The Later Albums of Steely Dan

I sometimes teach a short term course devoted to inventively structured narratives.   Some favorites:  Dinty Moore's ABC-arranged essay "Son of Mr. Green Jeans", Jamaica Kincaid's short story as barrage of instructions "Girl", Lorrie Moore's backward short story "How to Talk to Your Mother", Christopher Nolan's narratives-of-different-length-squeezed-into-the-same-timeline film Dunkirk.   Once we've studied a few my students try their hand it.   Many of the results have been extraordinary and have appeared in our school literary magazine.  A few years back, in the spirit of "I won't ask you to do anything I won't do myself", I undertook an imitation of Anthony Giardina's wonderful "The Films of Richard Egan" (a memoir disguised as the career retrospective of a forgotten movie star).  I sought to write about transitions in my life via my fandom of Steely Dan.  It didn't come out the way I wanted.   There is nothing in mine even close to as cool as Giardina's imagination of Egan's chagrin when he realizes that he's going to be overshadowed in his first big starring role by the guy who got second billing (Elvis), or the narrator overhearing his mother and her friends all atwitter over Egan's suggestive line readings in A Summer Place, or Egan sipping bourbon at dusk in Spain on the set of a B movie about Thermopylae and reflecting on his career and thinking, "This hasn't been too bad."  Mine just plods along. But I'm glad I did it.  The urge to express gratitude to your first favorite musicians is hard to resist, even if they’re plainly the sort of fellows who would be repelled by your sentimentality.

I wrote this before the passing of Walter Becker in 2017.

 

Aja (1977)

 

Steely Dan’s sixth album is generally regarded by the band’s fans and music commentators alike as the pinnacle of their art.   As always, the music was composed by Steely Dan’s only two permanent members, keyboard man and singer Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker, who had met ten years earlier at New York’s artsy Bard College.   The recording was done in Los Angeles, the music performed by a rotating cast of top shelf studio musicians.   Some of Steely Dan’s most memorable hits, such as “Peg”, “Deacon Blues”, and “Black Cow” appear on the album.  Upon Aja’s release, Rolling Stone’s critic described it as a “smooth, awesomely clean and calculated mutation of various rock, pop and jazz idioms. Their lyrics remain as pleasantly obtuse and cynical as ever.”

 

That year I was 14, a freshman in high school.   I had never heard of Steely Dan, though I must have heard some of their music on the radio – probably “Reeling in the Years” – without realizing it was them.  I was growing more aware of the music played by the two rock-and-roll stations in our town, but hadn’t really adopted a band of my own yet.  In truth, I found rock music kind of scary.

 

One spring evening I was sitting in a big car in a shoddy shopping center north of Athens, on the low rent side of town.  That shopping center included the cut-rate grocery store where my mother shopped, Bi-Lo.    What I remember most about it was trying to catch glimpses of the R rated movies they showed at the drive-in theatre next door – you could just see the screen at a hard angle.   And once when I was there I came across a fellow with off a massive carp he had just caught, as big as your arm, showing it to anyone who happened to pass by where he was standing.   An admiring crowd had gathered around him.  . 

 

On this spring evening I was in a big car, as I said, with my younger brother and two other kids.   The two other kids were the son and daughter of the man in the front seat, my father’s colleague, Dr. Dan Kirby.   The radio was on. I don’t recall who we were waiting for.  Probably my father had gone into one of the stores.  We didn’t mind waiting.  My brother and I fairly worshipped Dan.   He was on his way to becoming a big name in the field of progressive approaches to teaching writing to high school students.  To us he was tall, boisterous, fun loving.  His office door was always covered by the most amusing, edgiest cartoons.  He called us by funny nicknames (my brother was “Jock City”) and told us of his adventures as a kid in rural California.   Once, when he was in high school, there had been a string of murders near his hometown.  He and some friends had one of their number lie down in the trunk of a car with his arm, covered in ketchup, hanging out the back.  Then they drove around to gas stations asking where the river was.  Of course the story ended with them spending the night in juvie.    For reasons such as these, we never grew tired of spending time with Dan, even if it meant sitting in a car in sleazy shopping center.  

 

“Wait,” Dan said, turning up the car radio.   “Everybody be quiet.  This is the new Steely Dan song.”   

 

Gaucho (1980)

 

Becker and Fagen created their seventh album in the same way they had created Aja:  in the studio, meticulously, over months, not with a single band but with session musicians selected for their individual talents.  The songs, as had become the norm for them, were about aging hipsters, drug dealers, jealous husbands, and the like.   “Hey Nineteen” and “Babylon Sisters” became the big hits from the album.  In his review of Gaucho, the New York Times’ critic praised Steely Dan for their “studio craftsmanship,” “their sweet-sour-pop-jazz style”, and the “cryptically sardonic vignettes” that make up their lyrics.    In a horrible misstep, recordings of some reputedly outstanding music from those sessions were accidentally destroyed.  Bootlegs of demos from the "Lost Gaucho" have Holy Grail status among Steely Dan's most ardent fans.  

When Gaucho came out, three years had passed since I first heard the band’s name in a seedy North Athens parking lot.   I had become a loyal fan - not a true obsessive, but knowledgeable and devout enough that anyone unfortunate enough to be around me when the subject came up would probably want to reach for a brick after just a few minutes.  I had all their albums.  I listened to their music incessantly, learned all the words without understanding a whole lot of them.  Mostly I loved how rich and beautiful the music sounded.  The night before I went to a six week summer academic camp I got the family headphones and listened to Wayne Shorter’s sax solo on the song “Aja” over and over on the family stereo until my father came downstairs and told me to go to bed.    When I finally had a car with a cassette player, the first tape I played was a copy of the Aja album, purchased at Chapter 3 Records on Broad Street.  

 

There were some trials associated with being a high school fan of Steely Dan in the late seventies.   The music was a little too jazzy, too esoteric to pass as rock and roll.  People said it had no heart.   Being into them was not as discreditable as being into Disco music, but not much better.  So my band of choice was a social handicap.  There was no way to participate in a conversation about what people were listening to.  Among music consumers for whom rocking bands like the Stones and Boston and Lynyrd Skynyrd were gods, being into Steely Dan was not going to get me anywhere.  The really forward thinking guys were into the Clash and Elvis Costello.   I didn’t even try with them – I knew they’d regard what I listened to as effete, retrograde stuff.   My friends who wanted their music to come with an underpinning of political commitment rightly recognized that Steely Dan’s music was almost devoid of social conscience.  Even our German exchange student didn’t care for it – he heard something he called  “disharmonic” in one of my favorite songs.    One time, in conversation with one of my brainier friends, a fellow I knew to be sophisticated in his musical taste, I mentioned that I had somewhere read Steely Dan’s music referred to as “thinking man’s Top 40.”  In a show of great forbearance, he nodded politely instead of breaking my nose. 

 

What made it worse for me was that they never performed live.   They would not tour in support of Gaucho, just as they had not toured in support of their previous three albums.  They didn’t have to (their records sold anyway) and they didn’t want to.  In frustration with the rigors of the road and dedicated to their perfectionist studio work, Becker and Fagen had finally rejected the whole enterprise of performing live.  They made it worse for those of us who longed to see them perform by using an old recording of a live version of their song “Bodhisattva” as the B-side of a single from “Gaucho.”   It was a killer, raucous performance.   Almost their way of saying, “Yeah, we can do this, we’re great at it, but we don’t want to, so we’re not.”  Their prissiness about touring didn’t help my cause socially.  Many boys my age had a growing repertoire of shows they’d been to in Atlanta – Frampton at the Municipal Auditorium, Aerosmith at the Omni, the Ramones at the Agora, and on and on.   It would be hard to overstate the status afforded by being able to recount all the lurid details of one’s experience of seeing a well-regarded band live in a smoke-filled auditorium.   But I was a Steely Dan fan.  I had nothing.  

 

But the pleasures were too good to give up.  I was getting canny enough to recognize subtle humor in lyrics I had previously taken at face value.  “Brut and charisma poured from the shadow where he stood” sang Fagen, mocking a cocaine-hooked basketball star.   As I got better at getting the jokes, my curiosity intensified.  So I began to take my first forays into rock periodicals in pursuit of more knowledge about Steely Dan.   Around the time Gaucho was released, Becker and Fagen emerged from their cave to give an extended joint interview to Musician magazine.  I came across it browsing the periodicals in a small bookstore and fairly sprinted to the cash register to buy it.   There were technical parts of the interview that went way over my head (what the hell was melisma?), but the parts I DID understand revealed Becker and Fagen as a pair of wonderfully acerbic brainiacs.  Their level of erudition was ridiculous, and they seemed to relish being smart.  They made snarky jokes at their own expense.   They pulled no punches about music they hated.  They respected the black musical heritage their music emerged from.  They professed a fondness for Nabokov, whoever that was.   My admiration grew.  

 

Two Against Nature (2000)

Steely Dan’s first studio album in 20 years earned praise (mostly) from the critics and garnered Becker and Fagen an Album of the Year Grammy award, in a major – and controversial – upset over Eminem.   Longtime Steely Dan fans were tickled when some theorized that the rapper’s offensive lyrics had turned off the voters.  In Two Against Nature’s most celebrated song, the speaker hits on his cousin.  The true degenerates had won.   That song, “Cousin Dupree”, along with “Jack of Speed,” and “What a Shame About Me” was among the better offerings on the album.  

 

The Onion AV Club commentator said of Two Against Nature that it was “less a comeback than a pick-up, cause for all those closet Steely Dan fans to finally peer out from their backrooms and bachelor pads, leave the house, and head to the record store for the first time in two decades” for “an album that sounds like the 80s and 90s never happened.”   The new album gave fans everything they loved about the old Steely Dan – the  “gorgeous tunes”, “exuberant solos”, “elliptical and allusive lyrics.”   

 

What had happened during those 20 years between albums?  The grueling process of creating Gaucho had put a temporary end to Becker and Fagen’s working relationship.  Becker, who had developed a ruinous fondness for heroin, took his addiction to Hawaii and disappeared from the scene.   Fagen began doing solo work, and his 1982 album The Nightfly, jazzy pop songs based on his memories of growing up in the early sixties, was both popular and critically acclaimed (in later interviews he said that the process  of making that album, digging deep into his past, had landed him in therapy).   In the late eighties he began playing live dates in New York with an all-star lineup, labeled The New York Rock and Soul Revue.   Becker cleaned up, came out of seclusion, and he and Fagen began working together again, each producing a solo album for the other in the early nineties.   The culmination of this reunion was Two Against Nature.

 

For me those 20 years brought graduation from high school, departure for college, flunking out of college, my father’s death from Type 1 Diabetes, becoming a serious Ultimate player, reentering college, becoming an alcoholic, tearing up my knee, graduating from college, giving up alcohol, getting married, going to graduate school, becoming a high school teacher, getting divorced, becoming a serious ultimate player again, getting married again, and becoming a parent.   My college years were in the golden age of Athens music, so it was not only natural but kind of mandatory that R.E.M. became my new band of choice.  I had no regrets – the band I had grown up with no longer existed and R.E.M. fandom satisfied my intellectual vanity in pretty much the same way Steely Dan fandom had.  And for once I was a big fan of the same music everybody else was.   But there’s no really turning your back on the music of your youth, even when you tell yourself you’ve outgrown it.  Fagen's 1988 song for the Bright Lights, Big City soundtrack reminded me keep my ear cocked.  When the box set of Steely Dan’s seven albums came out, I was there with my shag-carpet heart and $60, and their music was in heavy rotation in my car and in my house and in my classroom in the 20 years between Gaucho and Two Against Nature.   And for this listener, the new album was worth the wait.   “Jack of Speed” became my favorite of all of Steely Dan’s songs. 

 

The peak moment of this revival period came in 1993, seven years before Two Against Nature, when something we thought would never happen actually happened:  they decided to tour.   In fact they started doing it almost annually.  It was fun and lucrative (their dorky teenage fans had grown up to have well-paying jobs and didn’t mind shelling out exorbitant sums for tickets).   So the band that had once been all about the studio forsook the studio for the road.  In the late summer of 1993, their first tour brought them through Atlanta.  They played the Omni.   Of course that show became the most important event on my calendar.  However, due to unforeseen circumstances, I was quite late arriving.  Things were well under way when I got there.  I was seething when I got through the door, but my anger drifted away as I walked the concourse looking for my section and stopped to listen for a minute.  The music.  It was familiar, much more than familiar thanks to 16 years of listening since that night in the Bi-Lo parking lot.  And for once the music was not coming from a speaker in my car or my house.  It was being played and sung by men and women, among them Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, breathing the same air as me, less than 100 yards away.  Fagen was singing their Odyssey-inspired song from Aja:

 

                                    Well the danger on the rocks is surely past.

                                    Still I remain tied to the mast.

                                    Could it be that I have found my home at last?

                                    Home at last.