By Jane Stevenson
Toronto Sun
Donald Fagen’s “day job” has been as one-half of jazz-rock outfit Steely Dan with partner Walter Becker since 1972.
Yes, there was that 20-year break between the group’s 1980 effort Gaucho and 2000’s Two Against Nature, a best album Grammy winner.
But the singer-keyboardist can be forgiven for never having gone on the road before as a solo artist, a trek that brings him to Massey Hall tonight in support of his third solo effort, Morph The Cat.
Fagen finds the prospect “slightly terrifying,” given he’s only recently gotten used to the idea of making his living as a performer. The tour began March 1 in New Brunswick , N.J.
“Gradually, I’ve gotten into it,” Fagen, 58, says down the line from New York City recently. “I wasn’t originally thinking of becoming a singer of any kind. I was a player basically. I started as an amateur player and developed my technique as I went on and really crossed into being professional after I was actually playing for money.
“Singing was really something I never expected to do. It was only when we couldn’t find a singer for our band that I started doing it. But the last few years, I’ve gotten comfortable with it.”
Don’t forget that Fagen and guitarist Becker were notorious perfectionists and more comfortable as a studio band that rarely toured. They even played less and less on their own albums, favouring sessions musicians instead, until their re-emergence in 1993 with a hugely successful tour, ostensibly on behalf of the release that year of Fagen’s second solo album, “Kamakiriad.”
“Morph The Cat” completes Fagen’s solo trilogy that began in 1982 with “The Nightfly.” There are plans for a boxed set of all three albums to be released this summer.
The songs on “The Nightfly” are told through the perspective of a young man, “Kamakiriad” was viewed through middle-aged eyes, and now “Morph The Cat” deals with mortality, among other things. Fagen’s mother died in 2003.
“That was one of the elements,” Fagen says. “Just getting older and also I’m a New Yorker, so 9/11 on a broader level had something to do with it. I work as I go so I have a file of things that go back a few years and I think probably the last Steely Dan album, “Everything Must Go” (2003), had some things on this theme too, but this is on a more personal level.”
Still, Fagen’s morbid sense of humour about the subject comes through on the new song, “Brite Nitegown,” which gets its title from W.C. Fields’ nickname for death, “the fellow in the bright nightgown.”
“You can either approach things you have no control of with fear and dread or with humour, so I can only choose humour,” Fagen says. “I have my moments of fear and dread also, but if possible I think you should try to have a laugh.”
Recorded mainly in New York City and while Fagen was in Hawaii with his wife — “I’m not so good at vacations and I looked around for a studio to do some vocals in,” he explains — “Morph The Cat” also deals with thug-like governments, national security and Ray Charles’ way with the ladies.
“Mary Shut The Garden Door,” for example, was inspired by the arrival of the 2004 Republican convention in Fagen’s own backyard.
“New York’s a Democratic town so it was strange,” he says. “It was like having tourists run the town for a week. I got out of town for the weekend. A lot of people got out of town. The song has a 1984 atmosphere about it. It’s basically about what it might feel like to have any kind of authoritarian government in power, whether it be an Islamic authoritarian, or any kind of fundamentalist government.”
So, given recent truth-stranger-than-fiction developments like Muslims rioting around the world over a cartoon of Mohammed or even vice-president Dick Cheney’s hunting accident, is Fagen disturbed by the direction the world is heading in?
“I’ve always been a Kurt Vonnegut fan since I was a kid, so if you read Kurt Vonnegut novels, you’ve been prepared for this for a long time,” he says. “Yeah, it’s depressing, but as a baby boomer, hydrogen baby, I grew up with the idea that there could be an atomic war at any minute. I remember Khruschev banging his shoe on the table and saying, ‘I will bury you!’
“Basically, from a political point of view, life has always seemed like a cartoon to me. It has gotten more ridiculous. I remember a Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove, which was really the sort of humour I loved as a kid. It’s really hard to do satire now because life has really caught up to the material of films and books. You just gotta hope that things will get better. I think the pendulum always swings the other way is the general movement of history.”
Fagen’s own frequent, post-9/11 security checks at airports inspired the new song “Security Joan,” which tells the story of an airline passenger who becomes aroused after his search by a female security guard.
“I often get chosen for the deep security line,” he says. “It might be the picture in my driver’s licence. I always get asked to take my shoes off and get wanded by the security person and all that, and it’s just so boring and anxiety-provoking. In fact, the last time, while all that was happening to me, the security guy was saying to me how much he liked my work, so he obviously knew who I was and yet it was the most severe security check I’d ever had.”
Another new song, “What I Do,” imagines a conversation between a younger Fagen and Ray Charles, who gives him “dating advice.”
“I always loved his music,” Fagen says. “And when I was a kid, I was a jazz fan when I was pretty young, and you didn’t get to see jazz musicians on TV. The beboppers have always been very marginalized. But you did get to see Ray Charles occasionally on TV. It was kind of crossover music. For a white suburban kid, just to see him on TV in the late ’50s was a revelation. Just the way he moved his body and was just sort of openly sexual and so on, especially his relationship with the Ray-lettes was always interesting to me.”
So what, then, determines which Fagen songs are bound for a Steely Dan album or a solo disc?
“(If I) have an idea that seems more subjective, I’ll put it aside,” says Fagen. “Or sometimes I’ll have something on a list and I’ll show it to Walter and he’ll say, ‘You know, that one I think that’s maybe more for you, than a Steely Dan type of item.’ ”
Becker, by the way, is at work on his own solo album to follow up 1994’s 11 Tracks Of Whack.
Fagen says while there’s no talk yet of another group album, he expects there will be another Steely Dan tour at the end of summer after he plays more solo shows. And, as he says, that usually leads to another Steely Dan studio record.
“The band seems to have this really long life,” Fagen says. “And I know there’s a lot of people out there who are there for the nostalgia and so on. But if we had no new ideas and if I thought we were just out there doing these things as ‘oldies,’ I think I’d quit. But I know that Walter and I always seem to have something to say about what’s going on. I think we’re still evolving, so it’s still a lot of fun.”
In the meantime, some of the Steely Dan catalogue will be part of Fagen’s solo show.
“There’s some Steely Dan things that I like to do, that are fun to sing, and I’ve rearranged one Steely Dan thing, and there’s a couple of covers that I’ve stuck in that might be fun,” Fagen says.
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