Steely Dan: named after a giant dildo, and still stimulating after a 20-year break
By Euan Ferguson
The Guardian
“I don’t know if it’s the greatest chord in the world,” drawls Donald Fagen, sprawled all lugubrious over a chi-chi sofa in a forgettable New York hotel, “but it’s not bad. It’s a pretty good chord, a pretty neat chord.”
They’ve got the Steely Dan chord now. It’s a chord, and a feel, which is so instantly recognisable by professional musicians that they now refer to it through this shorthand rather than sol-fa notation. It’s a pretty neat thing to have, a chord named after you, so we talk about it for a bit, and Fagen and Walter Becker, his co-collaborator and intellectual sparring partner, the Engels to his Marx, perk up, despite the teacups and the valances.
“I guess it would be a minor seventh chord with a sharp five,” explains Fagen, shifting his long legs around and stretching to life. ‘But it’s a…”
“It’s a tonic chord,” Becker jumps in, marginally the more eager-to-please. He looks at me, helpfully, smiling. “It’s a one-chord, think of the main one in “Peg”…” – but Fagen’s jumped back in, keen and passionate, and the two are off again, flying, bouncing wordplay, ideas.
“In other words, the quality is of the kind that, well, although if written on a chart you’d say E minor seventh sharp fifth, what it really is is a C chord in first inversion with an E in the bass and including a second, a D…”
“But with no third above the E in the bass…”
“… it has the stability of a tonic chord, but the cool satisfying quality that a true minor seventh has, in the sense of being… Bartókian. Or Copelandian.”
Fagen and Becker… Steely Dan. The musicians’ musicians. Named after a giant steel dildo in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, they’re one of those things you either adore and revere forever or haven’t a clue what all the fuss is about. Talk to non-combatants, the civilians, the ignoroscenti, and you’re met with blank looks and jokey queries about Steeleye Span. And then, while the ambulance is on its way, those in the know will gently explain just what they’ve been missing: nothing less than the best band in the universe, of all time, ever.
They wanted to combine the best of the twentieth century’s music into one fine, ever-listenable, intellectually snobbish slice. It could have been horrendous, but it’s glorious.
Twenty years have passed since the last album. When Gaucho came out, the world was unutterably different. Diana wasn’t yet a virgin; Michael Jackson was black. Two Against Nature, which comes out next week, is, absurdly, the first official Dan album since then — Fagen brought out two solo albums, the first of which, The Nightfly, is to this day the most required listening of all time, ever, for anyone who wants to either drive, or keep their brain intact, or bed a French actress — and the new album is, it has to be said, astoundingly good. It’s no different, really, in style or emphasis: a touch cooler, slicker. As ever, one has to listen to it about a dozen times before the knowing adoration kicks in.
You see, the 20 years don’t matter. What the pair have always set out to do, from their Tin Pan Alley days, writing crap for those who would pay, to the first hits — Do It Again, Haitian Divorce and the rest — and way beyond, through drugs, breakdown, redemption and reluctant fatherhood, is simple: they wanted to combine the best of the twentieth century’s music into one fine, ever-listenable, intellectually snobbish slice. It could have been horrendous, but it’s glorious. To take the finesse of jazz without the pseudo meanderings; to take the drive of soul
without the posturing; to take the beauty of classical changes — for Fagen enthuses, at length, about Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc, Satie, Fauré — without the wittering French longueurs; to take the snap of pop without its zit-busting immaturity… the recipe, then and now, is close to perfect.
Perfection is their aim, they freely admit; and they’re unforgiving in its pursuit. Unforgiving of their fellow musicians: although they insist that their current line-up of session men is “the band we’ve always wanted to have — they’re great musicians, and they’ve been listening to Steely Dan records since they were teenagers,” they remain notorious for the ruthlessness with which they fire anyone whose playing is less than perfect.
They’re also uncompromising with themselves, to the point of geekdom. Their shows are notoriously unshowy, their live numbers clinically perfect, but they’re comfortable with that. “I can never remember listening to some great musician and thinking, Jeez, this guy’s just not that much of a showman, y’know?” says Fagen. “It’s a concept that’s pretty alien to us. I mean, we’re not going to have smoke bombs, or, or …”
“… or be firing missiles out of our guitars.”
Uncompromising in their conversation, which is as fiercely clever as their lyrics. It ranges from literary influences (Burroughs, Gibson, Vonnegut) to political credo, and a lengthy discourse from Fagen on Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School and the dangers of “repressive tolerance’, all of which is fascinating, but, boy, are you expected to keep up, for they’re unforgiving of their interviewers.
Later that afternoon, I learn afterwards, bored witless by a Japanese TV crew, Fagen decided to do his next interview while soaking in the hotel bath. But unforgiving shouldn’t be taken as deadly serious or humourless; far from it.
They happen to be two New York Jewish intellectuals who love music so much that they can’t take it anything but seriously; but they also happen to be two very human men with a dry, dry humour. They must have been, back in the Seventies, among the first living beings to bring irony to California. Their lyrics are both poetic and savagely tongue-in-cheek, as they explore the American male psyche and the late twentieth-century landscape, satirising capitalism, trying to reflect their own sense of dislocation in America during those years; trying to do musically what Don DeLillo has done in print.
Twenty years on, musically, there’s still sex, and humour, and fine chords and marvellous brass: in fact, it’s astonishing how little has changed. Fagen regrets the lengthy gap a bit, but says “I needed the time.”
“We needed to grow up a little when we quit,” adds Becker. So have they? “Well, um… we’re older, anyway. Growing up, you know… you can easily overdo a thing like that.”
As I leave the hideous chintz of the hotel suite, I sense they wish they too could be freed from its flounced grip. These men were not made for chintz, but for hazy mornings and smoky studios. They were made for things formed from cork and rubber and brass… like Manhattan diners, or bayou docks, or saxophones. As I leave, they’re still discussing the chord. Trying to find the perfect way to describe the perfect chord.
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