In the space of five albums in four years, Steely Dan have created arguably the best rock music, and certainly the most erudite, of the Seventies. Michael Watts talks to its founders and songwriters, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker
Originally published on June 19, 1976
By Michael Watts
Melody Maker
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are living proof that intelligence is still regarded with suspicion in rock and roll. I confess it annoys me that they are more persistently categorized as “oddballs” and “smart asses” rather than considerable songwriters, which is what they are, because rock music and literary qualities are still held to be incompatible even by those who write about rock. Or so it seems.
Yet I suppose that, ultimately, Fagen and Becker, progenitors of Steely Dan, have only themselves to blame for insisting upon erudition and references drawn from jazz, Latin and classical music, as well as pop, whilst concealing it all beneath shiny music that can demand very little beyond an acquiescent toe unless one wishes it; for the supreme irony of Steely Dan, with whom irony as a device is second-nature, is the apparent equanimity with which they go about being most things to all men and everything to a few.
Probably, as they are children of the Sixties (Fagen is 28, Becker 26), it was inevitable that they chose rock as their creative field, but just as predictable, given their tastes and ambitions, that they would thereby appear conspicuous to those who did want more than to tap a toe. As Becker says himself, “if we were novelists dealing with the subject matters of our songs… our thematic concerns would not stick out as much.”
Those concerns are the most wide-ranging within rock writing, and have become the subjects for more interpretations than songs by any other artist since the Dylan of the period leading up to John Wesley Harding. Not usually very specific — the most recent album, The Royal Scam, is the least difficult of the five — they range from the typically black little tale of a compulsive loser (“Do It Again,” the hit single from the first album, Can’t Buy A Thrill) to the grandly worked title track of Royal Scam, which in three verses encapsulates an epic story of Puerto Rican settlement in New York.
The extent of their ambitions for these songs is illustrated by Becker’s statement that on “The Royal Scam” they were trying to catch the inflection of the King James Bible (in fact, there’s perhaps an echo of the 107th Psalm, “they wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way,” in the song’s chorus line “And they wandered in from the city”).
Nothing if not carefully constructed, their writing does not flow along with Dylan’s stream-of-images; it relies upon nuance, upon literary style and the suggestion of atmosphere in a novelistic manner far removed from the traditional workings of the pop song.
In lyric terms, very few writers in rock — perhaps Randy Newman, Robbie Robertson, Joni Mitchell — are working as consciously towards the aesthetic experience; for a start, there is nothing in the whole of Becker-Fagen’s output that is overtly autobiographical, which, because there’s nothing except for the songs themselves to which the audience can relate, helps explain why Steely Dan seems so faceless.
Eng. Lit — in which Fagen graduated, incidentally — looms large in the Steely Dan canon.
Of course, the name itself is an obscure term taken from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
But their literary influences range from the American black humorists (Vonnegut, Terry Southern, Nathaniel West) through to their (possibly) English counterpart, Evelyn Waugh, and on to such diverse writers as Beckett, Aldous Huxley, Voltaire, Nabokov, Borges and even Joseph Conrad.
Only their big interest in science fiction short stories, evident on another song from Scam, “Sign In Stranger,” seems familiar from conversations with other rock performers.
Hardly primitives, therefore, they are well able to talk of what they do in the context of art and the creative process, whether or not they acknowledge that it is art.
But, in any case, they are saved from any pretentiousness by a very bloody sense of humour that’s employed both in their songs and on a personal level.
Their conversation can be as funny, dark and cynical as their writing, and, again like the old Dylan, they often enjoy the technique of sending up whoever is in their company — particularly if it’s an interviewer — out of impatience, for self-protection, or just for personal entertainment.
This game of verbal ping-pong, in which the hapless person is batted about between the two of them, is generally initiated by Becker who, with his passion for word games, is sharp and perky where Fagen is laconic and droll in a somewhat weary fashion.
Withal, however, these are essentially serious men, whose ideas can be startling and invigorating.
This beautiful juxtaposition of be-bop devices and sinister lyrics with a Top 30 sound!
During the following interview with them in London recently, where they were on a working holiday looking at studios, Fagen suddenly broke off at one point to make the observation that reggae music, he had just realised, was very much like German band music.
This precipitated a rapid exchange of views between himself and Becker, who then went on to develop a theory of his own that the sound quality of English rock music was dictated by the humidity.
“That very full, mid-bass kind of sound,” he explained.
Finally, of course, it is music, their music, which justifies their lyric sheets, as it must do with all songwriters (and these are not “rock poets”).
Perfectionists who throw away an enormous amount of recording material, they have a fantastic ability to digest all kinds of popular music, no matter how dated, right down to the specifics of a style or a record — the Brazilian figure, for instance, that introduces “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” or Becker’s wah wah reproduction of Bubber Miley’s trumpet solo on “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” the Ellington song.
On the second side alone of Pretzel Logic they move from an homage to Bird with “Parker’s Band” that includes a quote from “Bongo Bop,” to the odd, pseudo-chamberwork of “Through With Buzz,” to the almost straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll of the title track, and on to the Beatlesque “With A Gun.”
Their musical influences break down to essentially three categories.
Firstly, there are the 20th century classical composers, probably from 1890 on, that would include Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel and Hindemith; then in rock and roll the Beatles, Byrds, Stones, Chuck Berry, Johnny Rivers, Tony Orlando and Van Morrison (a very rough count). But mainly it’s jazz: the Duke, Parker, and Miles Davis pre-eminently.
Drawing upon this reservoir of source material, they produce music that is undoubtedly Steely Dan, but almost indefinably so because of the variety of techniques involved, although the jazz harmonics, the overdubbed ensemble singing and the many rhythmic twists are familiar trademarks.
Fagen’s slight vibrato — on “Bad Sneakers” he’s not unlike Ray Davies — is always distinctive, yet the heart of their sound remains somehow elusive.
It is so controlled. Steely Dan sound like the classiest MOR band in the world.
This beautiful juxtaposition of be-bop devices and sinister lyrics with a Top 30 sound!
Fagen and Becker’s coolly paradoxical style, with its intriguing tensions between lyric and music, and between the appeal to the mind, the feet, and even the heart when they are realistically portraying sentiment, has its roots in Bard College, where the two met nine years ago.
Fagen was there from Passaic, New Jersey, Becker from New York.
Situated in Annandale-on-the-Hudson, across the river from Woodstock in upper New York state, Bard is a progressive institution which encourages in its 600 students a highly liberal outlook, and it’s worth speculating that Steely Dan’s unconventionality was nurtured here.
It’s often held, in fact, that their second album, Countdown To Ecstasy, has identifiable associations with Bard.
When the two left Bard — Becker was not a graduate — they tried to sell songs they had begun working on during their period there, but with varying degrees of success.
They did, indeed, cut a by now very rare album for Spark Records, the official recording label of a large international publishing company, that was a soundtrack for a schlock movie titled You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It (Or You’ll Lose That Beat).
The film, which, according to Becker, was little better than an expensive home movie, played for only two weeks in Manhattan; the soundtrack is unlikely to be re-released, either, although Steely Dan producer Gary Katz, to the vehement denials of both Fagen and Becker, thinks there is some good stuff on it (notably a song with the typical Dan title of “Dog Eat Dog”).
They also scored a forgettable dance movie in which Becker’s mother was involved, for which they got paid $1,500. But their main activity was peddling songs around the Brill Building.
Around this time, in 1970, they met the guitarist Denny Dias, the only other surviving member of the original touring line-up of Steely Dan.
They answered an ad in the New York Village Voice which said: “Must have jazz chops. Call Dennis Dias, Hicksville, Long Island.”
They eventually joined Dias’ band, which was called Demian after the Herman Hesse novel, and began rehearsing in Dias’ basement.
But their propensity for organizing people seems to have ensured that Demian was short-lived.
Fagen says they fired most of the band, whereupon Dias went into semi-retirement and they left to join Jay and the Americans.
Jay and the Americans’ road drummer had been one of the musicians playing in the Dias basement, and the publishing company of Jay and the Americans had been the only office within the Brill Building to show them any real attention, so they went to play with them for about a year and a half, whilst at appropriate intervals striking up again the old Dias band.
“When we joined Jay and the Americans we had access once more to a drummer who did not find us totally repugnant,” says Becker.
Neither were totally successful ventures, however.
With Jay and the Americans they were swept up in the oldies revivals of the early Seventies, playing on extensive bills at Madison Square Gardens with such as the Angels and the Shirelles, which offered great experience; but their real wish was for recognition as songwriters, not as bass and keyboard back-ups, and Jay Black’s attempts to record their songs were all abortive. They did make a useful contact, however, at a studio session job when they met guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and an even more important one in Gary Katz, who was a friend of Jay and the Americans.
Katz had been a partner for three years of Richard Perry in Cloud Nine Productions, which had been established with money given them by their respective parents.
When that ran out he just hung out for two years, during which period he met the Dour Duo. But in November 1971 he got a producer’s job at ABC-Dunhill Records in California, which he took on the proviso that Fagen and Becker be hired as staff writers.
The two were hired “sight unseen” by ABC president Jay Lasker. “I said to him,” recalls Katz, “that if it didn’t happen, I would quit.”
They maintain that it was always the intention to form a band, and the contract songwriting was terminated after six months as Katz pulled together Dias, Baxter, drummer Jim Hodder and other musicians for the first Steely Dan album.
They did, indeed, write a song for the Grass Roots in this period called “Tell Me A Lie,” but it was rejected. “You could always tell we were laughing down our sleeves at the band,” Becker says.
Barbra Streisand, it is also true, had cut another of their songs — actually, before ABC — called “I Mean To Shine,” but Becker claims that Richard Perry destroyed it.
“He changed the lyrics and the melody, and left out the bridge.”
Can’t Buy A Thrill, which included the hit singles “Reelin’ In The Years” and “Do It Again,” was recorded in June 1972, and thus began in earnest Fagen and Becker’s close working relationship with Gary Katz, whom they seem to value for his own perfectionist attitudes.
“Gary,” explains Fagen, “is there to ensure that each album is a superb Gary Katz production.”
Katz: “I think I get upset sooner than they do. They would be upset at the same things I am two days later.”
It is as a studio group, utilizing a repertory company of session players, that Steely Dan have increasingly come to represent themselves.
The last two albums have taken two years to appear, partly because of specific technical problems that tax the perfectionists in them, and there has been no touring in that period.
Nor will there be — in Britain, at least — until next year, since there are contractual problems with ABC that necessitate the delivery of two albums by January 1977.
“Caesar wants a record every three months, it turns out, so we have to render unto him before we can render unto the concertgoer,” describes Becker.
However, they have never been very happy performing, anyway.
They claim that in the early days of Steely Dan they were “coerced” into extensive performances with ill-prepared bands, although they were satisfied with the line-up that played here in 1974.
Even that trip, though, was marred by Fagen’s problem with his throat, for which he says he was wrongly treated by a Harley Street doctor and had to seek medical help in California.
Fagen still lives in California — precisely, in Malibu, and within hailing distance of Becker; but it does look as if the next album will be cut somewhere in Europe.
This interview was recorded one recent afternoon in London at the Montcalm Hotel, where both they and the Rolling Stones were staying.
I was amused that they had conveyed the message, through ABC, that the conversation had to be conducted “on a certain intellectual level,” for Fagen was once to exclaim, “this is really serious! Jesus! It’s only rock and roll.” Perhaps the Stones next door were at the back of his mind.
Gary Katz, a drawn, bony man, sat mostly in silence throughout, while Fagen slumped down in an armchair behind his shades and delivered his replies unsmilingly in an adenoidal New Jersey accent.
Becker perched himself on the edge of his chair, from which he could better twinkle in his inimitably sardonic fashion.
I had been informed by the press office that they had been woken up one morning at 4 a.m. by Keith Richard playing Katy Lied.
“Apocryphal,” Fagen replied shortly. Their answers generally, I found, were just as succinct and scholastically phrased…
You say in ‘My Old School’ that you’ll never go back to Annandale, which is a specific reference to Bard College. What can you tell me about Bard?
Becker: It was one of your basic beatnik colleges which they have in America. There’s a couple of them strategically situated throughout the country. Everybody there, just about, was a beatnik, except for the people who were in the religion department.
Fagen: They’re progressive schools. You don’t get as much foundation material as I would have liked to have gotten, actually.
They emphasize creative aspects of learning rather than basics, so it turns out that if you want to get some kind of formal education you have to do a lot of reading on your own. So the system is basically a failure.
Becker: In the winter they sent you off for a coupla months to go out into the world and achieve some kind of meaningful relationship with humanity at large, which was a general license to take a coupla months off and go to San Francisco and sleep on the floor under your Jimi Hendrix poster.
It was within commuting distance of New York city, too.
Fagen (who has been grunting approval to Becker’s reply): There are a few others. There’s one called Goddard, there’s one called Antioch, and one called Reed College.
There’s Brandeis in Boston, too, isn’t there?
Becker: The difference being that in Brandeis they would take a somewhat eccentric youth with bizarre ideation as long as he had a 96.3 grade point, whereas at Bard they would take anyone that had potential (he beams the word).
Fagen: And 4,000 dollars a year.
Becker: Which, of course, neither one of us had.
Fagen: But we were subsidized…
Becker: …by our respective States to attend this institution.
Fagen: We were the only poor kids there, really.
Becker: It took me a long time to realize that, too — why everyone else had cigarettes and Porsches.
Bard does seem to have had an effect upon you. There are certainly references on the second album, Countdown To Ecstasy.
Becker: Well, it didn’t have that much effect upon me since I obtained virtually no education there. But experiences at Bard were reflected in your writing?
Fagen: I don’t think so much of Bard as experiences of the late Sixties which were common to a lot of young swains in America. I don’t think it had so much to do with that particular college as it did with the mood of the country at the time.
Bard College is not so much different from living in Manhattan, except that you couldn’t get a good meal, ’cause everyone who went there was basically from the Manhattan area.
But that line, “El Supremo from the room at the top of the stairs,” that does relate to Bard, doesn’t it?
Both: No.
Becker: I can’t see why you would think that it did.
I understood it from Wayne Robins (an American rock writer), who went to the same college.
Fagen: Because Wayne Robins went to the same school as we did, I think he imagines some heavy association with the college, and tends to associate a lot of our lyrics with experiences that would be common to his.
Becker: At the time we went to Bard College, the going thing was, everyone would say, “see that dormitory over there? That’s where Bob Dylan wrote blah blah blah” or, “see that pump handle there? That’s the one that the vandals took.”
And it wasn’t so?
Fagen: Well, Bob Dylan did hang out there — it was near Woodstock — and he did have some intercourse with that college —
Becker: And its faculty.
Fagen: And the pun is intended. But, as far as the association with his lyrics, I wouldn’t know.
So the references have all been over-stated?
Both: Yeah, yeah.
And ‘My Old School’ is not about a drug bust at Bard?
Becker (eating a grape): Not that I know of, no (pause). Which is not to say that there was never a drug bust at Bard College. Which is not to say that I was not rounded up at that drug bust.
Which is not to say that I was never even attending the school at that time. And which is not to say that the school didn’t have the decency to bail me out.
Fagen: Which is not to say that the judge didn’t run a snowplow into a river, which I think was poetic justice if I ever heard it.
Becker: That’s right. Which is not to say that G. Gordon Liddy was the arresting officer.
Fagen: He was the assistant district attorney of Duchess County, NY, at the time.
Becker: The Wild Bill Hickok of the judiciary.
Fagen: And believe me, he wanted to be re-elected.
Becker: He was “the man in the trench coat,” as a matter of fact. He was an extremely corny cop. He thought he was a detective, Dick Tracy or something.
Fagen: In fact, we had an attorney in common. In other words, my attorney at the time I was busted by G. Gordon Liddy was later G. Gordon Liddy’s attorney when he was busted for his nefarious acts in government.
Becker: Which gives you some idea of how justice works in America.
It meant a lot of money?
Becker: Yes, that’s right (meaningful look). That was it. I had some idiot Communist lawyer that my girlfriend’s uncle knew from the Roaring Thirties, and, of course, he took me up there for a court appearance and the judge didn’t even show up; he was out farming.
Fagen: It was one of those very small-time communities. Everyone is a sheriff’s deputy — the guy who runs the general store, and so forth.
Becker: Come the Spring, you know, and a young man’s fancy turns to raiding Bard College.
Fagen: If they just catch you in your underwear, they’ll say they have you flagrant delicto.
Would you say that the subsequent move from the East Coast to California meant anything to your writing? Perhaps a tension created between the intellectual demands of the East Coast and the sunny nature of California?
Becker: I would say changes in musical climate, and the fact that we had an actual mechanism for presenting our songs after we moved to the West Coast which we didn’t have when we were on the East Coast — in other words, the band — that was more a violent change in what we were doing.
Fagen: If you never cross the threshold of your own domicile, it doesn’t really matter where you live, now does it?
And that’s the way you live?
Fagen: I would say, generally, yes, except for a trip occasionally. But in New York we had some lyric sheets and someone’s office with a piano in it, which was the only outlet for our songs, and on the West Coast we have multi-million dollar recording studios.
And if you know you’re going to get something on a record, you generally tend to write better.
Becker: Especially if you write it for yourself, because back in New York as often as not we were writing it with another singer in mind, or just with hopes that somebody would record it, please God.
Fagen: Neither of us considered performing the songs ourselves vocally till our first record, when we finally ran out of time in which to find a suitable singer.
So that meant changing the way you wrote?
Fagen: Well, I hadda narrow the range down a little bit on the melodies.
Becker: There were certain things that Donald prefers not to do that we had written into songs before which we didn’t do anymore, certain words that Donald doesn’t like to sing — such as “kinetic”, ” tonic.”
I threw at you the relationship between East and West Coasts to see if it might partly explain the fact that superficially the music is very pop and attractive, and yet underlying that there are all these interesting themes.
Becker: I’d like to help you out with that theory, but, as I recall, when we were located on the East Coast it was that way, too. We’ve always written outré lyrics and pop structures.
Fagen: It’s got more mature, I think, but that’s about the only change. It’s simply a matter of logistics. The record company is there. We got offered a job there as staff writers. And we’d had no luck in New York. So that’s where we ended up.
I’d like to get onto a discussion of your albums. This latest one is perhaps more accessible than the previous album, Katy Lied.
Fagen: Well, we did bring in some musicians we hadn’t used before, particularly some New York musicians, which I think changed the sound and made it a more live, rhythmic sound.
Becker: It’s got kind of a stomping mood to it compared with Katy Lied.
Which initially seemed cooler and cerebral. I had to play it a dozen times before it really started to grow upon me.
Becker: That may be why I’ve never liked it, because I haven’t played it that many times.
Fagen: ‘Course, I tried to play it a few times, but the quality of the disc that ABC puts out, you play it six or seven times and then you can’t hear it at all.
Becker: Well, those are re-treads. Those are all Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds albums, and the music is just encoded on top. That’s the toughest part of making albums for us — having to make all the songs the same length as on the Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds albums so the grooves will come out the same place.
Do you see a specific mood for each album?
Fagen: You know, I don’t listen to them after we’ve made them. In a restaurant the other night some guys from the record company played it while we were eating, some old record of ours, and it sounds like some other group to me, really, in a lotta ways.
Becker: We do try to put together a programme of songs that somehow hangs together.
Fagen: But mostly that’s things like tempo.
Becker: Yeah, not in terms of themes, really.
Fagen: In other words, we don’t wanna have too many songs with a very moderate tempo on one album; we like to break up the musical flow. But lyrically we feel we write the songs and the album will take care of itself.
We sequence for sound rather than for narrative potential; we sequence for how it affects the ear, rather than cerebrally.
Katz (entering the conversation): There’s no concept. Never.
Fagen: Chance is very important to an artist, you know. Dostoievski wrote in installments for magazines, and I’m sure he wasn’t aware of the entire flow until it was all together.
You know, if there is a lyrical unity to each album it’s simply because most of the songs on each album are written in a certain time period, and naturally a certain phase of our personalities would be prominent while the songs were written, and that would give it a lyrical unity, certainly.
There’s not usually more than two or three songs that were written long before we start recording them.
Let me ask you about individual songs, beginning with those on The Royal Scam.
Fagen: We don’t have to answer anything, but take a stab at it.
‘Kid Charlemagne,’ for instance — could that be about a Leary or a Manson? Am I in the right direction?
Fagen: You’re on the right track. I think it would probably be about a person who’s less of a celebrity than those people.
Did you have a definite person in mind?
Becker: Well, there is a particular individual, whom we naturally can’t name…
Fagen (straight-faced): For legal purposes.
Becker: …who hovered over the creation of the song like a sword of Damocles, like Hamlet’s father. Basically, it’s a chef.
A chef?
Becker: Cooks.
Katz: Master cooks.
Becker: Chemists.
‘Sign In Stranger’ — that’s almost like a school for gangsters?
Fagen: That’s true. Of course, it does take place on another planet. We sort of borrowed the Sin City/Pleasure Planet idea that’s in a lotta science fiction novels, and made a song out of it. But, indeed, you’re right.
Turning to the last album, Katy Lied — is that a praying mantis on the cover?
Becker: It’s a katydid. They may not have them here, or they may not call them that, but it’s a little bug that looks like a grasshopper, except that it has larger translucent wings. It makes a sound that is onomatopaeically rendered as “katydid.”
How about the phrase “Lady Bayside”?
Becker: Aah! In Queens, New York, there is a community called Bayside, where I culled numerous members for my first rock and roll band, and Bayside had a particular character to the community, which ranged from politically, rabidly conservative to absolute congenital mind-damage among its younger citizens. So the young women growing up in this community had a particular kind of character.
Fagen: It would be kind of like saying Lady Knightsbridge.
Becker: It may not mean anything to anyone but me, but lit sounded good.
Is ‘The Royal Scam‘ about Puerto Ricans trying to settle in New York?
Fagan: Because the interpretation is so accurate I wouldn’t even want to comment any further.
Becker: In other words, you already know more than is good for you.
Fagen: To tell you the truth, we tend to refrain from discussing specifics as far as lyrics go, because it is a matter of subjective interpretation, and there are some things that are better that man does not know. You are on the right track, and whatever you make of it will suffice. Really.
You leave yourself open to the interpretation of playing guessing games with your audience.
Becker: Well, hopefully the idea is that there won’t be any guessing games. You see, you have a fairly precise picture in your mind of what is in that song, I can see, but when we write the songs we hope that a listener hearing that song who does not translate St. John into San Juan would still be able to enjoy the song without being too worried about what it means.
In other words, it should work for somebody who doesn’t get nearly that far.
Yes, but it would work for him if he understood it, wouldn’t it?
Becker: Well, maybe so, but I would hope it will work for him even if he considers it a complete fairy tale.
On some songs you are quite specific. ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’ is a very specific song. I don’t think people would have any problems understanding that.
Becker: I shouldn’t think so.
So why do you intend some songs to be very mystifying?
Becker: Well, it’s not that it came out to be mystifying. We did decide to write that song in a kind of…
Fagen: Allegorical.
Becker: We were trying to imitate the inflection of a King James bible just a bit, so that made it vague necessarily.
Fagen: It’s kind of like The Trinity, you know. We think we’d probably destroy the spell if we laid it on the line, you know what I mean? There’s a certain mystique that that song depends upon for it to be effective.
Becker: We’re not topical songwriters. We’re trying always not to write the same lyric, but to write lyrics that have to do with something interesting; and so, when we get an idea on the lines of that one, we don’t want it to sound like a Phil Ochs song (pause) — may he rest in peace.
We don’t want its political or social overtones to be so specific that someone who hasn’t lived in New York would have no use for the song.
But one of the great virtues of your writing is that it’s not autobiographical — or, at least, overtly.
Becker: That’s another thing.
And neither is it hog-tied to a particular mood of the times, as is the case with so many rock writers.
Fagen: That’s true. I guess one of the great cornerstones of what rock and roll is supposed to be is that it’s somehow supposed to reflect now, the time we’re living in, and not reflect back; and, in fact, there is very little reflection in rock and roll.
Becker: It’s generally the cry of an anguished teenage soul. And we’re not doing that too much anymore (short laugh).
Fagen: As far as specifics like that, our audience will have to trust our sincerity, just trust us in not just laying down some bullshit. When they think they don’t understand something it’s certainly not a random lyric.
It’s been suggested that your writing is after the image of your own world, in the sense that you create a private world and your themes and lyrics relate more to that than the actual world outside it. Do you take the point?
Fagen: Well, I think it’s more a way of viewing the actual world through our eyes. I think probably in our earlier works we were fantasizing more than we do now. I think now we’re synthesizing what we see.
Becker: Nevertheless, it may be right in saying that the world crystallized through our eyes bears very little resemblance to anyone else’s world, even though we think we’re recording it as we see it.
We may be so bent that it’s unrecognizable. I would like to think so. That would certainly make it more interesting.
You could say that you were preserving the analogy with William Burroughs, inasmuch as very many of his references are extremely private.
Becker: Yes, almost embarrassingly private, and I don’t think we as a rule have veered as far into personal psychomimetic fantasy as he has.
But I suppose you could say that. And — did you write the article that suggested we recorded ‘East St. Louis Toodle-Oo’ because it was mentioned in a chapter in Burroughs? That isn’t so. I mean, you’re right — ‘East St. Louis Toodle-Oo’ is mentioned in the book —
Fagen: That was brought to our attention after the fact.
Becker: But the actual genesis of that piece is to do with the fact that — aside from it being a very attractive theme from one of our favorite composers — when wah wah pedal started to come into vogue for guitar, that was a very fun piece to play on the wah wah guitar.
Immediately the simile between wah wah guitar and Bubber Miley’s wah wah trumpet playing came to mind. That’s more how that came about.
Fagen: Yeah, and without having a missionary attitude, we still thought it would be interesting for the audience to realize that that kind of expression is not a new thing, and that in 1926 a trumpet player was doing with his lip what it takes a rather complicated set of electronics to do on an electric guitar. Walter had been putzing around on the guitar with that song for years.
Becker: I was fortunate enough to have a wah wah pedal, and that was one of my big numbers, so we decided the time had come to do that.
Staying on Burroughs, do you take the relationship with him — if we can go so far as to call it a relationship — do you take it far enough to write, at least partially, in a cut-up style.
Becker: No (slightly hesitant). We don’t write in a cut-up technique as I understand he does. I don’t think he does anymore, either.
Fagen: We sometimes will juxtapose styles of writing in one song, but that’s about as far as it goes, really.
Because we have a fairly broad popular musical experience, there will be the kind of harmony associated with be-bop and various kinds of jazz right next to a section that has more common rock and roll harmony.
‘Green Earrings’, for example, has a very contemporary vamp which leads into a cycle of fast progression, and another section which is actually from another era.
Becker: ‘The Fez’ is a disco song which suddenly has a lot of chords. And disco songs, as we understand them, one of the most characteristic things about them is that they’re lacking in harmonic movement… All of which has really nothing to do with William Burroughs.
Fagen: There’s a very superficial relationship between what we do and what William Burroughs does, except for perhaps the late Fifties bohemian spirit.
What would you say were your main themes as writers?
Becker: Well, of course, we have all the usual ones. Unrequited love, destructive love, er…
Fagen: Self-destruction.
Becker: The erotic.
Fagen: Violence… Oh, we can write about anything. In fact, we were recently thinking of writing something about the Congress of Vienna, which is actually part of the reason I visited the Museum at Monaco, to get a little atmosphere.
We think the Congress of Vienna because it was a turning-point in European affairs, and we see certain parallels between that and what’s going on now.
But that’s yet to come. We haven’t quite crystallized it yet, but we’re thinking about it.
Becker: It will work out. If you can do that kind of thing without making it pretentious, that’s the secret, because then you’re dealing with really interesting and unusual subject matter, and still making it into a pop song that doesn’t sound like a, er… Frank Zappa epic, or a Kinks’ musical comedy number.
Fagen: You see, we use that more as a starting-point to write a song which may, when it’s finished, not suggest to anyone what we had in mind. The song that we wrote about the Beer Hall Putsch, for instance, no one ever had to think about the Beer Hall Putsch to think about that song. That’s our method of writing a song: to have something in mind that may not actually be in the song.
How does the marriage of lyric and music come together?
Becker: Often there will be a fragment of music and lyrics we have that is very open-ended and could suggest a lotta things, and then we’ll decide what would be the most interesting to write the song about with that piece in it.
Or a piece of music, for example, will suggest that its lyric be concerned with a certain type of affair; either a little short story, or a more free form type of imagery.
Fagen: We always start with a fragment which will suggest the whole of the song. The way we write the fragment is the way any so-called artist will write a fragment, and I don’t think you can explain that, unless you want to get into discussing the philosophy of art or expression.
Becker: Oh, please, let’s not!
So how do the two of you assemble your writing? How does the contribution of each break down?
Fagen: The fact is, I can’t finish a song, and Walter can’t start one. The way we go about composition is dependent upon both of our limitations, really.
You’ve never actually written songs independently of each other?
Becker: Oh, there were maybe a few, years ago. But I think in the last coupla years they’ve all been total collaborations.
Fagen: You see, we were some of the few people in the New York area that used to listen to the same obscure radio programs and read the same obscure novels; it just seemed to work out that way.
How are you different as writers?
Becker: I’m less concerned with tying everything up. I like swatches of colours, images that don’t necessarily make so much sense. But, of course, Fagen makes me tell him how it makes sense when we write it. He’s gotta make it all come together, and that’s good. And Donald has a more organised mind than I do.
Fagen: It’s just that, if there’s something in a first draft that sounds like it shouldn’t be there and doesn’t lend unity to the song, I will argue endlessly to exclude it or replace it.
Becker: It works out pretty well, actually. When I consider how difficult the collaboration actually is, I’m amazed that we’re as single-minded between the two of us.
Fagen: We rarely have any disagreements about any part of a song. The only thing, in fact, is the way Walter sometimes perceives. If I have some kind of — usually — vamp, Walter will perceive it to be in another key than I do. Sometimes we have problems in song structure. But that also leads to some rather interesting constructions.
Becker: In other words, what Donald sometimes thinks of as a one-chord I will think of as a five-chord, and what Donald thinks of as a strong beat in a bar I will think of as a weak beat.
Fagen: In other words, sometimes he’s thinking of the song backwards as far as I’m concerned.
Do you have a working routine?
Fagen: I wish we did, I wish we did! I am able to get up at a certain time and proceed to write. I spring awake in a great burst of guilt and commence to come up with whatever I come up with.
And then, after several foolish calls to Walter, in which I make a fool of myself (here, amidst some laughter, he flourishes a mock-French accent), finally he comes over and we finish what I’ve begun.
There’s a feeling that underneath all your themes there’s a pervasive tone of cynicism.
Becker: That’s an accusation to which we are not unfamiliar.
Fagen: Well, we like to keep a certain distance from the protagonist.
Might not your music, therefore, be generally symptomatic of the times?
Becker: In terms of cynicism? Oh, I dunno. I don’t think these are particularly cynical times. You just wait to see what’s coming up! I’m inclined to think that things are going to become far more pessimistic.
Of course, pessimism and cynicism are not the same thing at all. Cynicism, I contend, is the wailing of someone who believes that things are, or should be, or could be, much, much better than they are.
Would you say pessimism is a more accurate description for what you do?
Becker: No, I wouldn’t say that. I suppose we are cynical by comparison to the people who are sincere, but musically I wouldn’t have it any other way.
A song like ‘Charlie Freak’ is unusually tender when set beside most of your writing.
Becker: Well, I think so, and hopefully those little glimmers of tenderness are all the more effective in the context they are in rather than a constant syrup being poured over our audience.
Fagen: In other words, without putting emotional limitations on what you’re doing, tenderness is just sentiment rather than a true glimmer of affirmation, or whatever you wanna call it.
Becker: They always accuse Vladimir Nabokov — however he chooses to pronounce his silly Russian name — of having such a cold aspect as an artist, whereas it seems to me he can be the most touching, poignant and beautiful writer that I know of.
Many people are put off because they think he’s cold, icy and vicious, but I’ve never felt that way, and I don’t feel that way about what we do, either. But I can see how they read that perception.
Fagen: I should tell you, though — sometimes, when we play an album back to sequence the songs, some times I get the feeling that we are hitting a little hard, that it’s too down.
But it’s getting back to what I was saying before: there’s so much distance from what is actually happening to the protagonist of each song, to use a literary word.
In other words, when I sing a song I just take the role of narrator; I’m sort of acting out a part. It’s really quite impersonal, although the music in me, and the words themselves, can be very personal — like ‘Don’t Take Me Alive,’ ‘Kid Charlemagne.’
Becker: I think we probably are conspicuous in our thematic concerns in rock and roll. But if we were novelists dealing with the subject matters of our songs it would not stick out as much, because in the literary field what we are writing about are more the traditional concerns than in rock and roll.
No other rock band I can think of has so positively this Eng. Lit. side to it.
Becker (chuckling): That’s kinda true. I hope it’s not obtrusive. I guess it is, but I hope it’s not.
Fagen: Bob Dylan had it covered a long time ago.
Becker: Yeah, but he had the “dead end kid” angle.
Fagen: But he did work in a literary way.
Becker: Well, he copped a lotta things. He read a lotta French poetry.
Fagen: In fact, I think a lot of his singing style comes from that very popular way of reading poetry in the Sixties. The cadences, the breaths after pronouns, and things like that.
The irony is that you are so literary aware, and do make music very much for yourselves, and yet you have had three top five singles in the States and the albums all go gold.
Becker: We’re very lucky in that, I’m inclined to think.
Fagen: Well, I hope we have more, because I figure sooner or later they’re going to take the ball away from us if they’re not making money, although the album sales seem to subsidize us, even if we don’t have a hit single off an album. We never get questioned about budget.
But we’ve always been very attracted to commercial, popular music as well as jazz, and it is the mainstay of the kind of structured writing we do. I think the albums are very entertaining, you know.
I think they’re much more entertaining than most other rock groups’ albums. That’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but I really think they are.
But how far do you think you can take your literary concerns without losing your audience?
Becker: It’s an interesting question, and it remains to be seen. I do notice that reading seems to be going out of style. Younger people that I meet, even people just a few years younger than me, are much more distant from any kind of literary traditions than we are, so maybe it’ll all be new to them.
Fagen (disgruntled): Hell, we’ll go into television! We’ll sneak through somehow. You know what the key is? It’s the music. You see, you’re only talking lyrically.
But if you look at it just on a superficial level, if the music is contemporary and smart and interesting and entertaining, you can’t put people off that much.
Especially if you put forth these themes with a little humour. I mean, we’re not gonna get any blacker. It’s gonna get funnier if anything, right? It is 1976.
Becker: Keep ’em laughing, that’s what we say.
So how different are the songs you write now from those you wrote as staff composers at ABC?
Becker: Oh, we were merely posing as staff writers at ABC. We were impersonating staff writers at ABC. We were actually preparing to launch our fine, fine, superfine career that now exists.
How optimistic were you two of succeeding?
Katz: Oh, they weren’t at all.
Fagen: We needed the money.
Becker: No, I’ve always assumed it was only a matter of time before we got the recognition we deserved.
Katz: You’re kidding!
Becker: No, I always had that secret belief.
Fagen: We were always confident we’d get to record.
Katz: But you never thought it would be popular.
Fagen: No, we never thought it would be very popular. And, in fact, it isn’t all that popular.
Katz: Yes, it is. Very popular. You’d be wrong to assume otherwise.
Fagen (reflectively): I wish it was more popular sometimes.
How popular?
Fagen: Very popular.
As popular as the Stones?
Fagen: Yeah.
Becker: I’m glad it’s the way it is.
Katz: Me, too.
Fagen: I don’t think I’d like the recognition on the street, that kind of thing — I don’t care for that. But I’d like a broader audience. I mean, I wouldn’t do anything to compromise the music; I just wish more people liked that kind of music.
Katz: I think that will come in time. It has with every album we’ve done.
You’ve never sat down to write something you think will be a hit?
Fagen: No, not really. We can’t, believe me. When we were attempting to be staff writers, God knows we tried. But it always comes out weird.
Katz: The most you can say about that is that in the studio, after something is mostly complete, somebody might say, “if we had a harmony it might make it a little more accessible.” That’s the most.
Fagen: No, that’s ’cause I don’t wanna hear myself singing along with no support! (a slight, embarrassed laugh). I don’t like my voice.
Which presumably was why David Palmer was brought in to sing on the first album?
Fagen: Well, our boulienne was to save me the trouble of actually having to sing all these songs. I was hoping that he would turn out, but I felt that his interpretation wasn’t quite what we wanted, and he wasn’t happy, either, with the kind of things he was doing.
Then, for the next album, you got Royce Jones, who sounded rather like him.
Fagen: Well, we need people to sing high register harmony parts.
And that’s still a problem for you?
Fagen: Well, sometimes I can do them, and some times I can’t. It depends on the range. So we’ve used various singers. Tim Schmit from Poco did some work for us, and Clydie King and some studio singers in Los Angeles, and Royce Jones, Mike McDonald… I couldn’t possibly tell you the importance of individual contributions from musicians to our music.
We use the very finest musicians we can find, and we have a very good relationship with them. I think it’s a more intimate relationship than other producers who use session people.
But it’s very difficult music compared to most pop music. We throw a thing away if it just has a little flaw, if it doesn’t feel quite right, or the drummer was a little off that day. We can’t accept it.
Becker: It’s done in a certain way. There’s very little written for the drummer — accents only. Chord voicings are written for piano.
The guitar player is prepared by spoken word from the composers. And the bass players that we use are always people that we know and don’t need to have a written part — I haven’t played very much bass lately on Steely Dan albums; I play a little guitar and a little bass.
It’s a quintet or a sextet that lays down the track, and everything else is overdubbed. Vocals are all overdubbed.
You use a lot of jazz people. Phil Woods, Plas Johnson, Vic Feldman.
Fagen: It’s our background. Jazz is what we’ve always listened to. It’s been the mainstay of our listening. It’s from New York radio in the Fifties and Sixties.
There are also undoubted Latin influences in your records.
Fagen: Both of us heard a lot of Latin music in New York. The old jazz stations, in order to survive, played a lot of Latin jazz in the late Fifties and Sixties — Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente, and things like that. So we heard a lotta that music.
I think Duke Ellington’s whole exotic jungle trip contributed a lot to our tropicality numbers. It’s certainly no attempt at real Latin music; it’s more like Duke Ellington in that it’s an idealized, exotic atmosphere — Cotton Club jungle music, you know. Showtime, Ricky Ricardo stuff. More I Love Lucy than Bob Marley.
Why do you find you need so many guitarists. There are five on Royal Scam.
Becker: Just to keep it interesting. We’re constantly trying to expand the number of musicians that we think will fit into what we’re doing. It’s more fun for us to have different musicians.
How does Denny Dias like that?
Fagen: Denny is an extremely tractable human being.
I presume Jeff Baxter was not.
Becker: He was less tractable by a good margin, although he was an exceptionally good sport about what we were doing, always, and extremely co-operative with us.
I also presume his problem was you weren’t touring.
Becker: That was one problem. Another problem had to do with money, in that being a member of Steely Dan was tantamount to a kind of enforced poverty at that time. And there were musical things.
Fagen: It was always a compromise.
Do you tend to be martinets, then?
Becker: I wouldn’t put it that way. Good grief! Perhaps you would care to re-phrase the question. I know you can do better.
Katz: It’s their show.
Becker: What we try to do is nudge very, very competent musicians into doing something extraordinary, even for them.
Fagen: A musician will come in and see some of the changes we got, and he’ll go, “Mmm. This is some sort of music here!”
Are you thinking of recording here?
Fagen: We’re looking at some recording studios here. We may.
Is it just because you want a change of scenery?
Fagen: That’s just about it, yeah, really.
Becker: Well, actually, our main motivation in coming was that we might pick up some inspiration, or stimulate some provocative vision or experiences or feelings.
You won’t find much in dear old apathetic London.
Becker: Well, even that’s something. For us that’s grist for our mill.
Fagen: Apathy — we can get a lot of mileage outta that.
Becker: Yes, we can take that and make it into a silk purse.
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