This article originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of Uncut [Take 306]
It is 50 years since the world heard the first bittersweet flowerings of one of music’s most innovative, ambitious and unique pairings. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker first met in 1967 as like-minded students at Bard College, a private liberal arts college in upstate New York. Naming their high-concept band after a steam-powered dildo from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, in 1971 they relocated from NYC to LA to work as staff songwriters at ABC and never looked back.
Assisted by producer Gary Katz, jettisoning original band members and performing live in favour of assembling a studio-orientated squad of the greatest session men and women money could buy, between 1972 and 1980 Steely Dan embarked upon one of the hottest – and coolest – creative streaks in music. From the avant-boogie group aesthetic of Can’t Buy A Thrill, where David Palmer shared lead vocals, they evolved to the far-reaching vistas of Aja, rich with melody, crafted solos and layered musical movements.
By Gaucho (1980), painstaking attention to sonic detail and increasingly hedonistic lifestyles inched Steely Dan towards the pursuit of an almost neurotic sonic perfectionism. Yet an unmistakable creative sensibility was evident from the start: consummate musicianship, killer grooves, rhythmic joy, memorable tunes, wry humour and stellar guests, topped off with Fagen’s cryptic, hyper-literate, reliably unreliable narration, doused in sardonic romanticism.
“They’re the American Beatles because they coined a musical genre that hadn’t existed before,” says Aimee Mann, one of the eclectic cast of admirers Uncut has invited to celebrate the band’s body of work. “Yes, it’s sort of a mixture of rock and jazz, but the way in which those two elements were combined was completely unique to them. To have the musical facility to put beautiful melodies on top of unlikely chord changes, with such well-written lyrics about really broken, sad subjects, and to create a whole new sound with a really idiosyncratic vocal – that’s the whole package! They invented a new thing.”
CAN’T BUY A THRILL (ABC, 1972)
The work of a functioning touring band: post-boogie subversion and rhythmically audacious hits with three lead vocals by David Palmer
DAVID CROSBY: Steely Dan are my favourite band. They have been forever and still are. The first song I heard was “Reelin’ In The Years”. Nobody else was doing that. I could hear it right away. They wrote better, they sang better, they played better, they didn’t limit themselves. They did it first and they did it best.
JOE JACKSON: “Do It Again” is the first track on the first album, and right away it’s Steely Dan. It’s quite unusual, this Latin groove and electric sitar on the solo. You think the vocal is going to come back in – but no, there’s another solo on the organ! It’s unique. The fact that it was a hit still amazes me.
ANNIE CLARK, ST VINCENT: This is [an album] I’d listen to on car trips. It’s so melodic, memorable and well written, but there’s also solos on every song. There’s such intense, ear-opening harmony.
AIMEE MANN: “Brooklyn” is a huge favourite. I was supposed to support Steely Dan this year but there was some confusion, layers of management stuff, and it never happened. On Twitter I wrote that all is forgiven if Donald Fagen will tell me what “Brooklyn” is about. I got this email from him! He wrote a long story about when they were living in Brooklyn and first writing songs, and dreaming about getting a really great band, and what will that sound like? “Brooklyn” was about his downstairs neighbour; this loudmouthed, entitled guy. From a cynical viewpoint, they listed all these prizes they felt like this guy thought he was entitled to; what would it take to make this asshole happy? But on some level you can tell they’re also talking about themselves: “What are the riches and prizes that I maybe don’t feel entitled to, but would like to feel entitled to?” There’s this one chord change that goes to the minor that’s really heartbreaking. It sounds like a break in the mask. That’s what makes them so interesting: the damage that you can hear underneath the cynicism.
COUNTDOWN TO ECSTASY (ABC, 1973)
Palmer leaves, Fagen graduates to frontman, and the quintet is infiltrated by session musicians. The result? Slick sounds, compelling songs, commercial stasis
LLOYD COLE: Not only am I a new Dan fan, but I’m an ex-hater. In The Commotions I enforced the rule of no fucking Steely Dan chords on our records, which means three fingers at most: no five-finger chords. But I was in the local bar a year ago and “My Old School” and “Bad Sneakers” came on. I thought, “OK, it’s time for me to really listen to Steely Dan.” I did a Twitter project where I rated every song and upset a lot of people! I really love the second album. Boogie-rock-and-roll-pop is hard to make not shit. But “My Old School” is fantastic. It’s just so beautifully put together. It’s not clever-clever, it’s just perfect music. “Showbiz Kids” is the complete other end of the spectrum, a snotty fuck-you to everybody, including the record company. It’s krautrock with slide guitar. The whole idea of krautrock is that it’s not supposed to be anything to do with the blues, but Steely Dan are like, “You know what? We can do both!”
JOHN DARNIELLE, MOUNTAIN GOATS: I’m a very lyrics-focused guy. That was my way into understanding Steely Dan. I didn’t want to be seen as the guy who liked mellow grooves; this band is a great test case for interrogating your own biases! On “Your Gold Teeth”, the contrast between the music – a bossa nova beat, a Brazilian vibe with shakers – and this amazing, long, really bitter lyric carves out a pretty special spot. It’s a very dark song with quite a light lilt. ‘Got a feeling I’ve been here before, watching as you cross the killing floor/You know you’ll have to pay it all…’ It’s Nathaniel West. Barely concealing the harrowing and desolation that’s underneath. ‘Torture is the main attraction’. That’s very intense stuff! But it’s undefined. The narrative is not fully recoverable to the listener. You get scenes and characters and details. It’s very painterly, but it’s not painterly in the delivery. Donald Fagen sings it like, ‘Oh, you know what I’m talking about!’ His conversational style means he can sing something fairly cryptic and you feel like you get the gist. That’s a cool effect. It’s a very three-in-the-morning thing.
AIMEE MANN: His vocal approach is really unique. I like that it’s not perfect. I like that he doesn’t have “pipes”. There’s really a person telling a story, with this doofy New York accent. Nobody had that timbre and I really appreciated that. Like, “I don’t know who this guy is, but he’s himself”.
PRETZEL LOGIC (ABC, 1974)
Enter jazz! The final LP to feature the full quintet alongside numerous session musicians is eclectic, mellow, mischievous
JOE JACKSON: I find the earlier albums more interesting, because you never quite knew where they were going to go next. There are songs on Pretzel Logic that they never did anything similar to ever again. “Through With Buzz” has a string quartet on it. “With A Gun” is almost country. For a very popular band to do a complete cover of “East St Louis Toodle-Oo” by Duke Ellington is extraordinary, with wah-wah guitar instead of wah-wah trumpet. What a brilliant and completely unexpected idea. There’s so much variety.
BONNIE RAITT: The sensibility of that R&B/jazz juncture, with innovative horn arrangements and smooth background voices, were things I hadn’t really heard in pop music before. To have that lyrical brilliance coupled with the arrangements, virtuosity and range of musical styles, no-one came close to those levels of originality.
JOHN DARNIELLE: Pretzel Logic is their most directly jazz record. It’s when they’re starting to discover these stacked harmonies that come to their absolute peak on Aja. The movement of the piano on “Barrytown” is nice and Brubeckian, the harmonies on the bridge are gorgeous. It’s clear that the author is critiquing his narrator, who is saying, “Everyone from this place is terrible.” And the author is saying, “Aren’t people who think this way kind of ugly?” During their glory run there isn’t a wasted phrase. It’s super true on this whole record.
TOM ROBINSON: The Dan’s open-ended lyrics often act as the aural equivalent of a Rorschach test. By 1974 I’m in a band and keenly alert to the new possibilities of infiltrating non-heterosexual song meanings beneath the mainstream radar – thanks to the cult of Bowie. For me, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was quite obviously a gay love song from start to finish. As an inexperienced youngster, my own first encounter with another man had certainly scared the bejesus out of me. Did I turn and run? You bet. “You tell yourself you’re not my kind, but you don’t even know your mind, and you could have a change of heart” would have been kindly advice for any confused young man trying to run away from his own inner conflict. The song meant so much to me, I covered it 10 years later. One critic carped about the “sly lyrical inversions” I’d added to make it fit my own queer agenda. But I hadn’t changed a word.
KATY LIED (ABC, 1975)
Having quit touring in July 1974, the studio-band Dan era begins. A stellar cast includes Michael McDonald and Larry Carlton, though Becker and Fagen all but disown the results
AIMEE MANN: Given that I think that almost everything Steely Dan does is great, Katy Lied has fewer songs that are my favourites. I’m not used to a Steely Dan record having songs that I don’t really like, so to have a couple that I don’t care for that much, like “Rose Darling” and “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies”, is surprising. But they’re really consistent songwriters. “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” and “Doctor Wu” are brilliant.
DAVID CROSBY: It’s the writing, that’s where it transcends everyone else. Their level of sophistication in recording, in arrangements, in singing, in harmony, in counterpoint, it was elevated across the board. They did everything better than anyone else, but it’s really about the writing.
MIKE WATT, THE MINUTEMEN: Something about the Dan just takes me back to music. It’s almost as though they are talking to me. In the Minutemen days, we played them on the bus all the time. We weren’t really into Gaucho and Aja, but the ones before that are really fucking happening. We covered “Doctor Wu” on Double Nickels On The Dime. To me, covers work when there’s some kind of irony. With The Minutemen, a lot of times we were trying to get dialogue with each other in our tunes, and we thought that’s what they might have been doing with “Doctor Wu”. We thought Donald was trying to talk to Walter, that was our take. “I went searching for the song you used to sing to me…” It’s kind of nostalgic and sentimental in a trippy way. In a way, we were trying to explain The Minutemen by picking that song. We wanted to people to think, ‘Why would those cats put that there?’
RICKY ROSS, DEACON BLUE: The first time I heard them was when Johnnie Walker played “Doctor Wu”. I got the album and loved it. People at school told me it wasn’t as good as some of the others, but you always have a soft spot for the first album you hear by a band you fall in love with – and I still love Katy Lied.
THE ROYAL SCAM (ABC, 1976)
A revolving cast of A-list guitarists contribute to a tight, transitional, tense and often terrific record
JOE JACKSON: It’s a huge generalisation, but I see a pattern with the first four albums. The first and the third ones are a bit more poppy, while the second and fourth are more esoteric and jazzy. Then when they got to The Royal Scam, it’s like they just put it all together. If I had to pick a favourite album – you’d have to torture me – that might be the one. It felt like they were at the top of their game. The title track is so original, and the lyrics are brilliant. It has a hypnotic quality which is quite extraordinary.
AIMEE MANN: Oh, those horns on “The Caves Of Altamira”! In 1976 we lived in a duplex and my downstairs neighbour was a drug dealer. My memory of The Royal Scam was being 16 years old, doing cocaine with my neighbour and listening to this record – which is unbelievably apropos, because I can feel the cocaine in this record. That coke paranoia, that frenzy, is all over “Kid Charlemagne”, especially, but also “Sign In Stranger”. It’s all these super-creepy drug-fuelled songs. Having listened to Steely Dan so much, yes, there’s often a really cynical attitude in the narrative, but there’s also this really heartbroken aspect. You can tell the narrator is a disillusioned romantic. There’s always that element.
TAYLOR GOLDSMITH, DAWES: God, Larry Carlton’s burning playing on “Kid Charlemagne”. When I first heard it, I didn’t know how a brain could work that way. It felt as far as a guitar solo had come, he made it sound perfect. Then there is their subject matter. With most bands, the songwriting tends to be very self-referential, maybe about some breakup or someone you’re falling in love with. With Steely Dan it’s like, “No, this is a song about Owsley Stanley, the guy responsible for inventing LSD in the ’60s!” It’s always been inspiring to me to see where they’ll go for a song. Nothing’s off-limits, and it makes it that much more evocative. It also gives Steely Dan this hard-boiled sensibility. Sometimes their songs read like a crime novel or a noir film. “Kid Charlemagne” is a really good example of that. It’s an interesting juxtaposition where it’s kind of clear what’s going on, but all the pieces don’t quite fit together. You’re getting hints of a story that you get to put together; then they’ll introduce a character in the third verse and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’ You get to play with it, which is really generous and rewarding to the listener.
AJA (ABC, 1977)
Deploying a cast of almost 40 musicians, Becker and Fagen craft their masterpiece, encompassing the funky disco grooves of “Peg” to the jaw-dropping title track
PADDY McALOON: Steely Dan were always, gloriously harmonically adventurous, but their first hits, while sophisticated, stayed pretty close to a model that wouldn’t frighten Top 40 radio. The jaw-dropping revelation of their reach and ambition was – for me – the title track of Aja. The moment when Steve Gadd cuts loose, and Wayne Shorter joins him with a four-note figure on tenor sax, served notice that Steely Dan might not be going back to their old school. Of course, that explosive musical moment is only a part of a song, a suite, that matches harmonic complexity with perfectly measured aphoristic lyric writing.
TALIB KWELI: Wayne Shorter’s solo is one of the most powerful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Aja is the undeniable one, the one where even people who aren’t fans of Steely Dan can’t argue!
DAVID CROSBY: The juxtapositions inside the music are so deeply complex, so sophisticated and beautiful. The soloing is less soloing and more almost orchestral presentation of melody. There’s a lovely feeling where you can’t really tell where the guitars stop and where the horns start; it’s just beautiful sound.
RICKY ROSS: “Deacon Blues” was the Aja track I particularly loved. When I was putting the band together the name stuck. We made up this press blurb about the ambition of the saxophone player who “dies behind the wheel”, but I think it was just fairly convenient! It’s a knockout song. Beautiful melody and brilliant words: “They’ve got a name for the winners of the world/I want a name when I lose”. That’s so great! Years later I went to Alabama and discovered that the name of the football team there is Crimson Tide. All these things fell into place. I was invited along to see Steely Dan after Becker died, and at one point Donald Fagen said, “Oh, I’ve been told we should do this song in Glasgow,” and they played “Deacon Blues”. There were a few people looking at me rather archly…
JOAN WASSER: “Peg” is the ultimate disco shit. I really love tight funk and Steely Dan take it to another level. It’s Michael McDonald on background vocals. I love him so much. He’s the whale of funk, his girth is so wide! “Peg” follows a pretty standard song form: sick intro with a hook, then the verse comes right in, then the chorus, and it’s all pretty catchy. It wouldn’t surprise me if they thought, ‘This is so beneath us, but we’re going to show you how to do it anyway. We’re going to show you we can throw down a sick disco song and make you dance.’
GAUCHO (MCA, 1980)
Over a year in the making, plagued by spiralling budgets, drug dread, serious accidents and lawsuits, the final Dan album for two decades is smoothly minimalist, cool and clinical
BRUCE HORNSBY: “Gaucho” is my favourite song of theirs, but when the album came out and I heard the first 30 seconds, I was going, “Oh, man, these guys are totally channelling Keith Jarrett’s ‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours’.” I’m a Jarrett fanatic. I put on the two records side by side and they didn’t even change the key! There was a lawsuit and Keith now gets a credit. On Gaucho, a lot of the harmonic content was more coming from the jazz world; the naysayer would call it “cocktail lounge” chords, but “Gaucho” isn’t really dealing with that kind of chordal content. Because of the lack of so many “jazz chords”, it has a more stately, more regal feeling, which I love.
JOAN WASSER: Because I’m such a studio nerd, I can really relate to the precision of doing the solo 57 times or whatever. I realise it can get out of control, but you have to be 100 per cent about the music you’re releasing, and sometimes that can take years. On Gaucho they worked on a track called “Second Arrangement” that got erased by mistake. They were like, “That was our best statement ever, man, and it got erased,” which is so perfectly them! I absolutely believe that they believed that! So they put “Third World Man” on there, and it’s a great song. It doesn’t have 400 chords; it only has 100. I’m so focused on the music, often I forget how great their words are, tearing down the extreme oneliness of LA life with the drugs and so-called glamour. It’s a snapshot of a time that doesn’t really exist any more. Almost every song I can hear people saying: “Problematic!” It’s hard to judge, because we weren’t writing lyrics at that time.
ST VINCENT: Aged nine, I knew their entire catalogue by heart. Irony’s about context, and I didn’t have a whole lot of context at that age. You know, “Babylon sisters, so fine, so young/Tell me I’m the only one”. I don’t think I really got the implications of the dirty old man, delusional washed-up loser point of view that Donald Fagen writes from a lot. But I do now.
TALIB KWELI: “Hey Nineteen” is really powerful to me. It’s a song about old men that I enjoyed as a young man, and now I’ve grown into a character in the song. Aretha Franklin has been my favourite singer for a long time; in the song the girl is so young she doesn’t know who the Queen Of Soul is.
BONNIE RAITT: “Hey Nineteen” is so true, sly and funny. As a young woman touring in the mid ’70s with an all-male band, I knew the age of the college freshmen who would hit on my bass player – and literally, they did not know who Aretha Franklin was. I just love that he sings, “’Retha Franklin!”
LLOYD COLE: I’m not in awe of many lyricists, but I’ve become totally in awe of Fagen. He’s in a league of his own. I feel like Billy Idol next to him! “Third World Man” is out of this world. How the hell did he think of that? Steely Dan are fabulously polarising, but their very best is close to the best pop music that could possibly be made. They’re right up there with Prince and Miles Davis.