Welcome to the Steely Dan Reader, formerly called the Steely Dan Internet Resource. This site is home to more than four decades of interviews, profiles and concert reviews of Steely Dan and its founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. We also maintain the text archives of Metal Leg, the great newsletter that from 1987 through […]
‘Eminent Hipsters’ Review
Originally published on Dec. 20, 2013 By Alan Light The New York Times Eminent Hipsters By Donald Fagen Viking, $26.95. Eminent Hipsters isn’t a memoir, but rather two projects stuck together: a series of essays Fagen (best known as half of Steely Dan, a band rarely mentioned in the book) calls “a kind of art-o-biography […]
Memoir Is a Tell-Some, Not a Tell-All
By Mark Reynolds PopMatters.com There are some things we know about the rock band Steely Dan. First, it hasn’t been a band in the conventional sense for most of its existence. Second, their songs, with jazz-inflected structures and worldwise, often cryptic stories, have never seized center stage in the pop landscape, even as they’ve sold […]
Eminent Hipsters, by Donald Fagen
By Peter Aspden The Financial Times Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen Jonathan Cape RRP£16.99/Viking, RRP$26.95 176 pages As befits a musician who made merry and smart during the golden age of the vinyl album, Donald Fagen, co-founder and frontman of Steely Dan, has split this collection of autobiographical essays into two, violently contrasting, sides. Side […]
Reeling in the Years With Sour Reflection
By Janet MaslinThe New York Times If you like Steely Dan’s greatest hits too much, Donald Fagen of that band probably hates you already. You may be one of the “TV babies” who illegally download those songs, show up at his concerts expecting to hear familiar hits, have no patience for anything soulful or adventurous […]
Hey 19 — You Suck!
By Elias LeightPaste Magazine Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan coheres loosely: It’s a series of semi-biographical but not necessarily related essays—reflecting on Fagen’s youth and musical influences—combined with a tour diary from 2012. Fagen reminisces about seeing jazz greats at the Village Vanguard, joins the Sci-Fi Book Club and comments on the […]
A Musical Memoir That Surpassed Itself
By Jeff MiersBuffalo News Steely Dan, the band co-founded by Bard College chums Donald Fagen and Walter Becker at the end of the ’60s, made its name by combining the influences of Duke Ellington, R&B, funk and pop with a consistently brilliant strain of lyric-writing that was the very definition of sardonic. That this band […]
‘Eminent Hipsters’ by Donald Fagen – Review
Moments of musical transcendence and life on the road … this dry white whine from the Steely Dan singer is a memoir to savour By Anthony QuinnThe Guardian This book is a piece of pure bliss, and it’s not even the book I thought or hoped it would be. When they said a memoir by […]
Donald Fagen: ‘Eminent Hipsters’
By Simon Sweetmanoffthetracks.co.nz You could never expect a man who made his name by placing the incongruous inside happy-sounding so-slick pop-jazz ditties to write a conventional memoir; Steely Dan is as much a magic act as it is a musical act -– and not just for the fact that you’re either under the spell or […]
The 65-Year-Old Hipster
Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen Writes a Not-Quite-Memoir By David Bamundo Wall Street Journal In his 40-plus-year career, Donald Fagen has been praised for his lyrics, both as one of Steely Dan’s co-founders and in his solo work. Now, his nonlyrical writings have been collected in Eminent Hipsters, a not-quite-memoir released by Viking and celebrated at […]
