Welcome to the Steely Dan Reader, formerly called the Steely Dan Internet Resource. This site is home to more than four decades of interviews, profiles and concert reviews of Steely Dan and its founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. We also maintain the text archives of Metal Leg, the great newsletter that from 1987 through […]
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Donald Fagen Spins Favorite Records
By Charlie Gillett Capital Radio After the release of The Nightfly, Donald Fagen visited the U.K. to promote it, and one of the few “interviews” he permitted was with Charlie Gillett on Capital. He selected some of his favorite songs and talked briefly about each one. CG: So your new album is called The Nightfly. DF: […]
Steely Dan: Gaucho
By Mitchell Cohen Creem She stomped into the living room, as much as one can stomp in pink slippers and an extra-large Close Encounters t-shirt, and conspicuously clicked the “stop” button of the cassette machine. I continued to write. “Steely Dan,” she announced, “are a symptom of everything that is wrong with our relationship.” Conversations that start with sentences […]
Steely Dan interview
Those consummate troublemakers, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, are finally cornered, producing dangerously controversial observations on film, literature, Free Jazz, touring and the music of Steely Dan, undermining nearly every tenet of the music industry. Originally published on March 1, 1981 By David Breskin Musician Magazine Three years, two hundred out-takes, a few mistakenly erased […]
‘Gaucho’ Review
By Ariel Swartley Rolling Stone The thing you begin to notice, listening to Steely Dan’s songs, is that no one ever answers anyone. For all the talk — and their latest album, Gaucho, is as compulsively chatty as dinnertime on death row — there’s no conversation. Whoever keeps asking, “Who is that gaucho, amigo?” might as well […]
‘Gaucho’: The Sardonic Style of Steely Dan
By Stephen Holden New York Times Nearly three years in the making, Steely Dan’s Gaucho (MCA-6102) is as refined as pop music can get without becoming too esoteric for a mass audience. Though it consists of only two men, Steely Dan must be counted one of the most influential rock “groups” of the past decade. […]
Interview with Robert Klein
“If you’re looking for the 1980-81 Steely Dan tour, this is it. It was three-quarters of a mile long and they had one roadie — the cab driver that brought them here. ” Robert Klein is warming up his audience of less than 200 invited guests in an RCA recording studio on West 44th. Klein […]
Steely Dan: A (Very) Brief Encounter
Originally published on Nov. 30, 1980 By Kristine McKenna Los Angeles Times New York — Interviewing Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the minds behind Steely Dan, is akin to being the new kid in school tossed in a room with the cruelly cool in-crowd. They know all the in jive and aren’t about to clue […]
An LP with Ironies in the Fire
By Richard Cromelin Los Angeles Times If anyone else had come out with a song called “Gaucho,” the title character would be a man in black fresh off the pampas, reeking of romance and mystery. Steely Dan’s gaucho is a comically pathetic figure in a less than romantic situation. The singer’s girlfriend has picked him […]
Spinning Sardonic Tales of Winners and Losers
Originally published on Nov. 28, 1980 By Boo Browning Washington Post It’s a little side street that’s closed to traffic so we can play there. No one else wants to come and play, ’cause we’ve got the basket tilted. — Walter Becker There’s more than a tilted basket on the street where Steely Dan play. For […]
