They made it big — and lost it even bigger. Now, Steely Dan are back, with a new philosophy and a new album. And the thinking man’s hippies sound better than ever.
By Robbin Eggar
Times of London
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have always been too clever by at least two-thirds. They are so not rock ‘n’ roll — and yet so successful in what they appear to view as a base cultural medium. They plucked their name, Steely Dan, from a steam-powered dildo in William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch. Willfully perverse, they champion intellectual superiority and extol the virtues of obscure jazz records while singing about dodgy people having dubious sex.
The Dan were a 1970s studio band sans pareil. Prolific perfectionists who hated touring, they made six critically acclaimed albums in five years, culminating in the multimillion-selling Aja. Three years later came Gaucho, another platinum record. But that was it, the spark had gone, snuffed out in a wash of depression and drug abuse. Over the next two decades, Fagen released two solo records, Becker one. They did an indifferent live tour in the 1990s, but there were no more Steely Dan CDs until the millennium turned.
In 2001, Two Against Nature was a triumphant return. It won four Grammy awards, including Album of the Year. They even got elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (America’s answer to Sir Paul, Sir Elton and Tom Jones’s OBE). However, Steely Dan were back on a roll and returned to the studio. Their next album, Everything Must Go, is released in June.
Donald and Walter were never pin-ups. They were too nerdy, too dissolute. Nothing has changed. Fagen, 55, resembles a seedy creative-writing teacher from a New England liberal-arts college, his grey hair hacked short, a beard stuck as an afterthought on the underside of his chin, his face overshadowed by a huge beak of a nose. Becker, 53, though his moustache has gone, appears the same egghead as ever, glasses on a chubby face, his hair peeled further back, leaving the dome of his forehead ever more exposed. They have a disconcerting habit of taking each other’s half-articulated phrases into a new dimension.
Songwriting partnerships are, by their very nature, strange affairs. Asked to describe their relationship, Fagen snaps: “Do you think we’re pals? It’s something more — sort of a cult à deux – but something less than marriage. It’s like marriage without sex.”
They met in 1967 at Bard, a liberal college in upstate New York. Fagen grew up in Passaic, New Jersey; Becker, over the Hudson in New York. Both were precocious adolescents, fascinated by psychology and the teachings of Timothy Leary. At 13, Becker was a young Republican — until he realised that Barry Goldwater’s glasses had no lenses. Both loved jazz. “The brotherhood of nerds wasn’t for us,” recalls Becker. “We weren’t members of the chess club. We were jazz drips. I would go to jazz concerts — alone, of course — and see, sprinkled through the audience, other alienated adolescents.”
They had attended many of the same concerts without knowing it. When they found each other, it was like looking in the mirror and seeing the missing piece of the jigsaw. “When Donald and I met,” recalls Becker, “it gave authority to our position. We started to mould a collaborative world-view, an aesthetic for ourselves. Taken together, we had a formidable skill. We were able to mount a better onslaught against the world.”
Their first drummer was fellow student Chevy Chase. After leaving college, they set up as songwriters – with mixed results. Barbra Streisand covered “I Mean to Shine,” but had the lyrics rewritten. They then joined the pop group Jay and the Americans, before signing their own record deal. The first Dan album, Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972), set the pattern: catchy melodies with disturbing lyrics. Their hits emanated from a personal comic book populated by damaged girls (“Haitian Divorce”), opium addicts (“Dr Wu”) and other lost souls, often counterpointed by quotations from jazz classics (“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”).
On Everything Must Go, their world is still weird, although underneath the delicate tunes (played by musicians including the pianist Bill Charlap and the guitarist Jon Herington) is an overwhelming sense of loss. “Throughout all our albums,” says Fagen, “there has been a theme of loss and apocalypse. This time, because of global events and the fact that we’re older, that theme has emerged more strongly.”
The title track is sung by Becker, his first ever Dan lead vocal. He explains: “You see the signs, ‘Going out of business. Everything must go’ on the window of an electronics store in Times Square. These stores have been going out of business continuously since anyone can remember. You can either take that song to be an expression of the idea that there is no death, or you can take it to be the typical commercial simulation of profound experience, of death for the purpose of selling a couple more digital cameras.”
Steely Dan have always polarised opinion. People either love them or dismiss them as cocktail jazz with clever words for angst-ridden college kids. Burroughs himself was never too sure. “Too fancy,” he said. “They’re too sophisticated, they’re doing too many things at once in a song.”
According to Fagen, that’s just the way it comes out. “There is very little calculated about what we’ve done. We combine the things we like: literature, stand-up comedy, jazz, R&B, even some modern classical music. My uncle used to have a luncheonette in Paterson, New Jersey, and once, my cousin and I used every flavour syrup to see if we could make some meta-milk shake, but it was just an undrinkable mess. Walter and I combined all the syrups we know and just got lucky.” Apart from in the early 1980s, Becker and Fagen have never stopped combining the syrups. Making Gaucho finished them off. Becker remembers it as “two years of banging our heads against the wall”. They spent too much money, got frustrated with their musicians and each other. “We were burnt out,” says Fagen. “We’d done nothing but work since the late 1960s. We both had personal problems, so we retired to our separate lairs to recover. I had a relationship that had turned sour. After The Nightfly (his first solo album, in 1982) came out, I got this huge block.” Becker, in the grip of a heroin problem, had retired to Maui. He makes somewhat light of his drug days. “I took pretty much all of them — either separately, sequentially or simultaneously. I don’t drink, but I did all of the other powerful stimulants of the day.” He produced albums for China Crisis and Rickie Lee Jones and, every so often, would get together with Donald. The truth was, they found it hard to work with anyone else.
Thirty-odd years ago, says Becker, they got lucky. “Nowadays, that could never happen: everything is so micromanaged. Bands are cast like some Broadway show. Even rap, which had potential, has become narrow and stylised, predictable and shallow.”
“There is nobody left in our position,” says Fagen, with relish. “To get the kind of artistic freedom we have, it used to have to be that you were young. Now you have to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Can you imagine Little Richard being supervised?”
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