Do it Again

Steely Dan Still Wants a Name When You Lose

There is a particular kind of existential dread that goes with being in the 8th Grade.  Maybe this was not your 8th Grade.  Maybe you went to a progressive day school or maybe you were athletic and effortlessly cool and popular.  Or maybe you just plodded with the multitude and didn’t care, and if that’s true, you have found your way to a different sort of human. Welcome. 

“I did not think the girl could be so cruel/ And I’m never going back to my old school.”  Walter Becker and Donald Fagen wrote this about Bard College, where Fagen graduated, and Becker put in a solid two years. For me, this was the soundtrack of my emancipation from junior high.  My interests were esoteric by the standards of my school.  I, for example, read for pleasure.  I had not been assigned a single novel for adults, though I memorized Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which I got into, even though I had experienced neither snow nor responsibility.  I would be ready for “Directive” and “Acquainted With the Night” later.    I knew there was a world way, way beyond 8th grade.   

I grew up far away from a place called Annandale.  I didn’t know about William and Mary or Guadalajara.  I did know that California was eventually scheduled to tumble into the sea, but all I really needed to feel the absolute catharsis of Steely Dan’s “My Old School,” was that I was leaving a truly wretched place and off to a better life.  I didn’t exactly know it, but I knew that Becker and Fagen were saturated in Nabokov and Ellington and Parker and all the good stuff I had yet to learn. But I did know that their stacked and suspended voicings put my perfect pitch to work. Until then, I thought the fun of perfect pitch was the effortlessness.  First I learned the chords, then I learned where they came from.  This song came from an album called Countdown to Ecstasy, and that’s exactly what it felt like.  So long, Northwood Junior High! 

Suburbia was the dream of my grandparents and their parents before them.  Right off Ellis Island were sweatshops and large families in tiny tenements.  Detached houses, lawns, trees, this was the dream, and who could blame them? When you’re a character in The Jungle, there’s no time to enjoy the city.  Upton Sinclair’s Jurgis did not hang out with people like Upton Sinclair.  They had truly terrifying, pre-Minimum Wage jobs and survived by hoping that their kids could one day live in Scarsdale.  Then their kids could grow up there, hate it, and go to whatever part of New York City could accommodate people calling themselves bohemians.

Walter Becker, born in Queens, grew up in Scarsdale, and saw through the entire deal.  College was a place to refine the hatred of one’s origins.  Here, finally, we love what we love and reject everything else.  Then we will become popular with people who live in Scarsdale.  Every Steely Dan concert I have ever seen has included “Hey, 19,” a radio hit about not being able to pursue a girl too young to appreciate Aretha Franklin.  When Becker was alive, live performances of the song included a riffy, associative monologue about going to this amazing concert, then taking your date home, wanting to impress her, and then, eventually, finding the right beverage.  Cue the Danettes: “The Cuervo Gold, The Fine Columbian, Make tonight a wonderful thing.”  Becker knew his alcohol too well.  He knew there were better brands of tequila.  That was part of the joke.  But most people in the packed houses didn’t know that.  And when, in that song, Fagen, really spoke to Becker’s origins when he sang, “Moved down from Scarsdale, where the hell am I?”  That reference always gets a woo-hoo from someone from Scarsdale, and the person in Scarsdale is not clapping from the cheap seats but rattling jewelry.

Becker and Fagen were into Dylan lyrics, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Nabokov, Ellington, Mingus, and so many cool things that would never become as popular as Steely Dan, which took its name from a dildo in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.  Bard was not a school full of virtuosi, so Fagen led four different bands—Chevy Chase played drums in one of them—and he and Becker were unsatisfied with all of them.  Talk about setting a tone.

You can’t become as popular as Steely Dan without appealing to the demographic that they tried to escape from.  During Steely Dan’s peak years, from 72-80, they toured very reluctantly and very briefly.  Donald Fagen did not consider himself to be a singer and farmed out the duties to David Palmer, then Michael McDonald.  Katy Lied, The Royal Scam, Aja, and Gaucho were studio only affairs.  So they could have as much contempt for the masses as they wanted, cloistered in studios, ricocheting from New York to LA and gobbling up the kind of top tier wizardry one could only afford when one was selling to people who did not get the references or the jokes.  Steely Dan appeals to a middlebrow domain where part of the fun is either getting the joke and feeling superior to everyone else, or letting the mysteries stand.  When millions are buying you, most of them don’t care about Charlie Parker or Duke Ellington.  They don’t know that “Lost Wages” was Lenny Bruce’s name for Las Vegas, or that the opening to “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” is a note for note tribute to Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father.”  They sang about lowlifes—drug dealers, pimps, drunk drivers, Pepe with a scar from ear to ear, a loser who is couch surfing and lusting after his cousin, another loser working at The Strand, about to give up on his novel and feeling like a ghost after he sees an old flame from NYU and hearing about everyone else’s success.  A line from “Deacon Blues” that gets everyone singing: “They got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose.”  That’s the ethos of Steely Dan in a nutshell. Kafka wrote that when everyone sings a song together, they are being drawn on a fishhook 

Steely Dan starting touring again in 1993, and they continue to tour five years after Walter Becker’s death. They always find the talent to do these songs justice. Larry Carlton’s extravagant “Kid Charlemagne” guitar solo, Wayne Shorter’s glorious soprano creation on “Aja,” these are mostly played note for note, but the musicians get other chances to stretch. Fagen grew up around a mother who belted standards from the piano, and, 30 years ago, her son finally grew into the role. He wears shades, he busts out the Keytar. His head is back, his attitude is brimming. It turns out he’s a real singer after all, exactly as he is. 

Steely Dan are a lifeline when you are 14, you hate yourself, but you hate everyone around your way more.  You see that the bullies and cretins are the ones bound for success, and know that most of them will meet somewhere in the middle.  The ones who don’t get the jokes are the ones who are truly enjoying this life.  You go home and listen to Steely Dan. Persevere. There is a big world out there.  There are books, there are friends, there are women who will appreciate you.  And then, when you discover the world and the music Walter and Donald were influenced by, it’s something else, something for smaller rooms.  There are a few celebrities in it, this thing called jazz, but there are many masters who are not getting what they should. The great bass player Henry Grimes was presumed dead in a jazz encyclopedia before he was discovered destitute in a rooming house. He played on many records treasured by Walt and Don in their dorm rooms—with Monk, Rollins, Mulligan. Being Steely Dan is one thing, being someone who influenced them another.  

But you find that you have learned about every genre of music and that Steely Dan still, like the toy they are named for, give pleasure.  And not just nostalgic pleasure, but complex pleasure with chromatic harmony and ironic, dark and weird lyrics.  I actually saw Bob Dylan play with Wynton Marsalis for a fundraiser. He sang a song that included the title of the first Steely Dan album: Can’t Buy a Thrill. Sometimes you can. Dylan and Steely Dan know that they have been selling serious thrills for a very long time.

All of the stuff that mattered to you came together with this entire world Walter and Donald—refugees from the suburbs—came up with. “Any world I’m welcome to is better than the one I come from.” Oh, how I felt that.  I recently caught Steely Dan at Jones Beach.  The corporate people plunked down their whatever, swiveled in their chairs, and even made motions like they were conducting the band.  This music made them happy,  I have no idea how much they knew about this band they loved.  Fagen, who did not begin Steely Dan thinking of himself as a singer—he told me he wished he could have gotten Steve Winwood, who happened to be opening this show—but his failure to be Steve Winwood or Curtis Mayfield was what made him Donald Fagen, the guy all those people at Jones Beach wanted to see.  When Steely Dan started, he avoided the stage.  Now, it’s where he lives.  He’s hanging on to what he has at 74.  There will never be another band like Steely Dan ever again.  There will never be that enormous supply of studio virtuosi, label money, the sweet, sweet warmth of vinyl and radio play that led to going Platinum.  Music will continue to become perpetually available and an enterprise that continues to shrink.  Great music will continue to happen, but not like that, not with those extravagant conditions for great musicians who get to stretch a little.   That night at Jones Beach, I was surrounded by people older than me, and those songs that came from the bravado of one’s smart ass 20s became more poignant. “Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again.” This, from a song released the year after I was born, is not just an assurance about the game. This game is turning into whatever it is. There is a massacre ahead. You could get hammered on Cuervo Gold but you can’t escape it. We were all reeelin’ in the years that night. Nothing we could do about it. We will never get over Walter—we will never get over many things—but we must live. Is there gas in the car? Yes, there’s gas in the car.