By Dylan Jones
GQ Magazine – UK
As an eminent hipster himself, Donald Fagen is more than adequately qualified to write about cool. As one half of Steely Dan, and as a solo artist, Fagen has been responsible for some of the coolest music of the last fifty years. Not content with creating what many consider to be the best album ever made — Steely Dan’s 1977 opus, Aja, in case you’re not fully up to speed — his 2006 solo album, Morph The Cat, is as good as anything he or his Steely Dan partner Walter Becker produced in their prime.
Fagen is also, rather famously, a professional grouch, and while he may be one of the least high-profile grumpy old rock stars still treading the boards, his new book might change all that. Eminent Hipsters is part memoir, part personal dissertation, and it makes for an enjoyable, if brief, read.
The first half of the book is an edited collection of portraits of some of the cultural figures who influenced Fagen as he was growing up in suburban New Jersey in the early Sixties, including the DJ Jean Shepherd, composer Henri Mancini and Ennio Morricone and the likes of Ray Charles. The second half of the book is a kind of geriatric Diary Of A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, and catalogues in enervating detail the trials and tribulations of touring (somewhat modestly) in your Sixties.
As you would expect from someone who has been one of the most consistently sardonic voices of rock, Fagen can write. Here he is describing Blake Edwards’ TV detective series, Peter Gunn: “…Edwards’s camera eye seemed to take a carnal interest in the luxe and leisure objects of the period, focusing on the Scandinavian furniture, potte palms, light wood panelling and sleek shark-finned convertibles. It was, in fact, all the same stuff my parents adored, but darkened with a tablespoon of alienation and danger. Sort of like seeing a smiling Pan Am pilot climb out of his 707 with a copy of La Nausee sticking out of his back pocket.”
Eminent Hipsters is full of such gems, although for those of us who have silently worshipped Fagen from afar for too many years, perhaps he could have dug a little deeper into his psyche, and described some of the personal and professional motivations that have contributed to one of the most important and influential bodies of work in all pop.
But then perhaps that wouldn’t have been cool.
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