Studio recluses move closer to their fans

By TONY NORMAN
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker launched Steely Dan at a time when America was just getting the hang of organized cynicism.

Steely Dan, named after a sex toy described with euphemistic delight in William Burroughs’ scabrous “Naked Lunch,” occupied the upper rungs of the Billboard charts its first time out with “Do It Again.”

The song was an elliptical rocker fusing Spaghetti Western imagery with elaborate but muscular instrumental fills.

“Do It Again” also features a cockeyed tale of seduction and gambling as a back story that helped establish Fagen and Becker’s reputations as pop music wiseguys.

Now, 24 years after it made the world safe for disaffected bohemian art-rock with “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” Steely Dan has emerged from the stage fright and studio perfectionism that severely limited its live performances in earlier years to become a first-rate summer act.

On Wednesday, the Coca-Cola Star Lake Amphitheatre will host Steely Dan’s third tour in four years. It will mark the band’s first performance in Pittsburgh since its sold-out ’93 concert clogged the roads to and from Burgettstown on one of the most memorable Saturday evenings in years.

Becker and Fagen will be joined by bassist Tom Barney, pianist John Beasley, drummer Ricky Lawson, guitarist Wayne Krantz, saxophonists Cornelius Bumpus and Ari Ambrose, trumpeter Michael Leonhart and vocalist Carolyn Leonhart.

This is the same creative team that will infuse the legend of Steely Dan with its latest chapter — an all new recording of original material, the band’s first since 1980’s “Gaucho.”

Reclusive and media-shy, Fagen and Becker usually communicate to the public from behind a phalanx of public relations people, press releases and staged interviews with the weekly news magazines.

But for the 1996 U.S. tour that will take them to 28 cities this summer, Fagen and Becker are personally manning the phones and calling print journalists predisposed toward all things Steely Dan.

Of course, Becker and Fagen’s brand of sly joshing shines through with little or no prompting from their legion of fans in the media. “We’re in the middle of some senility thing where we love everybody,” Becker said.

Glamour profession

Norman: Do you find it difficult to think of yourselves as Steely Dan again after more than a decade apart as solo artists?

Becker: “It’s easier for us to think of ourselves as Don and Walter, or Walt and Don, and in some circumstances as ‘Hi, baby, I’m with Steely Dan. ‘ We go with whatever seems right at the moment and don’t worry about consistency.”

Norman: So, why an oldies tour, if we can call it that.

Fagen: “I think nostalgia is something to be avoided even though I don’t hold it against anyone who wants to hear songs they may have heard as teen-agers. But that’s not the motivation for us touring. The popularity of our old songs allows us to tour under good conditions; it also allows us to drive around in limousines with a police escort.”

Becker: “My kid is very impressed by that.”

Fagen: “At this point, we have some new material. We’re also very excited about the band we have this year. We’re going to be doing some older tunes that have never been done on stage.”

Norman: Give us a sneak preview.

Fagen: “Well, the list changes every day. We think it’s better if it’s a surprise. I think it’ll be an interesting show, different from the ones we did in ’93 and ’94.”

Becker: “After the limousines and police escorts, the perks, the Percosets and the amenities, the thing that comes to my mind when we go out on tour this and next summer is: I’m going to be a rock ‘n’ roll band with a great drummer and all the fun of that. What’s the most fun is getting out there and playing the music and to hell with revisiting the scene of the crime or reinvestigating our old songs. It’s not about what the audience or anybody is thinking. It’s about getting out there and clanging along.”

Fagen: “We were careful to get a living band this time.”

Becker: “One time we got out there with several cadavers. It was horrible. That was a bad weekend.”

Fagen: “The thing about having a lot of older (songs) is that you have a stable to choose from. The Steely Danband book is full of interesting songs that we mix new ones in with. Duke Ellington played ‘Rockin’ in Rhythm’ for 50 years and kept changing the arrangements.”

Becker: “How does ‘Rockin’ in Rhythm’ go?”

Fagen: (whistles intro).

Norman: Do you attempt dredging up old feelings for certain songs when performing live, or do you prefer a more detached and ironic . . .

Becker: “Oh, no, never . . . ”

Fagen: “You mentioned the other day you heard an old live tape and that it dredged up something.”

Becker: “Well it did, but not . . . ”

Fagen: “So, it wasn’t some Proustian thing then?”

Becker: “Well, yeah, but not because of some song, but because the sound of the audience and the experience of being, well, it’s as if I’d taken a giant bite into the biggest madeleine you’d ever seen in the world.”

Fagen: “That’s a tea biscuit-looking thing . . . ”

Becker: “Lest there be any doubt amongst your readers that I’m talking about anything besides a cookie: The experience I had at that particular time had to do with suddenly getting the mood of what it was like to be in a band playing a concert in the early ’70s — the wild, drunken finales and encores. It was an outrageous feeling. It’s very different from what we have now. It was wild and uncontrolled. The audience was like that, too.”

Norman: Is that what used to intimidate you when touring in those days?

Becker: “There were good and bad nights, y’know. It was hard for us to go out and do something that wasn’t a good representation of our musical intentions. And that happened not infrequently just by the nature of the fact we were kids going through this, that and the other thing, collectively and individually.”

Fagen: “We were opening for other people and often weren’t allowed on stage to do a sound check or have even have half a chance to sound good that night.”

Norman: So the system was rigged against you?

Becker: “The system was rigged against all up-and-coming bands at the time. I’m not sure how things may or may not have changed since. But in those days, nobody you were opening for was going to take much of a chance of being upstaged. Somebody made sure you weren’t able to be heard at your best.”

Norman: Sounds sinister.

Becker: “Well, it is, and that’s one of the things you learn about show business. I was utterly surprised when it started happening.”

Fagen: “That’s why we don’t have an opening act. We don’t want to indulge our urge to be sadistic.” Becker: “We take all of our sadism out on our own band.”

Pretzel logic

Norman: A lot of your songs revolve around dark humor. It’s often quite cutting, but always smart. In an interview I read in the late ’70s, you said if you surveyed the record collections of anti-social misfits, you’d find multiple copies of “The Royal Scam” scratched beyond repair. Has anything changed?

Fagen: “We were, as usual, overstating the case, but not entirely. I think it’s turned around so that American middle-class culture has become extremely ironic as a matter of course. Daily life has built within it a certain detachment. We’re not just talking to weird people anymore. We’ve discovered that the normal reaction to 21st century life is chronic and perpetual irony.”

Norman: Is Steely Dan even possible in the Letterman era?

Becker: “Yes. Not only is it possible, it’s almost essential. The people need us now more than ever. That’s why we came. That’s why we’re here.”

Turn that heartbeat over again

Norman: What can you tell us about the new Steely Dan record?

Fagen: “That’s what we’re working on.”

Becker: “We’ve been writing songs. The new songs we play this summer will have been written for that purpose.”

Norman: Will you release singles to familiarize the audience with the new songs?

Becker: “No. Nothing is recorded yet. The idea is to go out and play the tunes first. We recorded one album back in the old days (‘Countdown to Ecstasy’) after touring the songs. It was the only album in which the arrangements and quality of the tracks was influenced by the fact we had a live band. We arranged the songs with the band in mind.”

Fagen: “We’re going to try and do that sort of thing again.”

Becker: “We have a bunch of tunes with slightly different slants of this and that. We’re playing with this band with the purpose of developing a coherent approach to the songs. At some point we’ll finish writing and go to the band so we can start cutting it.”

Fagen: “Either that or we’ll feed the sequences into (a computer) after two or three years of overdubbing.”

Becker: “Whatever sounds better.”

Norman: Songs born on the road seem to have more resonance.

Fagen “We’ll find out if that’s true. But it’s almost blasphemous to go touring without a new record to promote, but that’s when we do our best work.”

Becker: (laughing) “I think this year, Donald, we’re going to have all those Grateful Dead fans, too.”

Fagen: “We welcome Deadheads.”

Becker: “Anybody feeling any loss out there this summer because their favorite band is gone, we welcome your trade. We’re here and we’re in full-effect.”

Only a fool would say that

Norman: So, you’re both listening to rap these days? It seems so unlikely.

Becker: “Sure we listen to rap. We got kids and all. You know suburban kids have to have their Ice Cube records like everyone else.”

Fagen: “Yeah, Walter even thinks he’s black. He thinks he’s some kind of gangsta.”

Norman: What’s the secret of your enduring partnership?

Fagen: “Someone has to bail Walter out of his ‘much maligned solo career.’ He’s got no one else to turn to.”

Becker: “Who else am I going to turn to? First of all, a lot of people who’ve worked with us are dead now and none are coming back. Those of us still living have to lean in together and help ourselves through the struggle.”

Fagen: “We have to do what we can do, even if we have to dance on people’s graves to do it.”

Norman: So a call from the hot producer of the moment wouldn’t tempt you?

Becker: “I can’t see how anyone else can understand what we’re doing. Nothing like that has ever happened. No one has ever offered to produce us except for Gary (Katz) and one other person who shall remain nameless.”

Fagen: “On the other hand, many people have asked us to produce them.”

Becker: “And many of them are sorry they did.”

Time out of mind

Norman: Are we stuck in some kind of ’70s space/time continuum this summer with Kiss, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols and you guys on the road?

Fagen: My stepson, who has expressed zero interest in coming to our gigs this year, begged me to see if I could get four tickets to Kiss.”

Norman: So, we are headed back into an era of makeup and platform shoes?

Fagen: “Speak for yourself. My makeup kit got stolen last year.”

Becker: “I think Lenny Kravitz has all our old stuff.”

Fagen: “We have the same manager as Lenny Kravitz, and I think he’s been stealing our stuff out of the dressing room.”

Becker: “I saw him wearing a pair of plaid platform shoes that used to be ours. But to answer your question, we’ve moved into some point in our culture where there’s no such thing as . . . ”

Fagen: “Are you saying there’s kind of an eternal return at work?”

Becker: “Not exactly. We’re simultaneously in a present that incorporates the past and future. I think the past and future have been preempted.”

Fagen: “Hmmmm.”

Fagen & Becker: (laughter).