Black Days

With his new solo album, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen leaves behind imaginary landscapes to face his mortality in the uneasy air of post-9/11 New York.

By James Adams
Toronto Globe

TORONTO — No, Donald Fagen says, he’s not on the line from the foot of Mount Belzoni, nor is he high in the Custerdome. This afternoon he’s sitting somewhere in upper Manhattan, in the Sugar Hill district, in fact, working the telephones, stoking the publicity machinery for an upcoming 20-city concert tour and the launch of a new CD.

There’s no real Mount Belzoni or Custerdome, of course. They’re just the imaginary settings for two of Fagen’s most famous songs, 1982’s “The Nightfly” and 1980’s “Gaucho.” But for a lot of Fagen fans, they’re as palpable as the neighbourhood store or the high-rise on the corner, as cinematic as anything Fritz Lang or Ernst Lubitsch conceived. It’s something Fagen has been exercising for almost 35 years, this knack of blending idiosyncratic sophistication and highly personalized slang to create places (Blues Beach, the Reefs of Kizmar) and persons (Hoops McCann, Slinky Redfoot) as glamorous and unsettling as that cravat-wearing, hashish-smoking dandy from your days at Gamma Chi who thought your date at the frat barbecue had “a touch of Tuesday Weld” and would you mind if he took her out?

At 58, Fagen’s latest conjuring act is “Morph the Cat,” the eight-song CD that, upon its release tomorrow, will mark his first solo turn since “Kamakiriad” 13 years ago. As with that outing and his solo debut, “The Nightfly,” it’s a loosely thematic work, a mortality-haunted New York hipster’s exploration of the post-9/11 universe.

Fagen says there’s “virtually no premeditation” in his deciding whether what he’s writing belongs on a Steely Dan record. Sometimes it happens by a process of elimination or default: He’ll write some lyrics and chord changes and ask Walter Becker, the other, 56-year-old half of Steely Dan whom he first met in college in 1967: “‘What do you think of this?’ And if no one answers, or Walter says, ‘Y’know, that really doesn’t speak to me,’ then it’s mine.”

The same goes for the conceptual frameworks of his solo work. Generally, “the solo records are a little more personal or subjective, I’ll put it that way.” But usually it’s only after the fact that Fagen notices resonances among the material. Take “The Nightfly”: “I just started working up these songs… and the first couple I wrote seemed to be from the viewpoint of an adolescent in the early ’60s.” Eventually, Fagen had seven songs and one cover (Lieber & Stoller’s “Ruby Baby”) for an album that seemed to “represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man — i.e., one of my general height, weight and build — growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city” during the hottest days of the Cold War.

With “Morph the Cat,” the wellsprings were both personal and political. Personal in that his mother’s death in January, 2003, from Alzheimer’s, was “a big shock” and an intimation that “Oh, I’m in my late 50s, so I’ve got about 20 years to go, or something like that.” Another blow was the death a year later of one of his musical idols, Ray Charles, at 73. The political dimension derives from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the invasion of Iraq and the nease and paranoia that have been in the ether ever since.

Sometimes Fagen treats our life and times lightheartedly: “Security Joan,” for one, is about a traveller who decides to miss his flight from LaGuardia after he feels some sexual chemistry between him and the female security officer who “sweeps her wand over me.” For the most part, though, there’s mordancy and apprehension: In “Mary Shut the Garden Door” — inspired, Fagen says, by the Republican National Convention that New York hosted in mid-2004 — he sings of “Rough dreams/ Those voices in the kitchen/ I woke up/ And sensed the new condition/ They won/ Storms raged/ Things changed.”

Fagen plans to perform most of the album live when he visits Massey Hall in Toronto tonight with his first-ever touring band (he played Ottawa’s National Arts Centre yesterday). For most of their association, Fagen and Becker have been profoundly averse to touring. In fact, between 1974 and 1993, the two Dans, as individuals and as a combo, were exclusively a studio outfit. Inviting one top musician after another to play their meticulously crafted songs, the duo would accumulate hundreds of reels of unused tape and thousands of hours of outtakes along the way.

Today, Fagen insists such dedication didn’t exemplify some perverse quest for perfection. Bringing in a Wayne Shorter or Mark Knopfler, often to play a part that lasted no more than 32 bars in the final recording, “happened in the process of Walter and me searching for musicians for an ideal band. In the ’70s, there weren’t that many musicians with equal facility in R&B and jazz.”

By the nineties, “we got closer to that vision and started keeping guys we really started to jell with. And by 2000, we ended up with guys who seemed to know what we’re after.” Indeed, the last two Steely Dan records, “Two Against Nature” (2000) and “Everything Must Go” (2003), as well as “Morph the Cat,” have a remarkably stable cast of support musicians, with only the odd marquee player putting in a brief appearance.

The late, great Mel Tormé was a big fan of Fagen’s, featuring at least two of his compositions, “The Goodbye Look and Walk Between the Raindrops,” in live performances. In a 1996 interview, Tormé also lauded the whiny, nasalized croon that is Fagen’s singing voice — “He’s got a funny street approach that I love.” But when I tell Fagen that in that same interview Tormé also professed a fondness for Billy Joel’s singing, Fagen seems taken aback. “Well, that’s damning with faint praise,” he finally mumbles, then slips into diplomacy mode: “Mel was a great singer, is a great singer and it’s great that he gave me that compliment.”

Sarcasm and irony, of course, have long been staples of the Steely Dan oeuvre. So not a few Danites were surprised when Fagen committed matrimony with Libby Titus in 1993. Of course, it’s always a mistake to interpolate art and autobiography — but then Titus had been the companion for many years of Levon Helm, drummer and singer for one of the least ironic groups of all time, The Band, with whom she had two children. And, in the early ’70s, she wrote one of the greatest weepies of all time, “Love Has No Pride” (“If I could buy your love/Then I’d surely try, my friend. . . . And love has no pride when there’s no one but myself to blame/But I’d give anything to see you again.”) Fagen on several occasions has said that marriage agrees with him. So would he ever cover “Love Has No Pride” in concert, say? Or is it just too damn sincere and unguarded for his sensibility?

“Hey, I like that song a lot,” he replies. “Bonnie Raitt did a good version — Linda Ronstadt, too, I think. But I don’t think I could give it the right, um, emotional reading. Hmmm, I’ll think about it, that’s interesting. . . .” There’s a pause, then he says: “It’s really a girlie song, a chick flick.”

Now, Donald, would your wife like to hear her work described that way?

“She has her cynical side, believe me.”

Sliding a recent Steely Dan CD or even the new Fagen into the player can seem a touch anachronistic. The guitars are in tune, the time precise, the chords rich and smart, the production polished. It’s music, in short, with no tips of the hat to punk, hip hop or any other idiom that’s commanded attention since Steely Dan appeared on the scene in 1972.

“I listen to the same 40 records I did in high school,” Fagen avers without apology. “Except now they’re on CD.” Occasionally he hears “something I like that’s contemporary,” but when he’s asked to name an artist or two, there’s a good 10 seconds of hemming and hawing before he declares: “Martha Wainwright, she’s really good, a great singer. . . . My stepdaughter is pretty good, too.” That would be Amy Helm, who has done backup vocals for Steely Dan and Fagen and serves as the lead singer for Ollabelle, an American roots-music sextet.

“I don’t think there’s been any innovation or players that have added anything since [the late ’60s and early ’70s] or at least since reggae,” Fagen opines. “There have been many claims to that. I mean, I was in the New York office of Warner Bros. a little while ago and there was this big poster for some guy who does crunk music [sometimes spelled krunk, it’s a style of hip hop that surfaced about 10 years ago in Tennessee and Georgia]. So I asked to hear it and,” he chuckles, “I just didn’t see the innovation.”