Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen Writes a Not-Quite-Memoir
By David Bamundo
Wall Street Journal
In his 40-plus-year career, Donald Fagen has been praised for his lyrics, both as one of Steely Dan’s co-founders and in his solo work.
Now, his nonlyrical writings have been collected in Eminent Hipsters, a not-quite-memoir released by Viking and celebrated at Barnes & Noble in Union Square last week with a discussion with Rolling Stone editor David Fricke.
There are two main themes of the book: His experiences from his youth and a diary he kept during his recent “Dukes of September” tour, in which he performed with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald. Like his lyrics, Hipsters is filled with Mr. Fagen’s caustic wit and self-deprecation.
When he was about 8 years old, his family moved from Passaic, N.J., to Kendall Park, a then-new housing development in an otherwise rural community. Mr. Fagen recalled mounds of dirt on the corners of the unfinished development. “It was like Poltergeist,’ ” he said. “You ever see that movie? I’m surprised graves didn’t start rising up from the ground.”
As for the book’s title, he added, “there’s a million definitions of hipster. I’m using it for these sort of marginal artists that inspired me when I was a kid… they were the cutting-edge people of the time.”
People like the Boswell Sisters, who started singing together in the 1920s and were admired by the more popular Andrews Sisters, and Jean Shepherd, a syndicated late-night radio host Mr. Fagen would stay up all night listening to.
Though more a fan of jazz, blues and bebop, Mr. Fagen was also influenced by Bob Dylan. Listening to a record that a friend pushed on him, “he sounded bad to me, to my jazz ears,” Mr. Fagen said. “To a jazz person’s ear, it was amateur.”
But, “when Another Side of Bob Dylan came out, all of a sudden — his voice! He was like Frank Sinatra,” he added. “I was hooked.”
After that same friend then introduced him to LSD, Mr. Fagen recalled thinking, “Hey, I can be in a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
In 1965, he enrolled in Bard College where he met Walter Becker, and while they went on to found Steely Dan, Mr. Fagen, its lead singer, said he never saw himself as a frontman.
“We were looking for a frontman all the time,” he said, “but we never came up with one. I was elected, essentially, so I did it and we had a hit.”
After that, he said, “I was trapped. But after a while I got into it.”
Mr. Fagen writes candidly in Hipsters about the grind of touring and the love-hate relationship he has with audiences. In 2012, touring with Messrs. Scaggs and McDonald as the Dukes of September, the three musical veterans wanted to play the songs that they loved when they got into the music business.
“We knew that if we were gonna do that, we had to do some of our own repertoire,” he said, “or we were dead.”
At one concert, the Dukes kicked off with a Ray Charles song, a man in the audience stood up, cursed at them and walked out.
“When that happens, because I’m in a vulnerable state, you know, I started to hate everyone in the audience,” Mr. Fagen said.
As for today’s music scene, he admits, “I’m very detached from what’s happening now. I live in the past like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. I have, like, this rotting wedding cake in my room.”
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