Fagen and Becker: The Pirates of Rock & Roll
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen
Steely Dan has been one of my favorite bands for decades. For me, it was love at first listen in 1973.
And why not like them? The band consistently has had a knack for combining awesome lyrics with great melodies. Their signature chord progressions have become legendary.
To be sure, Steely Dan was a band ahead of its time. They started out as a rock and roll band but began to fuse elements of rhythm and blues, jazz, reggae and other styles into their songs.
The songwriters and mainstays of Steely Dan were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Becker died Sept. 3, 2017. To me they were the pirates of rock and roll. No, not the kind of pirates that the U.S. Navy shoots at in the Indian Ocean. They are much more likeable.
What Fagen and Becker did was jump on another musician’s “ship” (a band started by guitar player Denny Dias) and eventually had the other band members walk the proverbial plank until they were the only two left on board. How’s that for being progressive?
Fagen and Becker met in 1967 while attending Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Becker was originally from Westchester, while Fagen came from Fair Lawn, N.J., a mere 20-minute drive from New York City. After leaving Bard they wound up living in Brooklyn and playing in some short-lived bands.
In the late 1960s they answered an advertisement in the Village Voice. The ad was placed by Dias, who was searching for a keyboard player and a bass player for a jazz combo. It stipulated the players “must have jazz chops and no hang-ups.”
“We answered the ad and went out to Hicksville, Long Island,” Fagen said in a broadcast program on VH-1. “It was a kid with a basement band.
“Truth be told, we kind of took over his band. That was the core of the Steely Dan group.”
Becker added sarcastically, “And we wrecked it.”
Dias explained, “They joined my band at first. We started playing their songs right away, and I immediately saw they were great songs.”
Becker and Fagen got a job in Los Angeles in 1971 as staff writers for the ABC Dunhill label. The quirky songs they cranked out were not suitable for the artists for whom they were intended, so the duo sent for Dias and started filling out a lineup for their own band. Having studied literature in college, they took the name Steely Dan from the name of a sexual appliance in a 1959 William Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch.
After two albums and accompanying concert tours, Steely Dan had a solid fan following. But, as the controlling force in the band, keyboardist Fagen and guitarist/bassist Becker put a stop to the touring because it was not to their liking and it cut into time that could be spent in the recording studio. The other members started to leave the band because they wanted to do more touring or were disgruntled with their diminishing roles in the studio.
“We toured for a while to support the first couple of albums,” Becker said. “But we really didn’t like it, so we stopped in 1974 and didn’t tour again for 19 years.”
Having made Steely Dan their personal project, the two hipsters settled on a formula that would serve them well for their next five albums.
“We replaced the other members of the band with session musicians and some of our favorite soloists,” Becker said.
Added Fagen, “We never came up with a band of our own that we felt was the right combination of guys that was stable. It was just me and Walter. We’d hear somebody on a record and say, ‘Well, this guy’s a great soloist. What would he be good on? What would suit his style?’ We’d hire a couple of guys to come into the studio but didn’t quite find what we were looking for until we went though three, four, five, six, seven or eight players.”
If that sounds like perfectionism, maybe it is. Or maybe not.
“One interesting thing about Donald and Walter is that perfectionism is not what they’re after,” said session guitarist Dean Parks. “They’re after something that you want to listen to over and over again. So, we would work past the perfection point until it sounded natural – sounded almost improvised in a way.
“So, it was like a two-step process. One was to get to perfection and the other was to get beyond it and loosen it up a little bit so it didn’t have to be the perfect, squeaky clean goal. It was quite an amalgamation, to be sure. And it is interesting to note it could be a hit.”
Some of my favorite Fagen/Becker hit lyrics include:
“You’ve been telling me you’re a genius since you were 17, but all the time I’ve known you I still don’t know what you mean.” (Reeling In the Years)
“I crawl like a viper through these suburban streets; make love to these women, languid and bittersweet. (Deacon Blues)
And a poke at their alma mater: “California tumbles into the sea – that’ll be the day I go back to Annandale.” (My Old School)
The system of rotating musicians from album to album evolved into rotating them from song to song in the same session.
“It wasn’t like we played musical chairs with the players in the band,” remarked drummer Rick Marotta. “We played ‘musical bands.’ A whole band would go and a whole incredible other band would come in.”
While Steely Dan had sunk new roots in Los Angeles, they still used New York studios for some of their sessions.
“We ended up working with bands that had New York and L.A. musicians,” Becker said, “because there were elements we were finding in L.A. session players that were great. They had a kind of precision and savvyness about them in the recording process, and so on.
“Back in New York when we started, the drummer would show up with his trap case – right? – with the snare drum and some cymbals, some pedals and whatever with some sticks. In Los Angeles when we got there a truck would show up and two guys would come out and set up a huge drum set. And the (drummer) had two more sets like that so he could make the next date and was all set up when he got there.
“At the same time, a lot of New York musicians had a musical style – a sort of hard-hitting attitude. They took chances during their performances that didn’t happen on the West Coast.”
Some of the top session musicians that Fagen and Becker admired and used on their records included guitarist Larry Carlton, drummer Bernard Purdie, guitarist Elliott Randall, keyboardist Mike Omartian, percussionist Victor Feldman and saxophonist Phil Woods.
I guess you could call them some of the mercenary buccaneers on the good ship Steely Dan.
Fagen and Becker went on tour with another group of Steely Dan “guns for hire” in the summer of 2009. They overlapped the Left Bank Holiday tour of Europe with the Rent Party ’09 tour of the United States.
That unique tour focused mainly on multiple dates in major cities like Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in July and August. Each show featured songs from different Steely Dan albums. Also, for “Takin’ It To The Seats” shows, ticket holders had the opportunity to vote online for songs that they want the band to include.
That’s a progressive innovation from a progressive band of rock and roll pirates.
