‘Eminent Hipsters‘ is a witty, erudite selection of essays by Steely Dan’s grumpy old frontman, Donald Fagen
By Bernadette McNulty
The (London) Telegraph
I remember the first time a friend presented me with a Steely Dan CD. It was both a gift and a test, an initiation into music beyond what then, among Nineties rave bleeps and grunge guitars, was considered anywhere near remotely cool. The sound baffled me at first – with its closeted atmosphere, noodly jazz structures, and slightly reedy, elliptical lyrics it sounded like the Eagles reimagined by Woody Allen -– but there was also enough to intrigue me and, ultimately, enough to keep me going back to songs for which, like jazz or wine, you eventually develop a taste.
I imagine that is a description band frontman Donald Fagen would approve of from a person he would dismiss as “a TV baby,” an expression he admits to borrowing from the film Drugstore Cowboy to describe anyone born after 1960, “when television truly became the robot caretaker of American children and therefore the principal architect of their souls.” In his account of a 2012 tour with his side project, the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue, Fagen spends a lot of time being tormented by TV babies. They provoke his ire by turning up to gigs expecting Steely Dan’s greatest hits, or worse, waving their camera phones about: “The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People… sending instant videos to their friends: ‘Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I’m filming this s—.’ You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say.”
As you can tell from this, the 65-year-old American, a proud snark in his youth, has matured into a rabidly grumpy old man. But thankfully age has not stripped him of his keen wit and nose for elegant prose. Rock stars are not necessarily sensitive wordsmiths or deep self-analysts by nature -– their life stories, documenting a rake’s progress through narcotics and women, tend to be tossed off as record sales dwindle. In his usual contrary fashion, Fagen has decided instead to create a collage of writing made up of critical essays (some previously published) on the cultural heroes or “eminent hipsters” of his youth, combined with his recent tour diary.
Fagen describes himself as someone who could have easily followed another career as a journalist or an English teacher, although going on the transcript of a profoundly unilluminating audience he had with Ennio Morricone, he was better off sticking to the clever lyric writing.
Nonetheless, his “art-o-biography,” much like his music, is nerdishly clever, entertainingly original and even a moving reconfiguration of the memoir format. The early scholarly bombardment of the essays feels partly designed to shake off the casual browser, rhapsodising over obscure, cult figures of the 20th century, including jazz singer Connie Boswell, science fiction writer AE van Vogt and radio DJ Jean Shepherd. Fagen’s fanboy discussions are worth sticking with, though, as he teases out fascinating nuances and connections. He perceives in Boswell, born in the same year as Frida Kahlo, and also disabled, a similar impulse in her singing to “pull apart” her source material, “reorganise its parts and reshape it into something richer than the original.”
His vivid portrayal of growing up in Fifties and Sixties America includes snapshots of the rapid implosion of San Francisco’s flower children, and of suburban houses clad in so much wall-to-wall beige carpet that he remembers “the coolest girl in high school would crawl across her mom’s floor croaking, ‘Water… water!’” For the baby boomers, science fiction was seen not as escapism but as a realistic depiction of their ideological alienation from their parents’ generation, a perception that L Ron Hubbard would use when he created Scientology.
Fagen, for all his waspish antagonism to groups and conventions, shows an almost tender sympathy towards his idols’ flaws, whether it be Henry Mancini’s squareness or Ike Turner’s destructive Faustian pact. It’s a mix that flourishes best in the tour diary, as he depicts the indignities and disappointments of being an aging rock star on the road who has basically detested touring since his youth.
Descending his way through dodgy hotel swimming pools, shrinking venues and increasing onstage meltdowns -– let alone those superficial TV babies -– Fagen succumbs to what he calls Acute Tour Disorder, or what others would call hypochondria, misanthropy and the severe grumps. But he presents it with such style and humour, you’re almost willing him back on the tour bus, if only to get another volume like this out of him.
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