July 4, 1974—Crunched between recording sessions and
city-to-city travel, often appalled by the vicissitudes of the road, Steely Dan decided on a breather
from touring. It was only meant to be temporary, but the gig at the Santa
Monica Civic Center in California turns out to be the last live appearance
together for 19 years for Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the songwriting pair at the heart of the rock group.
The decision, contingent as it was, had tremendous
consequences. Fagen and Becker, still with only three LPs under the belts, were
now liberated from a routine they never felt comfortable with. "We used to throw up a lot before the show," Fagen told comedian Robert Klein in an exceptionally rare radio appearance, six years after quitting. "It was messy. It was odiferous." Now they
could concentrate, with laser-like precision, on what really mattered to them:
how their songs emerged in the studio.
A series of classic albums resulted, blending rock,
jazz, blues, popular music and contemporary literature (the band’s name, after
all, derived from a sex toy in William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch): Katy
Lied, The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho. Not for them the
gritty sound that many songwriters strive for in the studio. Instead, the
numerous musicians that might be hired for a single LP would find their parts
very precisely spelled out.
The closest counterpart I can think of to Steely Dan’s
decision to cease functioning as a live band was the Beatles' similar one in 1966. A similar
mixture of motives was involved, from the personal (exhaustion) to the musical
(it was becoming increasingly hard to achieve in concert the same level of
aural sophistication summoned in the studio).
Steely Dan were in a more vulnerable position than
the Beatles when they decided to take a breather. Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic (the one they were promoting in the summer of 1974)
had spawned hits but not anything close to Beatlemania. Fagen and Becker were pushing back against
the traditional record company model of hurried releases followed by frenetic
tour schedules. But then again, this pair cared little for making nice in the music industry. (One of their bosses before they went on their own, Jay Black, after employing them as backup musicians on his 1970-71 tour, referred to them as "Starkweather and Manson.")
Fagen had
only taken on lead vocals when it became apparent that David Palmer, originally
brought in for this role, did not project the level of twisted ironies called
for by the lyrics. Nor were he and his partner thrilled to open up for
heavy-metal artists, or for musicians who might share bills with them but not
their low-key approach to the perks of fame.
Fagen and Becker’s decision did not sit well with
guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (who departed for the Doobie Brothers) or drummer
Jim Hodder, who also moved on. On the other hand, the gallery of studio
musicians they called on over the next half-dozen years were among the best in the
business, including (though not limited to) Joe Sample, Wayne Shorter, Tom
Scott, the Brecker brothers, Larry Carlton, Chuck Rainey, Victor Feldmen, and Rick
Derringer. (They formed especially close collaboration with drummer Jeff Porcaro, later of Toto, and keyboardist Michael McDonald, eventually the lead singer of The Doobie Brothers.)
These master musicians would be put through their paces, with as many as 30 or 40 takes of a single song. The perfectionism of Becker and Fagen was relentless. It had to be, with all those complex chord changes, harmonies, and structures.
A musician might think he had produced a stunning take, only to be told
it was average. No deviation from their vision was allowed on vinyl,
let alone a mistake. The only compensation for all of this was summed up
by drummer Rick Marotta: "Every time I went in with them I knew it was going
to be something really historic."
The point of no return for touring probably came in
early 1978, when Fagen and Becker tentatively agreed to go on the road again to
promote Aja. But that plan was ditched after their projected bandmates began to
compare pay scales with each other and grumble loudly.
If that was a drag, so was the duo’s attempt to
match Aja’s craftsmanship with the
follow-up, Gaucho. By 1980, utterly
burned out, Fagen and Becker disbanded. It would be another dozen years before they
got back together again.
Fagen and Becker have played in public again, but it
is decidedly on their terms. Fagen is mindful of the effects of virtually
nonstop touring on the voice of hero Bob Dylan. He also remains one of the
classic grumpy old men of rock ‘n’ roll. In his 2013 book, Eminent Hipsters, he
groans about the audiences who came out to see him perform with Michael
McDonald and Boz Scaggs as part of the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue. In one
typical journal entry, Fagen observed: “Tonight the crowd looked so geriatric I
was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers. By the end of the set, they
were all on their feet, albeit shakily, rocking.... So this, now, is what I do:
assisted living.”
On the other hand…
"When
everything's working right, you become transfixed by the notes and chords and
the beautiful spaces in between. In the center of it, with the drums, bass and
guitar all around you, the earth falls away and it's just you and your crew
creating this forward motion, this undeniable, magical stuff that can move ten
thousand people to snap free of life's miseries."
“The protagonist in ‘Deacon Blues’ is a triple-L
loser—an L-L-L Loser. It’s not so much about a guy who achieves his dream but
about a broken dream of a broken man living a broken life.”—Steely Dan
co-founder Walter Becker quoted in Marc Myers, “Anatomy of a Song—‘Deacon Blues’—‘They Call Alabama the Crimson Tide,”
The Wall Street Journal, September
11, 2015
“When Donald [Fagen] and I started writing together
way back when we were in college and for several years after that, the songs
that we wrote were humorous but in fact they were too humorous....They were
just too jokey and sounded like novelty songs. But we realized that was a
liability and so we developed over time and we sort of tempered that idea, and
honed into the idea of things having humor in them but a certain kind of humor
and a certain amount of humor, along with other stuff. Because we were both
definitely interested in humor as a central element of what we were doing, but
we didn’t want to write Tom Lehrer songs.”—Songwriter-guitarist Walter Becker,
on his collaboration with Steely Dan partner Donald Fagen, interviewed by Paul
Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, Expanded Fourth Edition (2003)
