.
But Becker and Fagen never really stopped playing together and now they’re back on stage.
Post: A lot of your fans think of you guys as one person with two brains.
Fagen: I guess that’s right. We’re two people who grew up separately in similar circumstances. We’re from the New York area, we’re both jazz fans from an early age. So the day after we met at college in ’67, we started writing songs together. We think alike.
Becker: We’re really have one brain … we share it.
Post: Was it that sense of simpatico that made you both want to start writing?
Fagen: We were both writing before we met. There were lots of jazz harmonies and the lyrics were funny, so when we combined our ideas it improved each of our songs. It was never hard to write with Walter. When you think of us writing together, think of us as a couple of comedy writers, not songwriters.
Post: So writing is fun?
Becker: When we write, we’re basically trying to crack each other up. Whether we are writing or just walking down the street together, my goal is to make Donald do a spit take.
Post: People either love or hate your music.
Fagen: That’s true, but I can’t explain it. It’s not a class thing, or economic – we have fans from every walk.
Post: On this tour, have you noticed a new audience or are they your longtime fans?
Becker: With the lights on, we can’t see very far into the audience, but from what I can see, there are as many young new fans as there are our old fans.
Post: Some of those older fans often have a snobbishness about your music, which seems odd, considering you guys have had a few of the biggest radio hits of all time. What gives?
Fagen: We just play what we like. We’re not snobbish about music. We listen to everything from sophisticated jazz to the dopiest kinds of garage music. It’s interesting that in R&B, and especially rock, people with incomplete musical education or no musical education can still create music. This is one of the great things about American music and our culture.
Post: What about hip-hop?
Fagen: I like some rap, but essentially it is a social and political music which comments on what’s going on. That’s not the kind of music that interests me. In our music we make the political or social quality secondary to beauty, storytelling, groove. Take jazz music in the ’60s – I stopped listening to it because it seemed like a reaction to the political situation. Rap is like that, but there are increasing musical elements in it that make it more interesting.
Post: Lots of people are down on the current trends in music, what do you think is right about music these days?
Becker: What is incredible now is you can walk into a CD store or go online and order from a huge selection of things. There has to be more kinds on music within our grasp than there has ever been before. When I was a kid looking for old jazz stuff, you couldn’t find things – they just weren’t in print.
Post: There is so much available, Walter, what have you been listening to?
Becker: There’s some Billie Holiday, a couple of Brazilian records, a few jazz things and 20th century classical stuff.
Post: Donald, will you describe your partner Walter Becker?
Fagen: We’ve been together so long. It’s like marriage in a way — luckily without the sex parts. When it works, it works because we tolerate the other person’s weaknesses and celebrate the good things. It’s all about acceptance.
Post: Steely Dan was never a touring band, why tour now?
Fagen: In the last 10 years, the conditions for touring are much better. And we finally have a band that we love.
Becker: Touring now is a completely different experience than it was in the beginning. When we started, we were a rag-tag, diverse bunch of kids shambling around the country in rented station wagons. Bad food, bad hotels, bad sound, uneven performances, and losing money in the bargain. Since the ’90s we’ve had great bands, who deliver consistent performances, we have our own sound system and get to put on the show we want to put on. That’s the difference.
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