Steely Dan Goes Its Own Way, As Usual

Another problem for Becker and partner Donald Fagen was that at the band’s peak — with weird, jazz-influenced radio hits such as “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Do It Again,” “Bodhisattva” and “Reelin’ in the Years” — Steely Dan made no money. “We realized we were actually losing money during the ’70s,” adds Becker, who is touring with the long-reunited band. “The record companies had this wonderful little trick they would do, that no matter how many records you sold, or how successful you were, you never actually earned that much money, so you had to keep working. I didn’t want to do that anymore.”

With Fagen and Becker at the core, Steely Dan reconfigured its lineup numerous times, for both albums and tours, hiring top-of-the-line sideman such as guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and the late drummer Jeff Porcaro. Becker and Fagen hated touring, but the rest of the band loved it. “All they wanted to do is tour and be onstage and travel and live the fantastic rock ‘n’ roll life as they understood it,” Becker recalls. “By the end of that, we were both shot. Maybe you should say we were all shot. We resolved that discrepancy between what they wanted to do and what we wanted to do by cutting the baby in half.”

In the history of epic band breakups, from the Beatles to the Smashing Pumpkins, Steely Dan’s split in 1980, the year of their great-but-impenetrable album “Gaucho,” was perhaps not the most unexpected or earthshaking. Fagen and Becker were in different modes. Fagen continued to put out excellent albums, including his solo debut “The Nightfly,” while Becker decamped to Hawaii in order to become, as the official Steely Dan bio recalls, “a gentleman avocado rancher and self-styled critic of the contemporary scene.”

They came together again in 1993, when Becker worked on Fagen’s solo album “Kamakiriad,” and have been touring ever since as Steely Dan. They put out a couple more Dan albums, including 2000’s Grammy-winning “Two Against Nature,” but for the most part, Steely Dan’s career blueprint has flipped. They tour more frequently these days than record albums. “The whole process of touring for us couldn’t be more different than it was then,” Becker says. “Making a lot of money gives you creative possibilities for picking and choosing where you want to do things and what you wanted to do.”

Becker and Fagen first met in 1967 at Bard College in New York, bonding over their mutual affection for bebop jazz, particularly giants such as Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus. (In case this influence wasn’t obvious enough from the music, they gave it away explicitly in “Parker’s Band,” a track from 1974’s “Pretzel Logic,” a fantasy about jamming with Charlie Parker in “a dizzy weekend smacked into a trance.”) They also shared a love for literature, especially on the futuristic, avant-garde side, absorbing novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller and Kingsley Amis.

The duo started out as songwriters, attempting to become (famous songwriters’ office space) Brill Building professionals, but instead they drifted into the Jay and the Americans camp, becoming backup musicians for the hit band. In 1971, producer Gary Katz suggested they form their band, and they came up with Steely Dan, named for the, uh, bedroom device in William Burroughs’ beat classic “Naked Lunch.” Although Fagen’s voice was odd and detached, and their lyrics were often bitter and confusing, the Dan used its jazz chops to craft catchy pop and rock that sounded perfect wedged between Doobie Brothers and Bob Seger on FM radio. Years later, Becker would say the band’s mission statement was “encoding higher cultural information in cheesy pop songs played by a rock ‘n’ roll band.”

Although Fagen, 65, has recorded numerous solo albums, Becker, 63, is Steely Dan’s nonsinger, and he has put out exactly two — 1994’s “11 Tracks of Whack” and 2008’s “Circus Money.” He has no concrete plans for another. “If I’m going to start to write a bunch of things, I’d like to be able to make the records. And not years and years later, but when the songs are fresh in my mind, and when I’m close to the feeling of having created them in the first place,” he says. “I’ve noticed, when I’m writing songs and I don’t have places to put them, I’m going to, six years later, write a whole bunch of new songs, and those (original) songs are going to be orphans. In the ’70s, those were mostly Steely Dan songs.

“I don’t want to rush it,” he adds. “You know?”