As a young person, rising up in New Jersey throughout the Nineteen Sixties, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to listen to his jazz heroes within the flesh. The ecstatic improvisational rough-and-tumble of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Invoice Evans, and Willie “The Lion” Smith stayed hardwired inside his mind, and shortly Fagen landed at Bard School, the place sooner or later in 1967 he overheard a fellow pupil, Walter Becker from Queens, enjoying the blues on his guitar in a campus espresso store. Fagen launched himself and advised Becker how impressed he was by his clean-cut approach. The pair struck up a direct friendship, then 5 years later based Steely Dan, a band that may turn out to be one of many defining rock teams of the Seventies.
In albums like Can’t Purchase a Thrill (1972), Pretzel Logic (1974), and Aja (1977), they cultivated a smooth, polished pop that was marinated in jazz, blues, Latin, and rock and roll. Their songs had each a melodic, high-fidelity sheen—a present to radio airplay—and a degree of compositional integrity and instrumental elan that left aficionados agog. Lyrically, they developed a fixation—naysayers thought of it an affectation—with pairing waspish observations about social outsiders, the venality of popular culture, and males using out their midlife crises with relentlessly feel-good music, the harmonies by no means smudging in sympathy with the deranged phrases. At a time when potent presences like David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Al Inexperienced, and Diana Ross—in addition to prog-rock teams like Kansas and Emerson, Lake & Palmer—had been all remaking pop, Steely Dan’s tics and obsessions positioned them distinctively: the themes of their songs could possibly be relatable, however their fanatical studio perfectionism appeared prefer it was ruled by a secret method. The deeper you listened, the more durable it was to pin down.
Working within the studio retrained Fagen and Becker’s perspective towards music and sound. For a few of their contemporaries, like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, studio recording supplied methods to fabricate sonic illusions, like musical collage and stuttering non-sequitur constructions, unachievable both dwell or by way of acoustic means. As a substitute Steely Dan rethought already established studio methods comparable to overlaying tracks, mechanically looping rhythms, and enjoying with the location of microphones. By harnessing the apparently infinite potentialities of studio recording they had been capable of conjure up an orderly, pristine realism, staged as rigorously because the water forking out of a David Hockney swimming pool.
However Fagen additionally remained emotionally hooked up to the spontaneity of jazz. The group typically tailored materials lifted from basic jazz albums and recruited starry jazz musicians like Wayne Shorter, Phil Woods, and Steve Gadd to make cameo appearances on their information. Dropping prerecorded, improvised solos into rigorously worked-out backdrops was, in idea, a supreme inventive steadiness of management and spontaneity. And but in apply it made the Steely Dan undertaking internally contradictory. The improvisers improvised, and Fagen and Becker aimed to retain the aura of first-take freshness even when, at instances, they spliced facets of a number of takes collectively. Some critics frowned upon that behavior, suspicious that all of it amounted to easily creaming off the warmth and power of nice improvisation with out ever risking the spontaneous changeability that jazz improvisers would inevitably have delivered to performing those self same songs dwell on stage.
Steely Dan studio classes turned infamous for his or her obsessive high quality management, for obliging session musicians to play as many as fifty or extra takes earlier than Becker and Fagen felt happy. Their experiments with tech had been no much less exacting. Within the Seventies they looped tape by way of an loafer wheel to present their recordings a sort of mechanical rhythmic precision. When sample-based drum machines went in the marketplace within the early Eighties, they had been enthusiastic early pioneers, utilizing the know-how to pattern their drummers and underpin their tracks with nonetheless extra rhythmic consistency.
The apogee of their strategy to the studio was maybe “Josie,” the final monitor on their landmark file Aja, the story of a woman—a “live wire…with her eyes on fire”—returning to a small city, seemingly after serving a jail sentence, and setting the sexual antennae of the native male inhabitants aquiver. Fagen and Becker packed their track with far-flung jazz chords and deftly organized saxophone choruses—then performed the studio with equal consideration to element. To make the monitor’s opening riff throb forcefully, Becker funneled the guitar components by way of the state-of-the-art JC-120 amplifier, which thrust the sound ahead within the combine and artificially thickened its texture. The guitarist Dean Parks recorded two separate components, which had been later superimposed atop of each other, in order that the sound projected like blaring neon mild. The band’s sonic sensibility turn out to be a sort of aural trompe l’oeil.
By the point they’d left school, Becker and Fagen knew they needed to put in writing songs collectively. They shortly arrange workplace in Manhattan’s Brill Constructing, close to Instances Sq., from the place they scored some low-key successes in 1971, composing the soundtrack for the solely forgettable Richard Pryor film You’ve Bought to Stroll It Like You Speak It or You’ll Lose That Beat and basking within the mirrored glory of Barbra Streisand after she included their track “I Mean To Shine” on her album Barbra Joan Streisand. Then a producer, Gary Katz, heard their potential; a proposal arrived to signal as home songwriters for ABC Information, to supply their artists with a continuing provide of recent materials, and relocate to Los Angeles.
The prospect of a bunch of their very own emerged after they arrived in LA and it turned clear, to Becker and Fagen in addition to to Katz, that their songs, advanced and peculiar, misplaced one thing within the telling when handed to different singers who couldn’t convey their sardonic, world-weary high quality. For the primary two years of their existence, they had been a band as we perceive the time period: Becker and Fagen added Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (guitars), Jim Hodder (drums), and David Palmer (vocals); Katz would stay on board as producer of their albums for all the first run of their profession.
The group’s early sound, breathe-easy soft-rock—as heard on their 1972 debut, Can’t Purchase a Thrill, and its follow-up Countdown to Ecstasy—contained their obsessions in embryo. Their third file, Pretzel Logic, constructed on these first albums however solid a wider web. Its opening monitor, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” bounced excessive of a riff borrowed from the hard-bop pianist Horace Silver’s basic 1965 Blue Be aware monitor “Song For My Father.” The album additionally introduced a note-for-note remake of Duke Ellington’s 1926 composition “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” now reimagined for rock band instrumentation, with Baxter’s guitar expertly imitating the trombonist Tough Sam Nanton’s signature plunger mute distortions. The precision of the audio reveals each what a well-tuned ear the band had for instrumental sonority and the way deftly they may use the studio to paint and shade.
However by the point they recorded Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan was at battle. Schisms inside rock teams had been nothing uncommon, however this cut up was existential. Becker and Fagen loathed touring, each the logistics and the inescapable indisputable fact that their music by no means sounded pretty much as good piped by way of venue sound programs because it did on file. As Fagen defined in 2012, “my voice would give out after two weeks on the road. And that in turn would give me anxiety and stage fright.” He felt that he’d ended up because the lead singer of a rock band by default, which had by no means been his intention. Paying their musicians to tour was additionally massively costly. The musicians needed to proceed enjoying dwell so they may pay their payments, however Fagen and Becker prevailed, and the band gave its final dwell efficiency in Santa Monica on July 4, 1974, as the ultimate lap of their summer time tour.
Album quantity 4, Katy Lied, was conceived, carried out, and recorded solely on the ABC Studio in Los Angeles on the finish of 1974. The alto saxophonist Phil Woods dropped a neat paraphrase of “Doctor Wu” into the track, and the band’s ordinary steadiness of jazz, rock, and soul tilted towards soul inflections within the vocal harmonies. A warning for the long run got here when Fagen and Becker realized, to their horror, that their experiments with DBX noise discount—meant to attenuate tape hiss and lift the quieter sounds within the combine—had resulted in a scarcity of dynamic vary; the excessive frequencies of guitars and cymbals felt compressed and muffled, a glitch they aimed to repair in subsequent reissues. There was no tour in help of the album: Steely Dan was now completely a studio band, with little pretense that they had been attempting to create a sound that could possibly be meaningfully replicated dwell.
Dias opted to remain, however the different musicians drifted away, and Steely Dan turned Becker and Fagen alongside an ever-changing solid of session musicians chosen for his or her rock or jazz prowess. The duo secured cameo appearances from main jazz instrumentalists like Woods and the British keyboard participant Victor Feldman, briefly a sideman with Miles Davis, who contributed nimble keyboard solos to Pretzel Logic and performed once more on Katy Lied. Additionally they enlisted musicians concerned variously in fusion music and rock: Larry Carlton, Bernard Purdie, and Mark Knopfler—a wealthy recipe of influences they cooked to perfection.
Steely Dan’s music provoked simple pleasure, however its strategies had been artificial and medical, and their resolution to call themselves after the high-tech dildo from William S. Burroughs’s 1959 novel Bare Lunch felt particularly apt. After Bing Crosby’s faultlessly enunciated vocal on “White Christmas,” recorded in 1942, turned the highest-selling single to this point (a file it nonetheless holds), the pop business labored out that capturing signature sounds as faithfully as attainable was a sure-fire technique to promote information. Dwell rock albums of the interval—such because the Grateful Useless’s Dwell/Useless, the Who’s Dwell at Leeds, and Bob Dylan and the Band’s Earlier than the Flood—had an immediacy and urgency. However music produced in studios was assured to sound the identical every time—that was the entire level. Steely Dan carried that pop truism to a specific excessive.
Their follow-up to Katy Lied, 1976’s The Royal Rip-off, demonstrated that Becker and Fagen remained open to incorporating recent sounds and rhythmic grooves. As ever the file was grounded of their negotiations between jazz and rock, though now it had a more durable, funk-tilted core. Larry Carlton’s biting electrical guitar lent the opening riff of “Don’t Take Me Alive” the itch of agitation; a beat rooted in reggae was despatched dancing behind “Haitian Divorce.” The Royal Rip-off—which has simply been reissued in a remastered vinyl version from Interscope—is probably the group’s bleakest album. A number of songs inform tales of crime and medicines, whereas the title monitor explores the emotions of Puerto Rican migrants arriving in New York and having to check their dream of town towards the fact of prejudice and exploitation.
The album’s refinement of language arrange the band for his or her subsequent file, Aja, extensively thought of their masterpiece. So staged had their aesthetic turn out to be that the sleeve notice for Aja was attributed to a journalist named Michael Phalen, who, though the band by no means confirmed it, is extensively accepted to have been an alias for Fagen and Becker themselves. Describing the album’s opening monitor, “Black Cow,” as “catchy disco-funk” with “bitterly sarcastic lyrics…underpinned by cloying jazz-crossover harmonies,” an already tempting brew “propelled by an infectious, trendy beat,” the so-called Phalen flipped the script, twisting the invective a non-believing critic may use to rattling the “trendy” and “catchy” Steely Dan right into a sequence of glowing positives. As Fagen and Becker took whole management within the studio, additionally they snatched again management of their reception.
Aja’s eight-minute title monitor, Phalen snarked, was a “Latin-tinged pop song…inexplicably expanded into some sort of sonata or suite.” That phrase “inexplicably” was undoubtedly taunting the supposed pretensions of Seventies prog-rock teams (King Crimson is perhaps an instance) that produced multi-sectional compositions during which the time signatures by no means stood nonetheless. “Aja,” in distinction, went to large effort not to attract consideration to its development. Its lyrics served to embed geographical distance into the track. A person dwelling “up on the hill” the place “people never stare/they just don’t care” runs towards Aja, who, relying on the way you hear it, could possibly be both a lady or a perfect of nirvana. The keyboard participant Joe Pattern measures the space between the person’s actual and dream life by massaging prolonged harmonies into the ensemble ether, chords chosen rigorously to push gently towards the grounding of the prevailing tonality—a beckoning from afar, an aural phantasm helped alongside by the spatial readability of the recording.
Inviting Wayne Shorter, the tenor and soprano sax linchpin of Miles Davis’s teams from the mid-Nineteen Sixties, to solo on the track was a genius transfer. Shorter had performed on Davis’s gesturally bare-bones 1969 jazz-rock album In a Silent Manner, and you’re feeling “Aja” to be indebted. His beautiful solo has a characteristically shamanic, ritualistic high quality, probing the scalic patterns that underpin the track and molding the dynamic between the narrator and Aja into an explicitly musical dialogue. The lyrics reference “Chinese music under banyan trees/here at the dude ranch above the sea.” Shorter’s solo teased the paradox: Is Aja an individual or a philosophical reality?
This type of parallel actuality was par for the course for Steely Dan. The sleeve notes Becker and Fagen didn’t need anybody to know they’d written themselves singled out Victor Feldman’s “coy pianistics” on “I Got The News,” though it was an amazing pity, they stated, that his efforts had been “undermined by Walter Becker’s odd, Djangoesque guitar and pointlessly obscene lyric.” Tics and fixations reappeared in lyrics between albums in several guises. In “The Boston Rag,” from Countdown to Ecstasy, the narrator thinks that the idealism of his youthful self has now withered into bitterness, and the bleakness of his current life makes him go away city. “My Old School,” from the identical album, recounts a drug bust at Bard because the narrator thinks again to a interval of carefree revolt. “Sign in Stranger,” from The Royal Rip-off, references a brief story by the sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein exploring the “bootstrap paradox”—a quirk of time journey during which people who find themselves despatched again in time trigger their very own existence. Steely Dan songs trapped individuals in time, at a set level removed from the place they often needed to be—someplace, or certainly somebody, else.
By the completion of Gaucho, which appeared in 1980 because the follow-up to Aja, Steely Dan had entered troubled instances. Earlier than a notice had even been sounded, Becker and Fagen had been unsettled by a contractual spat: MCA Information had not too long ago acquired their label, ABC; MCA reckoned the brand new Steely Dan album was theirs for the taking and, after a authorized dispute with the band, finally prevailed. In the course of the lengthy strategy of recording, the band’s supervisor and Becker’s girlfriend, Karen Roberta Stanley, died in his residence from a drug overdose. The emotional trauma was heightened when Stanley’s mom, pondering Becker was answerable for introducing her daughter to medicine, tried to sue him for greater than seventeen million {dollars}; Becker countersued, demonstrating that the truth is he had tried to assist his girlfriend, paying for medical care and rehab. A couple of months later Becker collided with a taxi whereas strolling in Central Park, his leg accidents resulting in an extended hospital keep and placing him in a solid for seven months whereas he recovered. Additional proof that this newest undertaking was apparently jinxed got here after the album’s launch, when Keith Jarrett sued for infringement of copyright over Gaucho’s title monitor, which had a suspicious resemblance, he claimed, to “Long as You Know You’re Living Yours” from his album Belonging. (Becker and Fagen settled by agreeing so as to add Jarrett’s title to the composer credit score.)
Usually, Gaucho featured a rolling solid of premium jazz musicians, together with the trumpeter Randy Brecker and the saxophonist David Sanborn, however the presence of the Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler on “Time Out of Mind” signified that the palette of this album was softer and extra ambiently impressionistic. Knopfler performed an understated solo that ended up being built-in deep into the ensemble texture round it, an expertise he later stated he discovered irritating.
None of this turbulence across the manufacturing of Gaucho could possibly be discerned within the Ming-vase precision of the file itself. Permitting real trauma, such because the loss of life of a liked one, to paint the music straight would have run towards the Steely Dan grain. Gaucho’s sense of detachment was each its nice energy and weak point. Becker and Fagen maybe felt they had been entitled to a Keith Jarrett track as a result of each character on their album—and what a horrible rogues gallery it’s—feels entitled to one thing. At the least the coke supplier on “Glamour Profession”—making enterprise calls from a basketball star’s automotive telephone, downing Szechuan dumplings, and boasting about having “illegal fun under the sun”—is trustworthy about his dishonesty. In any other case Gaucho is populated by pudgy middle-aged guys who can’t perceive why their advances are being rejected by youthful ladies.
Medicine are by no means far behind intercourse in rock and roll, and in “Time Out of Mind” a person hoping his heroin excessive will remodel Los Angeles right into a utopia is shortly disillusioned. Lou Reed’s track “Heroin,” as heard on the Velvet Underground’s debut album in 1967, laid out the awe and the fear of habit by taking listeners inside a person’s mind-set. However in Steely Dan’s arms heroin may as properly be bubble gum: it’s an informal plot machine, as actual because the cliff edge over which cartoon characters defy gravity. Whether or not chasing intercourse or euphoria, characters on the album find yourself alone. On Gaucho’s title monitor a person finds the article of his want holding arms with a cowboy. It’s performed for laughs: “Would you care to explain?” he deadpans. No person, it appears, can belief anyone.
Becker and Fagen had been themselves solitary and aloof. As soon as the chilly, calculating studio turned their area they grew invisible to followers; their photos by no means even appeared on album sleeves. Feminine artists like Tori Amos and the Pointer Sisters lined their songs, however it was laborious to shake the hunch that Steely Dan was finally about boys and their toys. That suspicion gave the impression to be confirmed when Becker advised Newsday in 2006 that “Steely Dan is guys without girls. The collective persona that we unintentionally developed is a guy who’s talking to the guys, except once in a while, he breaks down and you get to see that he’s unstable. Kind of like Dick Cheney.” Absurd cartoon characters had been additionally meant to boost amusing, whilst you gag at their awfulness. A gaggle that had named itself after a Beat novel ended up extra within the method of Thomas Pynchon, enjoying with themes of paranoia, alienation, and the paradox of id.
The affinity was not misplaced on Pynchon himself, who references Steely Dan in his novel Bleeding Edge; Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After One other, options “Dirty Work” because the needle drop. The Pynchonesque punchline is that, in 1994, Steely Dan had been reborn as a dwell performing group. The autumn-out from Gaucho had led Becker and Fagan to go their very own methods, however in 1982 Fagen produced a solo album, The Nightfly, that was keenly acquired, and the pair reunited in 1993 to advertise a sequel, Kamakiriad, as a part of the primary Steely Dan tour since 1974.
Kamakiriad by no means equalled the success of The Nightfly, however the alternative to see the band carry out dwell was a draw nonetheless, and know-how had progressed to the purpose the place Steely Dan onstage might truly sound like Steely Dan within the studio. Jazz saxophonists from a youthful technology, like Chris Potter and Bob Shepperd, stepped into Shorter’s footwear; the jazz-rock fusion drummers Dennis Chambers and Peter Erskine had been known as as much as play, and solo spots had been opened as much as improvisation—no person was anticipated to recreate the unique information onstage.
However the album that was culled from the tour, Alive in America, launched in 1995, conformed to sort: Becker and Fagen headed again to the studio to create an “ideal” dwell expertise by mixing and patching collectively materials from totally different evenings on their tour. A final pair of studio albums, Two In opposition to Nature and Every part Should Go, appeared within the early 2000s. Steely Dan, nonetheless, continued even after Becker’s loss of life in 2017 with Fagen on the helm. He was persuaded that the model nonetheless had business clout, even now that it had successfully turn out to be a tribute band that includes one authentic member. Everybody in Steely Dan finally ends up on their very own.
