Originally published on May 1, 1975
By Steven Rosen
Circus Raves
EIGHT-THIRTY PM. On the sixteenth story of a monster New York skyscraper a lonely light shone at the end of a cavernous floor. The deserted space was a storage center for office furniture; 36 desks piled up, dozens of sofas in heaps, desks, swivel chairs and file cabinets. In this modern bureaucratic wasteland a publicity director for a large record company worked after hours to catch up on urgent affairs. Suddenly, a telephone rang, cutting through the ghostlike gloom. “Hello?” the publicity man answered cautiously.
“Hi, Howard. This is Fagen. Do me a favor will ya. Go over to the Alpine Deli on 48th and Broadway and find out how they spell Pina Colada?”
“Isn’t it always spelled the same way?” the bewildered record exec queried the keyboard player calling from Los Angeles.
“I know how it’s normally spelled. But I want to make sure that’s how they spell it. Find out, would you?” The request was imperious.
Steely Dan were in the throes of creativity. A painstaking perfectionistic task which involved dredging up from the pockets and corners of consciousness minute details of memory and perception. In the case of this particular transcontinental phone call, the Dans were composing a song, “Bad Sneakers,” for their latest Steely release, a microphotographical marvel called Katy Lied (on ABC Dunhill). While Steely Dan sought after the perfect recorded masterwork, fate sank more than one pitfall between the band and their goal.
Steely Dan is a respectable band. Even though they chose as their banner and herald the giant rubber penis from William Burroughs’ selection of dildos, the Dan can be embarrassed when asked about their name. “Well, you could say it has something to do with the fact that we use a steel guitar. You could say that, but it wouldn’t be right. You could say that it comes from a chapter in Naked Lunch. If you said that, you’d be right.”
Steely Dan is a proper band. They don’t wear make-up. They don’t soak you with gin-fizz guitars or hump you with elephantine drums. They don’t crush your earlobes with overamps or prance across the stage in feathered cod-pieces. Dan have found firm footing in the high IQ uses of electronic instruments, coupled with lyric visions even the kings of anarchy can dance to. The Dan have churned the juices of the flocks and have even bitten smartly into the hide of the critic. But the Dan don’t care. They’d just as soon stay at home and play scrabble with a bowl of Alpha Bits as go out and lock jaws with a room full of maddened fans.
“I don’t talk to anyone over five feet eight inches,” announced Donald Fagen, as he settled into a late-afternoon interview accompanied by his long-time friend and mental acrobatic cohort, Walter Becker.
Fagen and Becker, the nucleus of Steely Dan, began as a songwriting team at college. “We were majoring in Sowing Wild Oats 101,” remarked Fagen, his enormous rubbery lips folding around the words like sensuous eels with lives of their own.
Progressive incubator
Bard College was a tiny “experimental” institution, said to be a school for talented youths too neurotic to get accepted at Harvard, Princeton or Radcliffe. At one time called “a hotbed of communistic activity,” by the late ’60s, when Fagen and Becker were hunkered down in Bard’s Gothic dorms, the institution was intensely involved in psychedelic experimentation. Many students were soaring in the outermost zones of higher learning. As one former coed tried to recall, “Fagen didn’t leave his bed, it was the lower bunk, all semester. Girls came in to administer him food. They came in frequently, and often different girls.”
“When I got to Bard there was only one band on campus,” Walter Becker, Dan’s bassist/lyricist revealed. “And that was Donald’s group. He had three guitars and none of them was any good. They would all strum the same chords in different time. So I generously offered my services as lead guitarist.”
“We started writing right away,” said Fagen. “We worked together very well. There was nothing so divided as one of us doing the lyrics while the other did the music. It is not that simple. Actually you could describe the way we work as being not unlike the making of junk sculpture.”
Fagen and Becker went to the Big Apple, scoured around Tin Pan Alley trying to sell their songs to the hit mongers. But they just got laughed at. People thought they were garbage joke songs, much too bizarre for the listening public. But finally, after living in the outbacks of Brooklyn for two years, they hooked a gig with Jay and the Americans, a period from 1970 through ’71, which they haven’t forgotten. “It paid the bills,” quoth Fagen.
Katz cradle
During their sojourn with Americans, they met Gary Katz, who was soon to land a producer’s job at ABC Records. Gary was also the pal of a brilliant young guitarist for the Ultimate Spinach, Jeff Baxter. When Katz heard the Fagen-Becker tunes, he called “Skunk” Baxter (who was auditioning for the Burrito Brothers at the time) and asked him if he wanted to play with a newly forming group.
Katz served as musical director for the burgeoning group, finding other musicians to play in the band. Jimmy Hodder, Baxter’s percussionist partner from Boston, was phoned; Dave Palmer came in for vocals. After several rehearsals at the Dunhill studios it became apparent that a second guitarist would be nice. Denny Dias was tapped. With these five musicians, it became a matter of making solid the skeletal designs of the Fagen/Becker compositions.
“Donald and Walter’s material was difficult,” conceded Jeff Baxter at the time. “It sounds pretty simple if you listen to it; it’s rock ‘n roll, but it’s pretty complex. So we tried to get the best players together we possibly could. Donald and Walter would write it, the band would arrange it, and if it was not there in five minutes, it was not there. We’d go on to something else.”
Their first album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, was cut after they were together “a few minutes.” And it was a showcase to make the critics’ ears perk up, with its jazz-like lightness and themes of low-life violence. “Everyone in the band plays so many different styles,” offered one Dan, “that we might do a tango here, and a rock tune there, and a country song here, and a ballad there.” The hook was not so much in the treatment the song received, but the tune itself, the physical graph penned by Fagen and Becker. “The typical Steely Dan song,” prescribed the Steely Lennon/McCartneys of the ’70s, “would include a penetrating verse, a rousing chorus, an inspired bridge, and of course, a no-holds barred instrumental of some sort.” Tongue in cheek or not, the method produced two giant hits from Thrill, “Do It Again,” and “Reelin’ In The Years.”
“The focal point is Donald and Walter’s material,” explained Skunk Baxter during those heady times. “What they write about in their lyrics is pretty much the focal point of the whole band.” Although Baxter spoke with eagerness and respect for the Main Dans, in his words lodged the seeds of his future discontent. The Becker-Fagen duo was not an accommodating framework for equality, although, no doubt they tried to be fair.
Ego defense
Donald Fagen, looking like a cross between Vic Mature and Tiny Tim, is a tall dark and moody type, a quietly vicious character in his fantasies, who in action, charms ivories and certain women of special tastes. His songs reveal the true obsessive Self, a recluse trying to lose his own shadow; never quite at ease with the world-at-large. “We are quite dedicated to the ideals that rock ‘n roll is dedicated to,” he quipped. “For instance, ego defense. One of the major functions of the band is ego defense.”
Walter Becker, too, appears noncommittal, detached behind his perpetual smokey shades. Onstage, pumping nonchalantly in his see-through bass, he is oblivious to the frenzy in the crowd below and the musical fire around him.
Walt, however, has a sense of humor not entirely harmless. In the midst of this conversation someone advised him that the chair under him had a faulty leg. In a fit of sudden mock fury, Becker leaped up and hurled the chair against the wall. Then he calmly settled his lanky frame into a bean bag and pursued the train of talk for a few minutes.
After Thrill came a melodic almost scholastic LP, Countdown To Ecstasy, which included such bizarre numbers as “Bodhisattva,” (“Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva, take me by the hand,”) and “The Boston Rag.” And then came the real break-through, Pretzel Logic, the album which launched the reluctant rockers straight to the Top Twenty. Logic showed the band’s increased awareness of studio magic, with tape loops and overdubbing manipulated to create a deceptively smooth surface for such AM hits as “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and “Pretzel Logic.”
Steely Dan jumped from show openers to headliners in an unusually short amount of time. Heralded by the critics, their name spread like smog and it wasn’t long after that they were selling out shows shore to shore. Becker didn’t care though, and neither did Fagen. A couple more bucks in the bank, a new guitar maybe, but the feeling was the same. “Nah, opening the show doesn’t mean anything to me; it just means we go on a little later,” maintained Becker, still contemplating the death of the crippled chair.
“I, personally, liked opening shows,” defended another member.
“The audience is really fresh and it’s kind of cool.”
“Yeah, I like that too,” volleyed Walter. “You have a lot of people out there who are in the position to be very pleasantly surprised. But of course that’s all behind us now.”
Is there increased pressure on you as the headliners? “No, but it has increased our show by a few minutes. Better dressing rooms and more beer . . . a lot more beer!”
“I think I’m going to throw this chair over the balcony,” Becker interrupted without warning. No one was sure if he was kidding or not.
Because of the temperamental nature of Fagen and Becker, it was no surprise that the band ran directly into personnel difficulties. Lead singer on Thrill, David Palmer, was “let go” because it was not a “happy musical marriage.” And then last August, in the height of their Pretzel Logic glory, Jeff Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder left Steely Dan. At the time it was rumored that the two would form their own band, but when Jeff appeared at the British festival at Knebworth with the Doobie Brothers, it became obvious that the Skunk had decided to garnish that highly respected boogie band with his polished guitar mastery.
His reasons for splitting were simple. Fagen and Becker were not the easiest people in the world to get along with; they hated touring; and they actually, if not theoretically, held musical autonomy over the group.
The world feared the demise of Steely Dan. S. Dan fini: an ex.band. The anxious British press gave Baxter the third degree when he flew to London with the Doobies. The walrus-faced guitarist maintained that “nothing” had happened to Dan, and that they were just fine, making a new record, just fine. Pat Simmons of the Doobies, however, added anxiety to the fire when he stated that without Baxter, Steely Dan was, in effect, defunct. He spoke of the Fagen-Becker’s genius as being a little too surreal for even Becker and Fagen to cope with.
But from New York, came the heated response. “Steely Dan lives!” “Becker and Fagen are Steely Dan,” decreed Sandy Yaguda, who was in the studio for Katy Lied. “There will be no split up because there is no single guitar player or drummer or anything who could change Steely Dan. Fagen, Becker, Roger (the Immortal) Nichols, their engineer and Gary Katz are Steely Dan.”
Session Kings
On Katy Lied Rick Derringer plays guitar on some cuts, as well as the famed session master Elliott Randall. Walter Becker, himself, plays guitar on several tunes. “Walter is an incredible guitarplayer,” revealed Yaguda, “but he has difficulty playing both guitar and bass simultaneously. Knowing Walter, however, the feat is not impossible.”
Denny Dias, of course, is featured throughout.
The Dans cooked in the studio. Fagen played on his new $20,000 acoustic piano, the most expensive instrument of its kind in the world. The songs flowed like fine wine, like fruit liqueur:
Bad sneakers and a piña colada, my friend
Walking down the avenue past Radio City
With a transistor and a large sum of money to spend.
Tape-eater
The microphotograph LP cover of a grasshopper (katydid) was finished and the studio technicians were rounding into the homestretch, when a strange, inexplicable accident occurred in the mastering room. “It was as if the machine swallowed the album,” reported one onlooker. “It was beyond belief.” No one could figure out who was responsible for the accident, but when the damage was assessed, the Dans realized that they had to remaster the entire album. The shipping date was only a month away!
The entire crew began to work round the clock refinishing and refining the original tapes. All interviews were postponed and no telephone calls were received.
In the end, the album was completed; only three weeks late. And Steely Dan? “The guys are mental puddles, right now,” revealed their ace publicist at the time. “All they want to do is walk down the street and kick old ladies. The more the better.” But Katy Lied is out now and filling the airwaves with a Steely Dan kind of truth. Old ladies are not being kicked.
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