By Greg Kot
Chicago Tribune
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker chuckle when they recall the night they derailed the Eminem victory train at the Grammy Awards in 2001. The Steely Dan duo had just walked away with an unexpected triumph for album of the year, their “Two Against Nature” pulling an upset over the rapper’s “The Marshall Mathers LP.”
“When we went into the press room afterward, everyone looked real disappointed that it was us,” Fagen says.
“All these writers whose perfectly good and controversial front-page stories about the nasty white rapper who won the Grammys went out the window when the old guys won,” Becker adds.
They may be older, but Fagen and Becker are definitely not any less caustic than they were in their ’70s heyday. Their music continues to blend harmonically sophisticated jazz voicings, agile R&B grooves and some of the most twisted lyrics this side of, well, Eminem. In their Grammy-less first decade, Steely Dan’s records raised the bar for all songwriters by, in Becker’s words, “encoding higher cultural information in cheesy pop songs played by a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
The Dan’s latest album, “Everything Must Go” (Reprise), is firmly in that tradition; though it’s not on par with ’70s classics such as “Pretzel Logic,” it’s better than the relatively cold-sounding “Two Against Nature.” The chill began to set in during the late ’70s, when Steely Dan become strictly a studio project, with Becker and Fagen obsessing over sound to the point where they’d fly musicians across the country to play a solo and employ a half-dozen drummers per album. But they recorded “Everything Must Go” with their touring band, and it makes for a warmer, less fussy approach.
“We were never really perfectionists,” Fagen says. “But we grew up listening to jazz and we were used to hearing things performed with a certain polish that wasn’t much valued in the rock ‘n’ roll world at the time. Now, as we’re getting older, I’m finding we kind of like to leave a few mistakes in.”
Even the most demanding listeners won’t hear many of those on “Everything Must Go.” If anything, the tunes whoosh past as smoothly and sleekly as a stretch limo on the expressway. But inside those tinted windows, things get rough, as characters wrestle with their regrets and obsessions while the world crumbles around them.
It’s dark, dire comedy in the mold of Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Elkin and Kingsley Amis, authors over whom the young Becker and Fagen bonded at Bard College in 1967. They shared a mutual affection for blues and jazz, as well, and eventually landed a songwriting job at ABC Dunhill Records, though their offbeat lyrics were too much for pop lightweights such as Three Dog Night and the Grass Roots.
“We were supposed to be the pipeline to the deep unconscious streams of American culture they hoped to exploit,” Becker says. Instead, the duo was only truly suited for one task: making their own idiosyncratic albums. Fagen wasn’t sure he even wanted to sing, and ended up splitting vocal duties with David Palmer on the first Steely Dan album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” released in 1972.
Dan toured regularly at first, but Fagen and Becker were so discouraged by the experience they quit the road in ’74. “We were the opening act for anybody that needed one, from heavy metal acts to Texas outlaw bands who were truly frightening,” Fagen says. “We’d be sharing dressing rooms with guys who jumped into the shower with chain saws.”
They didn’t return to touring until recently, including a concert Friday at the United Center, with much more lucrative and artistically satisfying results.
If Steely Dan are now enshrined as rock royalty, with their recent spate of Grammys and membership in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, they still don’t sound like anyone else.
“What we’re doing is much closer to the type of R&B records being made in the ’50s by Ray Charles and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, a thread that was never really followed up on,” Fagen says. “We were fortunate to come up at a time when something that far off the mainstream path could get exposure, when FM popular radio was just beginning and deejays chose the play list. The underground held some sway over the mainstream.”
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