Editor’s Note: From 1987 through 1994, diehard Steely Dan fans turned to a small fanzine called Metal Leg for information about Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Published first by England’s Brian Sweet (who went on to write the unofficial band biography Steely Dan: Reelin’ In The Years) and later by New Yorkers Pete Fogel and Bill Pascador, Metal Leg set high standards by providing solid information without resorting to paparazzi-style tactics.
Articles
Editor’s note
I’ve Got The News
Donald Fagen: Words & Music
Donald Fagen Piano Lessons
Walter Becker Internet Interview
Mose the Fireman
Who Was the Razor Boy?
Rosie Vela: Facing the Music
Rebellious Jukebox
Letters
Editor’s Note
Hi again. This issue marks the 8th year of Metal Leg, believe it or not. If Becker & Fagen hadn’t decided to revive the Steely Dan name last year (1993), Metal Leg would have been around longer than the band itself.
After making it this far, we’d like to thank all the subscribers who have been with us since the beginning, as well those we’ve met along the way. By re-subscribing you help us to continue to put out what many have called “the best fanzine out there.” Please keep in mind that it takes money to publish this magazine, and your checks carry the costs of printing, mailing, computer equipment as well as the expensive cost of advertising to find people who have yet to discover us.
It looks like another monster year, at least for me, with another U.S. tour.
Another month of running around the country to catch the grooves of our favorite band is a bit of a hassle, but well worth the effort After all, I gotta keep all of you informed on what’s going on. And, since I ended up missing the Japanese tour when my flight was unexpectedly diverted to Singapore, I definitely decided to make most of this year’s dates. While it was a bummer not going to Japan, while stranded in Singapore I was one of the lucky people who got to witness the caning of Michael Fay so at least the trip wasn’t a total waste. Ouch!
–Pete
I Got The News
To the Good and Great peoples of the mighty island nation of Japan: greetings and salutations from the enigmatic yet pleasurable mind-world of Steely Dan. It is, or very well soon be, our great personal pleasure to share with you an evening of songs and singing, and with goodwill and broad smiles, it is hoped for all concerned. It is a well known fact that the Japanese people have long admired, or at the least recently come to appreciate, the icy and sophisticated rhythmic stylings identified with the group called Steely Dan, consisting at various times of whoever was so great as to make the particular session that day. Similarly, we have long ago learned to apprehend the strength and wisdom of the heroic Japanese people, with their land of mountain splendor and gracious temples, mixed in with their awesome balance of trade and majestic currency, the almighty Yen. So it is hoped that tonight may someday be remembered as having been an epic exchange between the cultures of Japan and of Steely Dan, featuring the massive swap of icy rhythmic stylings for ancient wisdom and almighty Yen, in the greatest amounts imaginable. So welcome, our new old friends, and LET THE SINGING BEGIN!
And with this introduction in the tour program, Steely Dan ’94 first ever Japanese tour was underway on April 12th in Osaka at Castle Hall and ended on April 24th in Fukuoka at the Shimin Kaikan. The backing band and the set list for the Japanese tour remained the same as the Steely Dan Orchestra ’93, except for substituting “Parker’s Band” for “Bad Sneakers” in the opening overture and eliminating “Tomorrow’s Girls” and “Countermoon” entirely due to time constraints. Walter also performed two songs from his upcoming album including “Book of Liars,” which was translated in the program as “Box of Rears.”
The crowds were pretty sedate. With few exceptions, people sat still in their seats and politely applauded at the end of each song. They had a couple of Dan T-shirts, a ’93 Steely Dan cap and a program on-sale, as well as all the Fagen/Dan albums including the Japanese single releases. While ticket prices were $60-$75, the new “Steely Dan Remastered” CD was 2,500 Yen ($25). Intermission refreshments were limited to Kirin Beer, Ritz Crackers, and the ever-popular vending machines with strawberry milk as well as Orange and Squash sodas.
The program included an interview with a Japanese music critic Yoh Nakagawa as well as some biographic material and other comments, all in Japanese.
Rod Stewart and Jackson Browne were also touring in Japan at the same time and their respective back-up bands attended the Dan shows. Jeff Young, of Jeff Young and The Youngsters, the backup band for the New York Rock & Soul Revue Live At The Beacon album, who is currently playing with Jackson Browne, was at one of the shows.
Another U.S. Tour!
As if last summer’s U.S. tour didn’t tide the boys over for the next 19 years, Steely Dan is back to “Do It Again.” After last summer’s sold-out, 25-city, North American tour, Donald & Walter will be back on the road for an 18-city North American tour which includes their first ever Canadian appearance. The dates (subject to change) are as follows:
- 8/19-St Petersburg, FL-Suncoast Dome
- 8/20-0rlando, FL-Orlando Arena
- 8/21-Miami, FL-Miami Arena
- 8/23-Columbia, MD-Merriweather
- 8/24-Mansfield, MA-Great Woods
- 8/26-Chicago, IL-Poplar Creek
- 8/27-Clarkston, MI-Pine Knob
- 8/28-Columbus, OH-Polaris
- 8/30-Raleigh, NC-Walnut Creek
- 8/31-Atlanta, GA-Lakewood
- 9/2-3-Dallas, TX-Starplex
- 9/4-Houston, TX-Woodlands
- 9/6-Denver, CO-Fiddler’s Green
- 9/9-Vancouver, BC-Coliseum
- 9/10-11-George, WA-The Gorge
- 9/13-San Francisco, CA-Shoreline???
- 9/14-San Bernardino, CA-Blockbuster
- 9/16-17-lrvine, CA-Irvine Meadows
- 9/18-Phoenix, AZ-Blockbuster
It’s interesting to see that there are no New York or Philadelphia dates planned at this time. We don’t know if there are any plans to add these or any other cities at this time. Keep your eyes and ears open and let us know if you hear anything. Our only suggestion for now is to start making your vacation plans now.
Some tickets have gone on sale already and are selling out as quickly as last year. If you are looking to travel to see any of the shows, we have some suggestions on getting tickets. First, unless money is no object, avoid dealing with scalpers at any time prior to the show. We observed that at last summer’s shows, the price of tickets declined to close to face value right before showtime. This was due to the fact that many Steely Dan fans are older and have become burdened with grown-up responsibilities. As a result, a number of people with good tickets were unable to attend when their kids got sick, babysitter didn’t show, got sent away on business, etc. and were forced to unload their tickets in order to get their money back. This means that if you show up an hour or so before showtime looking for tickets, it shouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg to see the show and you could get good seats. We know it’s nice to have a ticket in hand before you travel to another city for a concert, but you’ll have to pay for that peace of mind.
We don’t know if the set list will be different from what they played last year even though they’e playing many of the same cities as last year.
Two major changes have to do with the backup band. Donald and Walter have replaced guitarist Drew Zingg and drummer Peter Erskine. Drew’s position will be filled by Georg Wadenius, who played rhythm guitar on Kamakiriad and on “Century’s End.” Peter’s position will be filled by Dennis Chambers, the drummer who was their first choice for last year’s tour, but had other commitments. Chambers is well known in the industry and has played with many people including George Clinton and The Brecker Brothers. We haven’t heard why Zingg and Erskine were dropped, but looking at Steely Dan’s past history with drummers and guitarists, it makes sense that they’d look to shuffle things up a bit, just to try to keep things fresh and different.
Not missing a beat, Drew was recruited by NY Rock & Soul Revue’r Boz Scaggs, who will be touring to support his terrific new album Some Change on Virgin Records .
Regarding the rumored live Steely Dan album, it is definitely going to happen in time for Christmas release this year. There was a big question on which record company owned the rights to the live album, their old label MCA or their current label Reprise/Warner Bros. Reprise emerged as the winner and has formally announced the project. While all of last year’s shows were recorded, we hear that the Japanese shows and this summer’s U.S. shows will also be recorded, and the best takes out of all three tours will appear on the double-length album. As far as bootlegs go, two new double-length CDs of last summer’s tour have appeared called Book Of Liars — which was taken from audience tapes of the LA-area shows — and Doing It Again, which was taken from audience tapes of the NY/ Jones Beach shows. They are both retailing for $70 each, but we haven’t gotten a chance to hear either of them yet. We’ll track them down to review in our next issue, but hold on to your wallets for now , since this is a lot of money to spend, when the legitimate release will probably run between $25-30 and be of the best possible quality.
Walter’s Album
Walter’s first solo album, is almost finished and is set for release in late August on Giant Records. We haven’t found out the title yet, but it is being produced by Donald Fagen, who spent the entire winter in Maui working on the project. He performed the songs “Book Of Liars” and “Fall Of ’92” at all of last year’s tour dates, as well as “Cringemaker,” “Our Lawn” and “Girlfriend” at some of the dates. Other songs that may appear on the album include “Little Kawai By The Sea,” “Junkie Girl,” and “Three Sisters Shakin’.” We will have more info on the project in our next issue.
And if you didn’t hear, Kamakiriad was nominated for a Grammy for Album Of The Year, but lost to Whitney Houston ‘s soundtrack to The Bodyguard. Aja, Gaucho and The Nightfly had also been nominated for the same awards in previous years and lost. And true to form, Donald and Walter decided to ditch the Grammy ceremonies in a frozen New York City, and continue work on Walter’s album in a warm Hawaiian paradise. It was pretty funny watching people on the TV news trying to pronounce Kamakiriad during Grammy preview segments.
In other news, Metal Leg founder Brian Sweet has finally settled upon a title for his unauthorized biography of Steely Dan that will be published in early fall by Omnibus Press. After months and months of deliberations on what would be the most suitable appellation to encapsulate the band’s essence, Brian came up with the clever yet original title, “REELIN’ IN THE YEARS.” Boy, we never could have thought of that one. Good job, Brian!
Gary Katz/River Sound News
Steely Dan producer Gary Katz has been keeping himself busy with some R&B and Hip-Hop projects. The first project is the Tribute to Curtis Mayfield album, which was released on Warner Brothers. The album features superstars Steve Winwood, Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart and others performing songs by Curtis Mayfield, who was paralyzed in 1990 in a freak accident during a concert when a windstorm blew over a light tower crushing his spine. This album also features a band that Gary Katz is producing called Repercussions, doing a remake of “Let’s Do It Again.” On the remake, Gary decided to use Curtis Mayfield on part of the vocals, and according to the New York Times, “they wheeled him into a recording studio, and lying on his back in three quick takes – about all he had the strength for — knocked out the rendition that was used.” Gary also mixed all of the tracks on the album. The Repercussions’ debut album is due out in the very near future after a couple of production delays.
Gary has also produced the debut album of Groove Collective on Reprise Records. Groove Collective features Steely Dan tour vibe player Bill Ware along with nine other NYC musicians. The music style is “Acid Jazz,” which merges elements of traditional jazz with ’70s styled funk and ”90s hip-hop beats. Gary was also musical director for an acid jazz/AIDs benefit at NYC’s Supper Club with sported many jazz legends, including Joe Sample, Phil Woods who backed Gangsta’ Rappers Roots. Groove Collective also was among the highlights.
At Gary & Donald’s River Sound Studio, Pat Metheny and John Scofield, and the ex-Laker Girl-turned-diva Paula Abdul have been laying down some tracks.
And last, but not least, Beavis and Butthead, the Siskel & Ebert of Empty-V have declared that Donald’s video for “Snowbound” sucks. In a recent episode, the boys happen to catch the video, but lose interest quickly, fall asleep, start drooling while they’re napping, and then wake up and start screaming, “Change It! Change It! This sucks!” Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh…
Donald Fagen: Words and Music
The following piece was transcribed from a promotional CD from Reprise Records sent to radio stations and other media outlets when Kamakiriad was released last May. In this “interviewerless” interview, Donald talks about Kamakiriad, discusses several of the songs, and talks about getting back into the groove after lying low in the ’80s.
Intro: It’s been over a decade since one of today’s most intriguing and elusive artists released his acclaimed solo album, The Nightfly. Now Donald Fagen returns with Kamakiriad, and with the evidence of these eight new songs, including the single “Tomorrow’s Girls,” it’s been worth the wait. Hello and welcome to “Words and Music,” featuring Donald Fagen and his new Reprise Records release, Kamakiriad. With Steely Dan partner Walter Becker at the production helm, Kamakiriad is a dazzling journey into a brave new world with some of the most adventurous music of Donald Fagen’s career. And now, here’s Donald Fagen.
DF: On a literal level, Kamakiriad is about a journey that the narrator takes in a special sort of car. The story takes place a few years in the future and the car has some super technology. It has a link with a satellite called Tripstar, which is a routing satellite that helps him find his destination. It has peculiar gauges. Also, a bionic farm in the back, which is a self-sufficient food supply. And it essentially is a new-age sort of car. It’s an environmentally correct car. I felt that by placing the story a few years in the future it allowed me to have a certain amount of detachment from the story, which can be seen, at least on one level, as being autobiographical.
(Plays “Trans-Island Skyway”)
DF: The science fiction angle, I think, works as its worked for a lot of science fiction writers who write stories and novels, in the way that it sort of removes the sentimentality from what is potentially an over-sentimental story. The Kamakiri is a car I sort of made up. In Japanese, it means “praying mantis,” which I thought was a great name for a car. It’s a combination of various super-technologies from different parts of the world and it’s the kind of car I guess I imagined I’d like to drive a few years in the future, toward the millennium. I don’t know if I ever had a total visualization in my mind of what the car looked like. I guess I thought of it a being a medium-sized car, with the garden covered with some sort of bubble, and the tires being rather large.
One of the main things is that I felt the car didn’t really drive very quickly. It actually moved fairly slowly, the idea being that in the future, speed would be something which is no longer of that much value. And rather slow and thoughtful process is something to be desired. The car is propelled by steam, which makes it environmentally correct. I can easily see it stopping at a steam station to be refilled. It would obviously have a boiler of some sort, in order to produce the steam. As I said, because the car doesn’t have to really move so fast, it doesn’t need that much energy to drive it. The Kamakiri is a product of many nations. I guess I see it as being planned not so much as a technical feat, but rather as a work of art. It’s kind of wishful thinking on my part that perhaps architecture and technology will be conceived along the lines of art rather than the lines of expedience in the future.
(“Trans-Island Skyway” Continues)
Kamakiriad was an album that I felt I bad to do alone. The concept was something I came up with by myself and I wrote all the tunes, except for one tune that Walter and I collaborated on in the mid-’80s. I felt that the album was really a follow-up to The Nightfly, and that it continued in an autobiographical vein. It’s been a long time since The Nightfly came out, 1981. Eleven years is a long time. If you think about novelists or painters who aren’t working in a popular medium, it’s kind of accepted that an artist will need to develop something for a number of years. But in the record business, which is a popular medium, you’re supposed to just keep socking out those records. I think that’s part of the problem. I’m working in a medium, both an artistic medium and an entertainment medium.
What happened after Nightfly, I had a bit of writer’s block. Since I was having trouble writing tunes that I thought were successful, I took a number of other musical jobs in the ’80s. I co-produced a soundtrack album of Bob Telson’s music for The Gospel At Colonus, an Off-Broadway musical. Composed a film score for a film called Bright Lights, Big City. Wrote some material for other people, The Yellowjackets and a few other groups. And then in the late ’80s, I got some creative energy back and came up with the idea for this album Kamakiriad. Simultaneously, I was involved in the New York Rock & Soul Revue with my friend and now my wife, Libby Titus, in which a number of singers would revive some of the old great soul tunes from the golden age of soul, from the early and late ’60s. We did a couple of shows at the Beacon Theatre and then toured with that group, including Phoebe Snow and Michael McDonald and some other great singers in the Summer of ’92.
(Plays “Pretzel Logic” from The New York Rock & Soul Revue-Live At The Beacon)
DF: The ’80s were generally a period of self-examination for me. And when I started playing live around New York, and eventually elsewhere with the Rock & Soul Revue, I think it did give me some energy which allowed me to start writing again.
(Plays “Countermoon”)
DF: Like The Nightfly, Kamakiriad is a series of songs which are loosely connected. If you are trying to write an album where the songs are tied together, there’s a danger that you’ll have to use too much exposition or too much explanation which would make the album didactic and boring. I trust the listener to fill in some of the things which might be missing, some of the details. They used to call these things “concept albums” back in the ’60s and ’70s. That’s good enough a title, I think. Usually “concept album” was said in a negative way simply because most of them were not that successful. Hopefully, Kamakiriad is successful in that you can listen to it all the way through and get something out of it you wouldn’t by listening to a song here and there.
Essentially, the first song, “Trans-Island Skyway,” announces that the narrator has bought this terrific car. And that he will be traveling on a journey which is going to be very exhilarating and yet has some danger about it. Because he is traveling in apocalyptic times, there is all sorts of natural disasters to be avoided and all kinds of bizarre adventures he might be having. He says, at one point, “This route could be trouble.” And, in fact, he does run into trouble in his journey.
(Plays “On the Dunes”)
DF: The next six songs — there’s eight altogether — really represent adventures or detours that he runs into along the way. Some of the songs occurred to me in sequence. In fact, “On the Dunes,” which is the penultimate song, was written in 1983, before I had even conceived the project. But when I was putting the songs in order, I realized that “On The Dunes” would be perfect because when he starts his journey he doesn’t know where he’s going. In fact, in a way he sort of makes it up as he goes along, just as I made it up as I went along.
(“On The Dunes” Continues)
DF: The chronology is sometimes interrupted by explosions from the past. Specifically the song “Springtime,” concerns an amusement park that he stops at along the way called Springtime. The introduction is the exposition and it tells you that there’s this place called Springtime that’s the most popular place along the Funway. In this place they scan your brain for the memories of your early romances and then play it back to you in some magnificent virtual theater. Then, when the actual song begins after the introduction, you actually see some of these scenes recreated. At that point, the music becomes manic rather than nostalgic. Because nostalgia is really sort of a trap we fall into sometimes that prevents us from moving forward. I feel by putting the wrong music under the lyric, it basically sabotages the sentimentality.
(Plays “Springtime.”)
DF: The album, to me, seems to be about loss in a lot of ways. One of the ways people experience loss directly is when a relationship goes bad. It’s not that uncommon a thing for someone to wake up in the morning and look at his mate and not really know who he’s looking at anymore. People tend to change and grow in different directions. I think the most extreme form of that is when you look at the person you’re living with and decide that they may as well be from Mars essentially. When it becomes obvious that there’s some lack of communication between you, or perhaps things are starting to go wrong, it sometimes seems that the person you’re living with has been replaced by an alien.
(Plays “Tomorrow’s Girls.”)
DF: Well, I think in Kamakiriad, the narrator’s trying to reclaim some of his optimism, perhaps naive optimism, that he had as a child, as it’s spelled out in The Nightfly. I think that the way it ends up, the character at the end is still optimistic, but without the naivete. In other words, he’s basically much more in contact with reality, and realizes the harshness of reality, and yet maintains a kind of optimism.
I try to keep my own politics out of the stuff I do, aside from the spillover that happens when you create something that’s part of yourself. I think that a lot of the elements, the attention to seeing the world as a planet moving in space that we all exist on, the car is going through territory in which tidepools are boiling and plates are grinding — these are really natural disasters. For instance, the song “Snowbound” is about a city that constantly has really bad weather, the streets are icy and it’s always snowing and hailing and so on. The narrator gets trapped in this place for a while and starts to share the decadent lifestyle of some of the dwellers of the city. I guess I imagine him really having to fight to get out of this place. Of course, I can’t detail everything, but maybe the movie version will be more explicit.
(Plays “Snowbound”)
DF: The album took about two years to complete because Walter lives in Hawaii and didn’t want to spend that much time away from his family. He would come to New York, where I live, for six weeks. And I’d write a couple more songs and then I’d spend six weeks working with him at his home in Hawaii. So there were a lot of breaks and it was not a particularly hurried schedule, it was kind of relaxed. But altogether it took about two years. On this record, I felt that I wanted to have more control, you might say even more control than I had on other records, so I played all the keyboard parts myself, and arranged all the rhythm tracks myself. I even, in fact, did the horn arrangements myself. In the past, I always had someone help me with the voicings of the horns. I felt that if I wrote the arrangements fairly simply, the music would be more unified if everything was bent to my own conception.
I think that the music is unified in the sense that one of the most important things to me when I was doing the arrangements was the groove of the tune. I was looking for something very specific in the way of groove, and in fact made the demos that I used to start with the very specific absolute groove. I wanted the groove to be aggressive and yet very relaxed at the same time. The groove is so consistent that when you get to the end of the album, it’s easy to loop around back to the first tune.
With Walter producing, we first started thinking about other musicians we would use and we realized — certainly I realized — that the bass player I would most rather have play on the thing was Walter. So he ended up doing all the bass parts, and all the lead guitar. If it sounds like a Steely Dan record, there’s a good reason for it.
(Plays “Florida Room”)
DF: I feel that, more than any other record, I got the finished product to sound the way I imagined it would come out. I didn’t know where I was going exactly, I think it’s a psychological journey that’s taking place literally in space rather than in the psychological space. The last song on the album “Teahouse On The Tracks,” was the last song I wrote. I didn’t really know where the guy in the car was going to end up until I wrote that song. So there was a sense of suspense about writing the record as to whether I would actually come up with some kind of conclusion.
In “Teahouse On The Tracks,” he finally arrives at this town, which I call Flytown, this nasty little place. A kind of unfamiliar town, where, psychologically, he’s totally abandoned and just about ready to cash it in, when he hears this band playing from a place, a second story window. He finds out it’s a little place called “Teahouse On The Tracks” and he walks in there and he finds people from his past on the bandstand. They’re experiencing a certain kind of joy which has become totally unfamiliar to him. By meditating on his past and bringing it back to life again, he experiences this resurrection. He suddenly gets a case of party feet, as it says in the tune. The next morning, he gets back in the Kamakiri and heads back into the unknown.
Donald Fagen: Concepts for Jazz/Rock Piano
If you’ve always wanted Donald Fagen to give you piano lessons, now, in the privacy of your own home, Homespun Tapes, the largest purveyor of high-quality video and audio lessons has just released a 70-minute instructional video called “Donald Fagen-Concepts For Jazz/Rock Piano-Playing, Writing & Arranging.” According to the liner notes, “This video gives us rare insight into the musical thinking of one of the most influential songwriters and arrangers in American popular music. In an intimate conversation with jazz pianist Warren Bernhardt, Donald Fagen explores the process that went into the writing and arranging of some typical Steely Dan songs (penned with partner Walter Becker) as well as some of his own solo works.
Starting with the Steely Dan hit, “Chain Lightning,” Donald and Warren demonstrate how a sophisticated jazz-rock tune can evolve from a simple twelve bar blues form. By altering the bass line and chord qualities, an ordinary blues is transformed into a unique and original composition.
By selecting tunes that use familiar blues and R&B structures as source material, Donald and Warren can clearly trace the development of a piece. Songs of increasing complexity are played and analyzed. “Peg,” “Josie,” “On The Dunes” and “Teahouse On The Tracks” are each explored in detail to reveal their singular structures, harmonic and rhythmic characteristics, intro ideas and other devices.
By sharing his vast experience in popular music, Donald Fagen provides you with powerful tools to enhance your own playing, writing and arranging.
The quality of the video is excellent and it’s fun to watch, even if you’re not a musician. It’s really interesting to see how “Peg” evolved from a Gospel blues structure and “Josie” evolved from a primitive Delta blues structure.
(NOTE: This information was published originally in 1994 and may no longer be accurate.) The video, which is rated for intermediate to advanced players, is available at finer music shops across the U.S. or you can order directly from Homespun Tapes at 1-800-338-2737, Fax# 914-246-5282. Their address is Box 694, Woodstock, New York, 12498. The catalog number is #VD-DON-JPOl. The tape retails for $49.95. You can also ask for their latest catalog which has 400 titles, including 3 tapes by jazz pianist Warren Bernhardt.
Walter Becker: Interview on the Internet
You might have been hearing a lot of things recently in the press about “The Internet,” a network of computer systems that link universities, businesses and unclassified military installations
across the world. A model for Vice President’s Albert Gore’s “Information Superhighway,” “The Internet” provides for the efficient and instantaneous exchange of electronic information of many types and is expected to lead the word into the information age as we approach the 21st Century.
“Metal Leg” subscriber, Steven Kranz of Tucson, Arizona is a frequent visitor to “The Internet” and informed us of the existence of a global Steely Dan network which provides for the exchange of information on the band. While cruising the DanNet, Steven happened across the following unedited interview with Walter conducted by Christopher Hoard that was excerpted in_the September 1993 issue of “Jazziz Magazine.”
December 1991, Lower Manhattan: A rare and spontaneous event in the annals of 20th century pop music goes largely unnoticed by the press. If not for a publicity shy rock legend turned behind-the-scenes producer, it would have been just another gig at the Roadhouse, featuring Walter Becker’s one-time songwriting partner Donald Fagen sitting in on keyboards with guitarist Jimmy Vivino’s feisty blues rock and R&B house band. With the four-piece born section, Vivino’s New York Nights renders tunes like “Deacon Blues” and “Green Earrings” with an accuracy and looseness that celebrates the timelessness of the original recordings. Shortly into a blistering, bumping set Vivino can not resist toying with history. “I understand Walter Becker is in the audience,” be advises an already primed crowd. Vivino insists on inviting Becker up to take the stage proffering a guitar, and forcing a live reunion of America’s rock’s most diabolical songwriters after eons of not performing their material in public. Several hundred adoring aficionados erupt into ecstatic pandemonium.
Becker has no choice; it was play or be torn to shreds. His inventive guitar phrasings set over studio classics like “Josie” draws ecstatic cheers. Their audience’s faith and long wait is over. They can now boast to friends about how they happened on a momentous chance to see their favorite Seventies rock band play live. The makeshift New York City reunion was all the more unlikely given that Walter Becker spends nearly all his time near family and home studio near Maui, working as a record producer. When Donald Fagen finally ended a decade-long hiatus from major album projects (after the extremely successful 1981 release of The Nightfly), he asked Becker to assist in producing and playing on Fagen’s recently released Kamakiriad.
Before Becker began laying down lead guitar and bass parts on Fagen’s sequenced, pre-production demo, Becker had already decided to start writing songs again and record his own solo project. Becker took a much longer break away from songwriting than Fagen, but by his accounts was the more eager of the pair in trying to revive their writing partnership. As Fagen put it in a May 1993 Rockline radio broadcast, “I think we’re better friends now than ever. We always kept in touch throughout the Eighties…”
Though Becker and Fagen made several attempts to collaborate since announcing the end of Steely Dan in 1980, Fagen had difficulties writing songs he felt comfortable singing and recording until recently. Though the partnership had forged arguably the most successful non-touring rock unit since the latter-era Beatles, both remained oblivious to fan and record industry prodding, though the demand for more music never subsided. In the aftermath of Steely Dan’s last release, Gaucho, Becker took time (out of mind?) to recover from personal crises and diffuse the pressures that come with mega-success. After “a couple of years” Becker began a prolific career in record production and accumulated dozens of mostly jazz albums to his credit, including more recently Rickie Lee Jones’ 1989 release, “Flying Cowboys” (Geffen), Jeff Beal’s latest (Triloka), and the debut release from Lost Tribe on Windham Hill (that label’s least characteristic release to date). Lost Tribe is arguably one of the most technically accomplished, dynamic and original fusion bands to emerge from the fray as of late, and Becker will be drawing upon their talents heavily in his forthcoming solo project. But involvements with Fagen have diverted Becker temporarily from making rapid progress on his project.
Last summer, Becker joined Fagen’s New York Rock & Soul Revue for two weeks of live dates in the Eastern U.S., performing a handful of Steely Dan classics along with an assortment of other vintage rock and R&B material. The musical chemistry and audience response helped propel them to a month-long tour commitment as the resurrected Steely Dan (dates have been announced across the U.S. for August and September). It could well be billed as the “Lost Decades Tour,” as it’s been only 19 years since the band played an announced gig. According to Fagen’s recent radio interviews, the shows will feature Becker’s solo material and songs from Kamakiriad, along with the classic Seventies concoctions of alienation, hipster subculture and keen, sardonic observation. Steely Dan can claim to be the most celebrated “non-touring” studio rock unit since the latter-era Beatles, and Becker along with his partner seem poised again not merely to capitalize on it, but to celebrate their work in an optimum live setting.
Becker recently took a break from work on his upcoming album to talk to “Jazziz” via satellite about his latest career shifts, the weight of history, and forays back into the public spotlight. At summer’s end, Becker will return to his island home to complete his first solo effort (due to be released on Giant Records in early or mid-’94). The first question alludes to a letter Becker wrote to the LA Times in response to Richard Cromelin’s April 1992 interview with Fagen. The piece dwelled on Fagen’s and Becker’s personal problems during the Seventies and characterized Becker as a “sadist” who reveled in intimidating music critics. With the same eloquent sarcasm resonating in so many Steely Dan lyrics, Becker’s pen poked fun at Cromelin, berating him for dwelling on the negatives, and going on to describe a deal proposed by Cromelin that would pay Becker handsomely for an exclusive “tell-all” Steely Dan expose for an Australian tabloid …
Christopher Hoard- Whatever happened to the “tell-all exclusive” in the “Outback Tattler”?
Walter Becker- (deadpan) Actually it fell victim to the censors. See, the Australians came mostly from England, and they’re very repressed. The story in fact was deemed inappropriate for the Australian public…
CH- Looking back on your success in the Seventies, how does it still affect you?
WB- I would say that basically I’m still resting on those laurels quite comfortably. It opens doors. When I meet people and players for the first time, they’re already on my side. It’s been just a very good and very positive influence on people I meet and work with… It always gets a smile out of the people down in Paea. I pass out those free CDs like it was going out of style and pretty much milk it for what it’s worth. We were lucky we had that bleak decade (laughs). It seems like the Seventies must have been shorter than some of the other decades.
CH- Because the Sixties spilled over into it?
WB- Yeah, it started late and spilled over. I’m only kidding … There was a lot of great music in the Seventies. I felt that I was fortunate to be involved with Donald and Gary (Katz) and Roger (Nichols) and all of the people who were part of the Steely Dan band and the dates. Everybody made invaluable contributions to what we were doing and helped make it as successful as it was.
CH- What was significant in your finally deciding to go ahead with a solo project?
WB- I took a few years off and when I got back involved in music the easiest thing for me to do was production stuff. After I did that for a while I had some song ideas and I wanted to get back into writing songs. A couple of the projects I did kind of got me back into it. I live in Hawaii and Donald is thousands and thousands of miles away, so there’s nobody to collaborate with conveniently. I had self-reliance imposed on me by my circumstances.
CH- How would you describe Maui as a music production environment?
WB- The comparison is in New York or LA you have a large pool of talent to draw from, and here there’s a much smaller pool to draw from. Here, there’s no studio scene to support the usual sort of players I’m used to working with over the years, and again it dictates a level of self-sufficiency in what you do. I get people over to do stuff and they’re here for a certain period of time and what’s left I try to do myself. The big difference is you work in a much more open time frame here. People don’t have other gigs to pick up and go to. Usually they’re staying here, so they don’t have to think about their family obligations. It’s pretty good actually because they can stay focused on the music.
CH- How far has you album project come along? Are any other musicians involved?
WB- It’s hard to tell. I’m somewhere in the middle. Some of the songs I wrote are collaborations with Dean Parks, and others are collaborations of various types with Donald. And the rest of them are my own. So far, Dean is playing guitar, John Beasley on keyboards, Bob Sheppard playing saxophone, and the other three guys playing so far are Adam Rogers on guitar, Ben Perowsky on drums and Fima Ephron on bass; those three guy are from a band I produced called Lost Tribe. As I go on, there may be others involved as well.
CH- Rumor has it you’ll be the one singing this time around.
WB- I am, for better or for worse.
CH- So what should we expect?
WB- (Laughs) Well, I’d like to lower everybody’s expectations to the point where hey’ll be pleasantly surprised, so I’ll leave that up to you.
CH- You’ve been particularly prolific in producing jazz acts as of late. How do you view the climate for jazz artists both with audiences and in the music industry at present?
WB- It would be hard to have frustrations with the audience at this point because I
don’t really know who they are. Judging from some of the results we’ve had, there’s so few of them you wouldn’t want to discourage a single one. As far as the industry is concerned, it’s very difficult to get a fair hearing for new artists. Even the labels that think of themselves as jazz labels — with a couple of notable
exceptions — are not really focused on jazz music. They seem to think if only they could get rid of those goddamn jazz musicians they’d have a great label, so that’s a bit frustrating. There are a lot of things that contribute to the economic difficulty of jazz music. It’s still basically not a broadly popular form of music; it never has been in my lifetime and there are a lot of records coming out. Most of them are pretty stinky.
And the ones that are not are often hard to find; I empathize with the jazz fan who goes into Tower Records and confronting a vast array of jazz recordings, many of them new ones, and knowing that from bitter experience buying a new jazz record that you haven’t heard before is a low-percentage shot. At the same time, you have little opportunity to hear jazz records because jazz radio is so limited. There’s so
little of it, and you have difficulty trying to get them to play things. Jazz suffers from pigeonholing, categories, playlists, commercial considerations, and being dominated by a few large companies and all the things that contribute to the general dilemma. But it suffers more severely (than other music) because it’s already such a small slice of the pie.
CH- You successfully made a transition from studio composer/musician to producer, and if what your publicists say is true, you’re about to make another major career shift.
WB- Yeah, so it would seem. Part of what’s happening for me is wanting to make my career dovetail with wanting to spend time with my family. About the perfect day for me is waking up and having a cup of tea with my kids before I drive them to school, then I go to the studio and try and write some music for three or four hours and give up about noon, then have a refreshing beverage and hit the beach. Then I just kind of free-form from there on. I suppose the one thing that’s driven me into having a solo career and becoming a solo artist, whatever that is, is that it affords me the most control over my time and where I spend it. That at this stage in my life is as important a consideration as anything.
CH- And yet you and Donald are planning a major tour together …
WB- It’s just a few weeks out of the summer. It’s the exception that proves the rule, I guess.
CH- So it’s not as if a series of big-time albums and tours are in the works?
WB- Oh, no, nothing like that. Last summer we did a little two-week tour and it was kind of fun, so we said, well, we’ll do a little four-week tour this summer and it will be twice as much fun. We’re playing in what they call “the sheds,” kind of indoor/outdoor venues that seat about 5,000 people. They’re very nice places and it’s a very satisfying kind of live venue all around, because you’re not inside a bad-sounding ball, the acoustics are relatively good, it feels intimate but they’re still big …
CH- Are there plans to record the tour?
WB-There’s been some loose talk about it, but I don’t really know if it will come to anything.
CH- Have any of the projects you’ve produced been particularly memorable?
WB- I’d have to say that with one or two exceptions, all the jazz projects I’ve done were very enjoyable. Of course the Rickie Lee Jones album I did I worked on for a long time and I think I learned more from that than the others just because the way that Rickie works is unique. It was so different than the way I had approached things in the past, so that was a great experience.
CH- I’ve heard from other players that working with her is … an experience.
WB- Oh, yeah, as a writer what she does has a depth to it and it’s not very common to get to work with someone like that. The way she does things is so intuitive and so perfectly designed to fit her own set of talents, because she’s not a trained musician, she’s developed her own ways to do things. Which is not to say I would ever want to do things precisely the way she does, but at the same time it demonstrates how that (approach) may be used to one’s advantage. You know, I’m a similar kind of musician to her in terms of lacking certain kinds of technical skills and working with her encouraged me to find my own unique solutions, and to enable myself to get the most out of what it is I do. She has a kind of ability to see through bullshit that is an important skill in record-making, because a lot of what you’re doing is deciding what’s good and what’s not.
CH- The sound of Kamakiriad is somewhat a departure from the pristine productions of your work together. Was that a conscious production decision?
WB- Donald and I are getting old and eccentric, right? Basically it was a completely new method of deriving the basic rhythm tracks. What was an approach that conformed as closely as possible to Donald’s writing. The groundwork of the track-making process is now part of his writing process. It used to be writing a song was one stage, and then we’d go and start to record the record. Because he’s working with drum machines and so on, it doesn’t work that way anymore — for many people, not just Donald. That was the basic departure. And because the basis of the sound is this machine stuff, which is technically perfect and kind of mechanical, it allows you to loosen up in some other ways — and you try and offset that in a way. When we were working with people, we were always trying to get things as polished and seamless sounding as they could be. Donald spent a tremendous amount of time getting the rhythmic feel to sound as natural as they are. Donald basically evolved a technique to get the beats on the machine to have a kind of loose pocket kind of feel that you’d get if it were played by an incredibly steady soul drummer.
CH- Are other projects with Fagen in the works?
WB- Well, the tour at this point is going to be the next thing. Donald I’m sure will be collaborating with me on my record in some way, although he’s been really busy finishing his record and tied up in doing the things one has to do when one’s record is finished — interviews, calls, video shoots. At some point I’m sure we’ll get together and he’ll work on this project. And that’s about as far as we’ve taken things. We’ve bandied about a few song titles now and then, but we’ve done that in the past and it hasn’t necessarily amounted to anything.
Mose the Fireman
While you’re waiting for Walter’s solo album for grown-ups to be released in September, you can at least tie over your kids or pint-sized relatives (or yourself, of course) with the Rabbit Ears production of “Mose The Fireman,” which features a music score composed by Walter Becker and John Beasley and illustrations by Everett Peck. For more than eight years now, Rabbit Ears has been using the superlative talent of today’s finest actors and musicians to breath new life into the classic stories of children’s literature. In “Mose The Fireman,” Michael Keaton adopts a broad New York accent for this comic history of Gotham’s legendary fireman, whose outrageous exploits shape one of America’s tallest tales in the tradition of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyon.
The score, which brings to life the sounds of turn-of-the-century New York has a Scott Joplin Ragtime/Duke Ellington “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” flavor. It was composed by Becker and Windham Hill pianist John Beasley and recorded at Becker’s studio in Maui, with engineering by Roger Nichols. Becker plays bass, banjo and mandolin, Beasley plays piano and synthesizers, Steve Tavaglione plays all horns, and Steve Marchetti plays all drums and percussion.
(NOTE: This information was published originally in 1994 and may no longer be accurate.) The video is around 30 minutes Jong and retails for $9.98. The soundtrack features the narration and music from the video, plus 7 instrumental tracks titled, “Main Man Mose,” “Lil’ Red Head,” “Lady Washington Rag,” “Delancey Street Fire,” “King of the Bowery,” “Hudson Hump,” and “Ba Da Bing Swing” and retails for $11.98 on CD and $6.98 on cassette. They are available at larger record stores, such as Tower Records. You can also order directly from Rabbit Ears at 1-800-800-EARS on Monday-Friday from 9:30AM to 5:00PM Eastern Time. Rabbit Ears address is 131 Rowayton Ave., Rowayton, CT 06853.
“Who was the Razor Boy? What is the Boston Rag? Where is Mizar-5?”
The following review of the just-released European Dan hits collection “Remastered,” written by Nick Hornby, appeared in the January/February 1994 issue of “Mojo,” a great new British music magazine that can be found at better newsstands across the world:
Just as all sports fans know that Pele’s real name is Edson Arantes de Nascimento, all Steely Dan fans know that the insect featured on the cover of “Katy Lied” is a katydid, and that the katydid is similar to a grasshopper. (We know a couple of other things too: that Steely Dan took their name from William Burroughs, for example, and that Deacon Blue took their name from a Steely Dan song, but these snippets do not provoke the same kind of excitement.)
This information is repeated, inevitably and comfortingly, in the sleeve notes accompanying Remastered-The Best Of Steely Dan. Just over a year after Pretzel Logic, Katy Lied was released. Its U.S. Top 40 single was “Black Friday,” and the album’s sleeve featured a picture of an insect, a katydid, which is similar to a grasshopper. The Royal Scam, their 1976 album … Hooray! Note the non sequitur that allows the writer to demonstrate his mastery of Dan trivia, incidentally, and the way that (I’ll make a wild guess at gender here) he is entirely unable to develop the point once he has made it; this is textbook use of the Great Katydid Fact.
The katydid has come to assume such importance, one supposes, because Steely Dan provides a notoriously slippery surface: there’s very little else to grab hold of. It would be nice to talk about the songs, but most of them defy comprehension, regrettably; all one can say for sure is that Becker and Fagen listened to a lot of Crusaders records and read a lot of SF books, that their imagery is vaguely apocalyptic and that irony is a not unfamiliar weapon in their lyrical armoury.
The rest is pure conjecture. Who was the Razor Boy? What is the Boston Rag? What is a “bodacious cowboy?” Who was Dr. Wu? What (in “Bad Sneakers”) are the five names the singer can hardly stand to hear? (If you could give me a couple, even, just to get me started…) What is a Third World Man? Where is Mizar-5? Who or what is Aja? What sort of logic is Pretzel Logic? What happened on Black Friday? Why doesn’t daddy drive in that Eldorado no more? Why, if you want some fun, is Mr. Lapage your man?
I have been listening to Steely Dan for 20 years, and I don’t really understand a single word they ever wrote. I do know, however, that the insect on the cover of Katy Lied was a katydid. I bought Can’t Buy a Thrill because of “Reelin’ in the Years” and I liked “Reelin’ in the Years” because it contained a corking guitar solo which made it sound, to my 16-year-old ears, like the Doobie Brothers.
I would have been surprised if you’d told me that I’d still be listening to Steely Dan in the early ’90s — teenage pop fans are nothing if not loyal; I would have been amazed and appalled, though, to learn that I had become the aficionado of a particularly slick and impossibly sophisticated jazz/rock/funk outfit which sounded nothing like the Doobie Brothers whatsoever.
That’s what happens to you when you grow up, I guess, although one imagines that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were grown up all the time, and only made records that sounded like the Doobie Brothers because pop life was easier that way; they were happiest, one felt, messing around with grown-up jazzers like Tom Scott and Wayne Shorter (who both played on Aja, the penultimate Steely Dan record), and they wouldn’t have cared if rock-fan dimwits like me had never listened to them again.
Steely Dan was never a singles band, despite “Haitian Divorce” and “Do It Again”; the albums were simply too dense, too much of a piece, and Best Of… compilations seem especially inappropriate in their case. This one, for example, features four tracks from Can’t Buy A Thrill, and although their debut still sounds as smart and as West Coast-fresh as it ever did, it needs to be kept well away from the clever-dick stuff that came after. The final two tracks of “Remastered”: “Dirty Work” and “Josie,” ask you to compare and contrast “Can’t Buy A Thrill” with “Aja,” but strangely the juxtaposition does neither of them any favours: “Dirty Work” is pretty and careful and sincere, “Josie” is witheringly cool and dry and flip. They sound like the work of two entirely different bands — which, of course, they were, given the way Dan personnel changed between records — but more disconcertingly, taken out of context, they seem to mock each other.
There are those who dislike Steely Dan precisely because they were cool and dry and flip; pop music, these people reckon, should be all about guts and fire and feeling, not difficult chords and ironic detachment. And sometimes, if you listen to Katy Lied or Gaucho when you’re in the wrong mood, it is possible to share that sort of suspicion. “If you’re so smart,” you feel like saying to Becker and Fagen, “how come your songs all have verses, and choruses, and solos in the middle, like Bruce Springsteen songs? How come you haven’t managed to deconstruct pop any further? How come you didn’t go off and do something really clever, like write the Great American Novel, or a postmodern musical?”
Ah, but what verses and choruses and solos they were! The guitar solo at the end of “Kid Charlemagne” (and no, I don’t know who he was either) is a dazzling, note-bending, unexpectedly joyous thing; you don’t expect to be this exhilarated by music that self-conscious. The way the guitar break tumbles out of the horn charts in “My Old School” is similarly enthralling, and it’s at times like this that Becker and Fagen convince you they created a genuine rock/jazz fusion, a brand-new, late-20th century R&B.
Should they reform? Hell, yes. We’re not talking about a Clash-style embarrassment here; “Hey Nineteen” and “Babylon Sisters” were what we started listening to after we’d given up on The Clash, and if Becker and Fagen have less fire in their bellies now, well, they’ll just be cooler.
Rosie Vela: Facing the Music
You might have seen her on numerous covers of “Vogue” in the late ’70s, in the Sinatra Michelob television ad in the the mid ’80s, or most recently in the Maybelline television and magazine ads announcing “I’m 40!” But as some of you might or might not know, ’70s super model Roseanne Vela can actually claim credit for the first so-called Steely Dan reunion when she unintentionally snared Walter Becker and Donald Fagen to play on her 1986 debut record “Zazu.” ln this article that appeared in the November 3, 1986 issue of “New York Magazine,” writer Eric Pooley tells her story: “For ten years, Rosie Vela was a top fashion model. Now she has a pop album out. Despite all appearances, hers is not the story of a beautiful woman who parlays her looks into a record deal and stardom. Vela wrote all the music on Zazu and her songs were good enough to reunite Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, of Steely Dan to play them.”
One night in 1976, a studio owner watched a “Vogue” model named Rosie Vela record some rock songs. He looked Vela’s body up and down, lingering over her red-blonde ringlets, heavy-lidded eyes, and pouty lips. Then he made a tasteless proposition.
“He said, ‘Hey, you like music,’ ” Vela remembers. “‘You could be a star. You could do it — I’ll get you some songs. I’ll get you a producer. I’ll dress you up. I got it figured out — an androgynous pop character, neither male nor female.”
“I said, ‘Huh?’ ”
Today, Vela tells the story with annoyance and satisfaction. After developing her music in private during 10 years of modeling — countless photo sessions, 14 “Vogue” covers — Vela has released her first album, Zazu. And she’s struggling to be taken seriously in a town where models rarely are. “People talk about my ‘Cinderella story,'” she says, “because I’m a model, and because I haven’t given concerts yet — as if the genie just waved his wand over me.”
Then she sits back in her sunken living room above the Hudson and listens to Zazu. A song called “Interlude” comes on — a solemn, beautiful ballad with a melody that unfolds as inexorably as a love affair running aground. It’s no wonder the music is so strong — Vela’s band includes Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who made some of the finest rock of the Seventies under the name Steely Dan. But the real power is Vela’s: She sings in a voice that starts out low, hushed, and sad, then goes double-time, urgent and hopeful. On the couch, Vela is rapt, singing along with herself in a lonely world somewhere behind her hair. Then “Interlude” moves through a haunting instrumental passage: Becker and Fagen playing Vela’s melody note for note, adding one lyrical descending run at the end. It’s a tribute from two master musicians to the music that reunited them after six years. Vela still sings along — lovely, enigmatic, and fragile.
Rosie Vela’s story is not the one about the top model who parlays her looks into a record deal and becomes a pop star thanks to a sexy album cover and music made by others. Her story — young woman comes to New York after the death of her husband, makes it as a model, then works to become a musician — is a far more compelling one. It may result in stardom; it’s too soon to tell. More important, Vela has already produced an album of music that’s being compared to the work of Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, and Kate Bush. In fact, the complexity of Vela’s music — oddly structured songs with strong melodies but no hooks or pandering choruses — is one obstacle to success. Another is her beauty.
Fashion models, of course, occupy a strange place in New York life. Rich and glamorous, they are ogled and looked down on by the fashion industry and the public. Vela can play the sultry-brainless-model game; she can play the wisecracking southern girl; she can play the spacey flower child she was fifteen years ago, before her husband died and her life changed forever. But she really is an artist, “soft and inward,” as she says, and also talented, determined and smart. And her good looks could make it hard for some people to recognize her talent.
“Modeling has been great to me,” says Vela, not one to complain about how awful it is to make $3,000 a day for being pretty. “But it has its dark side. People think you’re the Barbie doll of the century. They think that’s all you are.”
A classically trained pianist who grew up in Galveston, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas, Vela came to New York in 1974 after her husband, a gifted 21-year-old musician named Jimmy Roberts, died in her arms, of cancer. Vela became one of the most successful models of the late seventies, but never lost sight of her goals: Modeling was a job, and music was her life’s work. Patient enough to give her talent time, Vela and her brother Chat built a recording studio in her apartment, where she survived years of self-doubt as she taught herself to write and play and sing.
When she was ready, she sent a demo tape to A&M Records executive Jerry Moss, and soon she was in a studio with Becker, Fagen and their producer, Gary Katz. “She is so talented,” says Katz. “Her playing, singing, writing. The thing about Rosie is, she doesn’t think in structures — she writes a passage because she likes it, then another and another, sometimes in the same key and it works. For someone who started out with basically no idea what she was doing, she’s very, very good — remarkable. Cool.”
“Yeah, I thought I was good,” says Vela with her disarming laugh. “But I never thought I’d get to work with rock-and-roll Vikings.”
The sun is setting over the Hudson, red light flooding Vela, her white living room, her white upright piano. Around her are a half-dozen electronic keyboards, two electronic drum machines, a digital sampler, studio tape recorders, and assorted gadgets that alter sound and have names like “outboard” and “exciter.”
Standing at a Yamaha DX7 electronic keyboard, Vela plays a delicate, contrapuntal melody — a kind of pop fugue with dazzling interplay between the hands. She picks up speed, and the piece becomes a rollicking workout. Taped to the DX7 is a fortune from a cookie: “Among the lucky, you are the chosen one.”
Vela takes a phone call from a model friend, laughs, says “Beauty must suffer,” and hangs up. She moves to the couch as “Magic Smile,” the first single from Zazu, lopes out of the speakers: syncopated keyboards over a walking bass line, and Vela’s high, wistful voice — a parody of the scat-singing chanteuse, and an affecting love song. Vela sits with her back to the window, snapping her fingers, shaking her head, singing along for the first time since the record was released.
“Can’t imagine how/You’d thrill me and then you’d walk away … “
There’s sadness, and humor — the conceit of a woman who looks good and knows it. And there’s some nifty scat singing in a language she call Zazu:
” … Been trynta seeya baBUH/Been dyinta keenovay … “
“This is a joke about love,” she says, “as corny as I could get it — stretch the syllables for their feel. All these songs, really, are messages for the girls about the elusive lovers who never call.” (Vela lived for nine years with artist Peter Max, moved out last year, and is now alone.) Other songs play: one about a desperate woman banging on boxes in the street outside her ex-lover’s apartment; another about a woman in a ”Blade Runner” future, talking to a vanished lover named Zazu. Vela sifts through magazines and newspapers, scanning reviews of Zazu. One says she is sexy and in her mid-twenties; another calls her songs “pillow talk.”
“Pillow talk,” says Vela, 33. “That hurts. But the songs are personal, about my love guys, so I guess it’s true. But it still hurts to see it in print. Pillow talk.”
Galveston, Texas, in 1953 was a conservative, industrial Gulf Coast town; Roseanne Vela was born into a family of Spanish and English heritage; her father, Hector Vela was a lawyer for the Army Corps of Engineers. Rosie grew up Catholic and coddled, a prodigy who started taking classical-piano lessons when she was six. She played Rachmaninoff, Bartok, and Haydn; her wildest music in those days was made in the living room with her father, who played a mean Herb Alpert-style trumpet.
All that changed in 1967, when Rosie bit thirteen and discovered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Frank Zappa’s Freak Out — and listened to them over and over in her bedroom. “My mother didn’t know if it was a Communist plot or what,” she says. Rosie joined a band made up of older boys — her father would chaperon during rehearsals — “and finally, I quit socializing with my parents,” she says. “At home, I was alone in my room, drawing, playing records. I was someplace else.”
She found others in that same place after her parents divorced in 1969 and she moved in with her father and brother in Little Rock. Above all, she found an intelligent, laconic boy named Jimmy Roberts, who had a dry wit, curly hair, blue eyes, “and kinda puckery lips.” Roberts led the best rock band at the University of Arkansas, played hot guitar, and knew piano even better than Vela did.
“I melted,” says Vela. “Oh, my God.”
She enrolled in art-history courses, spent her time with Roberts and his band, and became a hippie of the wood-nymph variety.
“I ran with that wild crowd,” she says. “Gypsy clothes, hair down to my ass, little tiny shorts, and long boots.” She breaks up laughing. “I did have fun. We’d go out into the forest, meet at midnight, sit around a fire and sing and play guitar in the woods.”
Roberts band was doing well — club dates, a demo tape, major-label interest. Vela would jam with Roberts on his tight, melodic pop and country-rock tunes. The lovers planned to marry in February 1974. “But at Christmastime,” Vela says, “Jimmy got the cancer.”
They married anyway, and spent Robert’s last seven months deeply in love, making the best of the time they had. When Roberts was entering the hospital for his final stand, they bought some records and took them and a stereo system into his room. ”The last album he ever bought was Steely Dan’s Countdown to Ecstasy, says Vela, her voice low. ”They were like the Beatles to us. We listened to them in the hospital all the time.”
She slept on the hospital’s marble floor, brought her husband hash brownies to ease his pain, and helped him record his songs. “On his last night, he sang me his last song. He had so much tumor growing around his throat he could hardly breathe, but he sang it line by line and made me sing it back until I got it right. Later I sang it into a cassette.” Her voice cracks. “I can’t play that tape.”
Other musicians came by the hospital, asking Roberts if they could play his songs. Roberts said no, they belonged to Rosie.
“He said, ‘You do ’em.’
‘”Me?’
‘”You can do it. Practice.'”
The next morning, Roberts fell into a coma. He died three days later.
“Everybody floundered after that, me especially. Havin’ him drift away in my arms it really aged me. Devastated. I felt like I didn’t belong in the world anymore. But I woke up and I was still alive. I decided I had to throw myself into something that moved so fast I’d be carried along with it.”
She went to New York, where she knew no one, armed with a sheaf of pictures. A Little Rock photography student had asked her to pose once “because I wore such crazy clothes.” The results were good enough to persuade the Wilhelmina agency to hire her. “I was surprised — I didn’t think of myself as beautiful, and I’d see other girls in the dressing room: ‘Just look at them, Vela, forget it. You gotta be kiddin’.”
After two months, she left Wilhelmina for the Ford agency, and her career took off. From 1976 to 1980, her young, innocent, sometimes sleepy look was everywhere. She was known to show up late for shoots and demand naps during sessions, but in front of the camera she was witty, provocative, powerful. There were times when she’d be made up for a shoot and look in the mirror: “I didn’t know who that person was — makeup galore, hair out to here — where’s Rosie? Made me uncomfortable. Alienated.”
But she knew what she was in it for. “Modeling is money,” says Vela, who even today helps support some of her family with her fees. “It’ s a job that pays better than most. I wish I could pay the rent with music, but I can’t, yet. So I’m grateful.” While other models spent their off-hours posing at Studio 54, Vela spent hers working on the 50 songs Jimmy Roberts had left behind.
Vela’s modeling career began to falter early in the 1980s. Vela says she was working less because she was studying acting under Sandra Seacat in Los Angeles and because she landed a small role in the disastrous big-budget Western Heaven’s Gate and was on call for a year. She had also built an impressive recording studio in her apartment and was spending more time than ever on music. She’d come home from posing “for my little pictures,” put on a tape Roberts had made, sit at her piano, and play along with him. “I’m a serious person, and serious people work at something,” she says. “He taught me that. I worked at his songs. But I’d play them for people and they’d look at me like I was crazy. They weren’t my songs.”
One night she came home, sat down at the piano, and did not play Roberts’ s music.
“My first one, I wrote for him,” she says. “I opened myself up, said, ‘God, take control.’ And this piece just flowed out. After that, I did my songs.”
“People say, ‘Howdja get Steely Dan to play on your album?'” says Vela in her best sneering model’s voice. ‘”Musta cost a lotta money.’ I say, ‘No, it just… happened.”‘
Walter Becker, among the most elusive people in rock, walked into the Village Recorder studio in Los Angeles one night to see Katz, who was producing Vela’s record. Becker stood in the mixing room while Katz spun dials and Vela worked on “Tonto,” a psychedelic siren song about a woman tired of being the sidekick to a Lone Ranger who’s never around:
“Well the heroes never call/Nobody’s there/And there’s nowhere to fall…”
“Walter was hangin’ out,” says Vela, “and I’m recording the lead melody line and he’s watchin’ and I’m sweatin’ bullets.”
Midway through the song, Becker sauntered into the sound room and picked up Vela’s portable Yamaha keyboard. “He started doin’ this little snaky, sexy thing that worked against the beat,” says Vela. “I couldn’t breathe.”
“Walter just joined in,” says Katz. “He liked the song.”
Then Becker stopped. “I don’t play keyboards,” he said.
But he did want to play. And later that night, he told Katz be wouldn’t mind playing on a few other songs.
He said he liked the one called “Interlude” best.
“Walter Becker wants to be on my album,” Vela thought to herself, ”God bless America.”
Later, Katz played Vela’s demo for Fagen in New York. ‘That chick is … good,” Fagen said. “Weird and good. I like “Interlude” the most.”
Vela, Katz, Becker and Fagen met at a New York studio called Sound Ideas. Fagen was ill at ease, the way a divorced man might be when he sees his wife after a long while. He tugged at his face and hair. Katz soothed him. “The next thing you know Donald and Walter were playin’ together for the first time in six years,” says Katz. “It was a nice moment. The three of us and Rosie, just playing.” (It went so well, in fact, that Becker and Fagen are now in a studio working on new Steely Dan material.)
Vela was so intimidated by Becker and Fagen that she found it hard to talk to them. “Frightened, man,” she says. “The Beatles.”
The next night, Becker and Fagen worked through the instrumental break in “Interlude.” Vela was in the hospital, undergoing tests for formaldehyde poisoning after drinking from a plastic bottle left too long in the sun. For the second time in her life, Becker and Fagen’s music helped her out of a hospital. “I called my brother Chat, who was in the studio. He says, ‘Listen to this.’ Then I hear the music: Walter’s guitar is playing my melody, Donald’s keyboard is all around it. I said, ‘Goddamn. I feel better.’ I never told Becker and Fagen about listening to them in the hospital when Jimmy was dying. I guess it would have been too much.”
When Vela and photographer Herb Ritts met in April on the beach in Malibu, she knew the kind of pictures she wanted for her album cover — simple shots at sundown, light makeup, nothing to exploit her beauty. (At first, she had not wanted to appear on the cover at all.) But Ritts, the photographer who shoots Madonna’s album jackets, had Vela heavily made up, in jewelry. “And the makeup artist kept pulling the shoulder straps down,” says Vela. “He’s pulling ’em down, I’m pulling ’em up.”
The pictures were not what Vela had in mind. “I’m not Madonna,” she says. Ritts liked them, and A&M wanted to use them. But Vela said no, got a photographer to shoot her at sundown in Central Park, and came up with a sleepy close-up cover shot and a dark shot for the back — her body blending into the blackness behind. The first cover, she knows, would have sold more. “But I didn’t want to say ‘Look at me, Miss Cover Girl.'”
After having posed for a million images. Vela doesn’t want to manufacture a video pose for pop — a risky notion in a rock era defined by pop cartoon characters. ‘Tm not Billy Idol,” she says. “I could dress up and vamp and dance around, but it’s not me. I’ve gone through those chameleon changes.” She is convinced that if she performs her music to the camera, wearing the kind of clothes she always wears — black jeans or long skirts, white T-shirts, small jackets — she will get across to an audience.
Her first video, for “Magic Smile,” was directed by Peter Kagen, who did Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” clip. Kagen’s camera found Vela in Barbados — in the sugar cane, on the beach, in her bed. But the clip may be to coy to establish her identity. “Magic Smile” stalled at No. 23 on “Billboard’s” Adult Contemporary chart, and fell off after six weeks. “It was a good song,” say Katz. “But not the hit. ‘Interlude’ is the hit.”
So, after a long promotional tour-radio stations, record stores, seventeen-year-old guitarists slipping her their phone numbers — Vela is taping a video for “Interlude.” It will be a straight performance video, including close shots of her singing on a midtown Manhattan rooftop, with the Empire State Building as backdrop.
But Vela knows the best way to find an audience is to go out on the road and perform. Her only gig so far has been “Late Night With David Letterman,” where she sang “Magic Smile” with Paul Shaffer and his band. Now Vela is auditioning a band of her own, planning showcase gigs in New York and Los Angeles. ”I’m too much of a wussy to do 16 cities in 17 nights or something,” she says. And the idea of testing her talent in front of an audience is both frightening and exciting. “Who wouldn’t be nervous about it?” she says. “But I can’t wait. Playing my songs for people, performing my different characters.” She may do some new material, and possibly some covers by Hendrix, the Beatles, “maybe Donald and Walter, and certainly Jimmy Roberts.”
If Vela isn’t overly concerned about live performance, maybe it’s because she’s already performed successfully for some of the most demanding ears in the rock world. Fagen and Becker, and, more recently, Joni Mitchell, guitarist Danny Kortchmar, and Don Henley, the former Eagles star now enjoying a successful solo career.
Last month, Henley asked Vela and Mitchell to sing on “Who Owns This Place?,” Henley’s single from the soundtrack of “The Color Of Money.”
”These are all Vikings, and I’m a teddy bear,” says Vela. “I was singing into the mike, and I had never heard my voice so loud and clear. I got butterflies, and shivers. I was listening to myself sing, and that’s disaster. So I said, ‘Bottom line, Texan — get it together,’ took a deep breath, and just sang. Joni Mitchell came in and sang along with the tape of my voice — matched her voice to my drawl. Then, Henley has me singing two words — ‘push-pull, push-pull’ — at the fade-out. I’m whispering ‘push-pull, push-pull, pushpull …’ steamy stuff.”
Later, Vela was napping beneath the mixing board, curled up “in a secret place. No one knows I’m there. The place is quiet.” Henley walked into the room alone, singing to himself. “And the song he’s singing,” says Vela, “is ‘Interlude.”‘ Vela just lay there under the mixing board, listening to Henley sing her song. She never told him she was there.
Rebellious Jukebox
In this article that appeared in the December 18th 1993 issue of Melody Maker, Donald Fagen, formerly of Seventies sophisticats STEELY DAN talks about the pivotal records in his life.
1. Miles Davis: It Could Happen To You
These milestone sessions opened me up to the power of music. I was about 11 when I first started listening to jazz. I lived in New Jersey and used to listen to late-night jazz stations from Manhattan and that’s where I heard this. Jazz affected me in a way that R&B records really didn’t The fact that I didn’t understand it made it very powerful for me. I recognized. say. John Coltrane’s solos as being alien to anything in my suburban middle-class background He’d go way outside of the usual formulas. which produced this feeling of outreaching that was both frightening and very attractive.
2. Sonny Rollins: Where Are You
This is a ballad from his famous album, The Bridge. I’d really liked his work in the Fifties and I was hoping he’d come out of retirement. When this appeared in the Sixties, his style had changed. He was much more controlled. Rather than trying to imitate Coltrane as so many players did, he’s assimilated it into his own style. You could hear some of the scariness of Coltrane in his new sound.
3. Oliver Nelson: Blues and the Abstract Truth
A very popular jazz record with a kind of mainstream, big-band sound. Nelson had a West Coast sound and the contrast between (altoist) Eric Dolphy’s solos and that slick, swinging rhythm section was very interesting to me.
4. Charlie Mingus: Slop
I bought the Mingus Dynasty album on an experimental basis. I’d never heard him and all I knew was that he was the bass player on Charlie Parker’s famous Massey Hall concert but I liked the cover — Mingus wearing an absurd Egyptian hat. The first time I played it I thought it was terrible. I thought the band was a mess and I couldn’t figure out why people kept yelling. On the other hand there were some great solos. About a year later I put it on again thought it was brilliant and couldn’t stop playing it. There was something about the rootsy feeling that I’d come to accept. It was angry, with a lot of church and blues feeling. My older cousins would take me to The Vanguard or Five Spot in New York and we saw Mingus round about this time — 1962. I was knocked out. It wasn’t like a concert, it was a visitation from another universe. Mingus was really brusque with the musicians. Then he began drinking and became nasty to people in the audience. too: “Stop tinkling that spoon in that glass!” Then he started lecturing us on the problems he was having with his record company. It was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. The last time I saw him he’d grown enormously fat and was wearing a bathrobe with what appeared to be calamine lotion all over his body, as if he had the worst ever case of poison ivy.
5. Clifford Brown: Dahood
This is the studio version and part of a very important bunch of records that influenced popular music a lot. I used to think Clifford Brown’s style was too stiff and formal. It was the basis, along with Fats Navarro. for the Blue Note style of funky or soul jazz. I was very snobbish about that when I was a kid. I thought they were just stringing together blues cliches. But later I started to appreciate these people for their power and went back to Clifford Brown A lot of the live recordings sound great particularly when he had Sonny Rollins and Harold Land in the band.
6. Thelonius Monk: Monk’s Dream
Monk injects an incredible blues sensibility into everything he does. He’s trying to bend the piano like you would a guitar. And this has Frankie Dunlop on drums. He’s probably my favorite drummer.
7. The Beatles: The Ballad of John & Yoko
I like the fact that this is autobiographical. The lyrics are great in a kind of Chuck Berry mode. Lennon was a very courageous person. I really liked his solo stuff. He was always ready to confront whatever needed to be confronted. In this case in a very funny song that puts me in a good mood. “The way things are going/They’re gonna crucify me.” I mean you never hear that anywhere.
8. Bob Dylan: lt’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
An astounding record. You get to hear on this what a fantastic singer he was. His range, which now, as far as I can tell, has reduced to a perfect fifth. used to be enormous. He starts very high on the verse and then drops an octave in about a second and sounds like he’s doing a duet with himself. A perfect record.
9. The Band: Tears Of Rage
Another Dylan song, from Music From Big Pink, a record that really changed rock ‘n’ roll. Whether for better or worse I don’t know. Everything was influenced by it at the time. It was the kind of contrapuntal improvised group playing, plus the dynamics and harmonies were unpredictable and had a kind of gospel effect. The singing was spectacular — three fantastic singers, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. There’s never been anything else like it. It was on a much higher level than any other records in those days — homemade and beautiful-sounding.
10. Dionne Warwick: In The Land Of Make Believe
This is a straight ahead pop song in intent but Burt Bacharach is brilliant. He was Marlene Dietrich’s musical director for a while, and he utilized a lot of French classical music for her stuff. Poulenc and Debussy were his models and when applied to soul and gospel it had this very ethereal effect, especially with Dionne Warwick’s voice. I love that combination of classicism and soul. Walter Becker and I were both huge fans of Burt Bacharach records and they were definitely an influence.
11. Ray Charles: Have I Got News For You
A big band record with arrangements by Quincy Jones. Straight-ahead, stop-time blues, great words. I’m sure no one’s ever done this as well as Ray Charles did. He’s just the greatest singer in the world and he still sounds great.
12. The Lovin’ Spoonful: Do You Believe In Magic?
Very big when I was making the transition from jazz fan to pop fan. This always puts me in a good mood. John Sebastian is incredibly underrated. He was a fine songwriter and a great singer. These days, he’s kind of a forgotten man. I guess what did him in was that song “Daydream” which people got really sick of and typified The Lovin’ Spoonful as sugary, good-timey music. But it wasn’t typical of his work at all. There’s some great music on those records. The lyrics on this are all about youth and optimism and it was probably one of the first records that celebrated rock ‘n’ roll for itself, pulled back and looked at what was going on culturally.
Letters
Greetings Pete:
Check it. Yo, I need info on a magazine called (Source) & (Rapmaster) or any other Rap Magazines. Do you have any posters or photo’s free of charge.
Thanks,
Elwood Washington
Baltimore, Maryland
Sorry, Elwood. We at Metal Leg really don’t know that much about that whole rap thang sweeping the nation except that it has something to do with crossing bad poetry with James Brown bass lines.
Dear Mr. Fogel,
I am writing because I would like to receive the Steely Dan Fanzine “Metal Leg.” As you can tell if one writes these letters they are a “Dan Fan.” I am one of these people. I am a 17 year old senior in High School. I am the only one of my age that I know of that is really in to them. I grew up listening to “Gaucho” and “The Royal Scam” (which is my favorite album). I recently got back into Steely Dan last April. Now I have everything they’ve ever done (almost). To put it shortly, Becker and Fagen are my idols.
Thank you very much,
Adam Peichoto
Crows Landing, Connecticut
Dear Adam, If you really want to demonstrate your devotion to the Dan, insist to your English teacher that your next oral book report be on “Naked Lunch” instead of “Wuthering Heights. ” It’s a lot cooler and you’ll get to say “rubber penis” in class.
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