Twenty Years Later, Becker and Fagen Find the Steely Dan Formula Works Well
By Larry Katz
Boston Herald
Say you’re a member of a bigtime rock band from the ’70s.
Say you’re recording your first album of new material in 20 years.
What in the name of Santana do you do to update your sound?
Try lining up a slew of much younger, much hotter guest stars? Try the hip-hop route with rapping and sampled beats? Try techno with tape loops? Try all three? If you’re Steely Dan, the answer is none of the above. The icy cool team of keyboardist-vocalist Donald Fagen and guitarist-bassist Walter Becker is back, sounding, well, the same as ever. In their case, that’s not a bad thing.
“Two Against Nature,” the first Steely Dan studio album in two decades, sounds like nothing so much as a follow-up to the last two Steely Dan albums, 1977’s “Aja” and 1980’s “Gaucho.’
But the surprise isn’t that Fagen and Becker have chosen to leave their sleek style intact. It’s that their style holds up effectively in 2000.
The lyrics to Fagen and Becker’s hipper-than-thou songs are as ironic and clever as previously. They’re also as contemporary, and often inscrutable, as anything by today’s post-modern pop poster boy Beck, who likely studied the Steely Dan songbook while developing his own songwriting sensibility.
When Fagen, now 52 and still sounding prematurely cranky, sings the chorus to the opening track – “Flame is the game, the game we call gaslighting Abbie/ It’s a luscious invention for three, one summer by the sea” – you can only guess what the heck he’s gassing about. But the words work. They’re an open invitation to interpretation.
Not everything on “Two Against Nature” is so willfully obscure. At times, Steely Dan reaches a new level of narrative directness. While not totally obvious, “What A Shame About Me” details an encounter between the narrator, a failed novelist fresh out of rehab, and Franny from NYU, a successful former schoolmate of the opposite sex making it in Hollywood.
“Cousin Dupree” is as straightforward and funny as Steely Dan gets. The title character is a hustler who’s “worked a lot of nowhere gigs, from keyboard man in a rock’n’ska band to haulin’ boss crude in big rigs.” He turns out to be not nearly as smart as the family member he’s clumsily trying to seduce.
As always with Steely Dan, the nasty edge of the lyrics to songs such as “Cousin Dupree” is disguised by the sleek music. Becker, 50, and Fagen cushion their discomfiting wit with a perfectly crafted sound: an untaxing but sophisticated blend of funky beats served up with jazz-rock virtuosity and verve, verging-on-daring sax solos by the likes of young lion Chris Potter, and Becker’s engaging guitar leads. And it’s all wrapped up in pop-song form.
It remains a style that will leave anyone desiring grit and raw emotion unmoved. But, unlike smooth jazz, it has a provocative side to it, whether in the shifting, slippery chord changes or, more obviously, the lyrics. Steely Dan concocts a potent brew that goes down with deceptive ease.
But who’s eager to swallow a new dose of Dan at this late date?
Sure, Fagen and Becker do have loyal fans who have snapped up the pair’s handful of sporadic post-1980 offerings: Fagen’s two solo albums, “The Nightfly” in 1982 and “Kamakiriad” in 1993; Becker’s “11 Tracks of Whack” in 1994″; and a 1995 Steely Dan live CD drawn from amid-’90s reunion tour. That tour was unexpected because Steely Dan not only had broken up in 1980, but had ceased performing live all the way back in 1974, the better to concentrate on studio creations.
Maybe Fagen and Becker sense there’s a new market of young, Beck-schooled listeners ready for the Dan’s brand of white funk whimsy. Plus “Two Against Nature” has the laid-back cool of lounge music without the stultifying nostalgia, and the ear-soothing grooves of smooth jazz without the mind-numbing placidity.
But, more likely, Fagen and Becker just got bored and realized that there was still room for them, since no one else has found a way to turn knotty jazz fusion into palatable pop-rock.
Whatever the case, Steely Dan is on the comeback trail and seeking notice. You can catch them on TV tomorrow – twice. They’re the musical guests on “Late Night with David Letterman” at 11:35 p.m. on WBZ (Ch. 4) and perform for 90 solid minutes in front of a studio audience on a PBS “In the Spotlight” special airing on WGBH (Ch. 2) at 9. (The PBS show repeats on March 13 at 8 p.m. on WGBX Ch. 44.)
The PBS show starts slowly. The songs from “Two Against Nature” are appealing, but watching a band of hired guns play them off of written charts lacks excitement. Fagen makes a wizened frontman with his scraggly beard and a moustache so thin it looks like an anorexic caterpillar.
But the concert picks up momentuum, especially when Fagen and Becker dust off the Steely Dan songbook and deliver sparkling versions of singular ’70s classics including “Babylon Sister,” “Black Friday” and “Kid Charlemagne.” These songs are intoxicating enough to win over new fans — and they’ll make old fans feel like it’s been two years since the last Steely Dan album, not 20.
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