TITLE: The Band With 2 Brains
AUTHOR: Jeff Gordinier
SOURCE: Entertainment Weekly
DATE: 3 March 2000
The two guys from Steely Dan are staring at a vegetarian menu. They look like they've just been handed a medical textbook written in Urdu.
"I wonder what Zen ravioli is," Donald Fagen muses.
"It's ravioli with nothing inside," quips Walter Becker.
There is a pause.
"I'll have the Zen ravioli," says Fagen.
Modest as it may appear, this wry little exchange--the two brains behind Steely Dan sitting together, making deadpan observations, weaving them into a kind of cosmic smart-ass haiku--symbolizes a landmark moment in pop history: They're here to promote [i]Two Against Nature[/i]. A new album.
Shockingly, Steely Dan's last album of new music came out nearly 20 years ago. When Gaucho made its velvet-slipper pas de deux onto the pop charts in 1980, Christina Aguilera had about a month left in her mother's womb, Ronald Reagan had just trounced Jimmy Carter at the polls, and MTV didn't exist. For two decades Becker and Fagen have delivered sporadic hors d'oeuvres to the pop buffet--Fagen's The Nightfly in 1982 and Kamakiriad in 1993, Becker's 11 Tracks of Whack in 1994, a live album in 1995--but the famished Steely Dan fan has mostly been forced to subsist on Zen ravioli. Put it this way: That barely legal ditz that Fagen sang about in "Hey Nineteen"? She's nearing 40.
And as for those mysterious gaps, Fagen and Becker aren't exactly rushing to fill them in. "Do you have a copy of the new bio time line?" Fagen asks.
Uh-huh. The one that gives the following whereabouts for 1982: After a period of dissolution on the fringes of the Hamburger Werkstatter group, B & F abandon symbolist thought-poetry and begin experimenting with Siamese erotic pottery.
"That's it," says Becker. "That's our story and we're sticking to it."
For anybody familiar with Steely Dan's brand of subversive pop, it should come as no surprise that their first radio single in 19 years, Cousin Dupree pushes the kinky subtext of Hey Nineteen a few extra erogenous zones into left field. (Cousin Dupree is an infectious, airwave-friendly ditty about incest.) What is weird is that Two Against Nature sounds precisely like the logical follow-up to Gaucho--as if the duo's suave, spidery web of pop, fuzak, and funk got preserved in a block of Jurassic amber for 20 years. Nature hits stores on Feb. 29--the extra day added for leap year. Maybe they should've called it Two Against Time.
"We have a common vision of what we're trying to do," says Becker, explaining how Steely Dan still comes up with ... that sound. "It's just very easy for us to agree on a musical goal and articulate it."
"Because we've been together so long," says Fagen, "we have a code, a shorthand that makes it very easy."
Exactly what Steely Dan's trying to do has always been a subject of fascination and confusion. Now 50 and 52, respectively, Becker and Fagen met amid the shaggy-hippie bedlam of upstate New York's Bard College in the 1960s; they would later try to make money writing tunes for the Brill Building, Manhattan's top melody factory. Both experiences spawned the two-headed beast known as Steely Dan. Sure, Fagen and Becker orchestrated some of the most gossamer-gorgeous hits in radio history--Rikki Don't Lose That Number, Reelin' in the Years, Josie, Deacon Blues--but seething underneath that sumptuous, console-shiny surface was a tricky lyrical morass of sarcasm, oblique sex and drug references, and beatnik riddles. "That was always frustrating for everyone--how few clues they would drop," says fan Nash Kato, the ex-Urge Overkill frontman. "They were so cryptic, it was almost like a scavenger hunt." The very name Steely Dan comes from the novel Naked Lunch. It refers to a dildo.
Rock folklore has it that every kid who saw the Velvet Underground went on to form a band. Fagen and Becker might be the only guys who thereby formed a band that was nothing like the Velvet Underground. "The night I saw them, it was probably one of the worst rock & roll bands I'd ever seen in my life," Becker remembers.
"It was terrible," Fagen agrees. "But Lou Reed was good."
"They were cool, but sonically it was a real affront," Becker says. "It was a wall of very, very piercing noise."
While the Velvets gave birth to a loud family of bands--messy, untutored, prone to adrenal blasts of fury--Steely Dan would represent the antithesis of that. They shunned noise. Not long after a chaotic tour, they gave up the road altogether in 1974. The studio became a laboratory: As Fagen and Becker eventually whittled the "band" down to two guys--themselves--they initiated a series of mad-scientist experiments with a crack team of LA session mercenaries like guitarist Larry Carlton and sax man Tom Scott. They toyed with ... jazz. ("Americans, generally speaking, despise jazz," says Fagen.) For a track like Peg, from the gleaming 1977 masterwork Aja, they'd juggle three or four drummers in a fussy quest for the sublime. "There are tapes lying around with the same tunes performed by many different bands," Scott laughs. "I often wondered what it was they were looking for." "I don't remember any rituals, man," Carlton says. "Just play it and play it and play it and play it and play it." The boogie-nights excess of '70s Hollywood swirled around them, but Steely Dan's studio remained a cloister of stoicism and sweat. "We set the bar pretty high for ourselves," admits Gary Katz, who produced their entire '70s catalog. "We were meticulous about the work."
"See, when you do a tune with great musicians over and over again, it flattens out the performance," says Scott. "Everybody just kind of plays without a whole lot of emotion. Now, in many cases, that would be a detriment. In their case, it was a plus. Because of the nature of the songs--this placid instrumental background with these weird lyrics--it worked so well." But in certain camps Steely Dan became The Enemy; to punks hell-bent on ripping down the '70s dinosaur-rock orthodoxy, classic albums like Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, and The Royal Scam embodied a slick, California swingles-bar style that drained rock of its raw power. Ironically, though, the Dan really detested California. "All of us did," says Katz. "I can remember the day we picked up a review of the first album, and it described it as a 'West Coast' sound, and we laughed through lunch. We were the quintessential New Yorkers. There wasn't anything West Coast about anything we did."
Still, it was when Fagen and Becker moved back to New York for the Gaucho sessions that things fell apart. "Walter had an accident," says Katz. "He got hit by a car. And it left him out of the studio." Becker and Fagen may've had a telepathic link since their days at Bard, but suddenly it got disconnected--maybe for good. Becker moved to Hawaii. Thousands of bands would go on to rip off the Velvet Underground, but the Steely Dan legacy remained a tough safe to crack for 20 years. "Not many people were interested in doing what we were doing, frankly," Fagen says. "And still aren't."
Maybe. Steely Dan hasn't changed a whit--a glacial four years passed before Becker and Fagen were willing to crawl out of their audio cave and surrender Two Against Nature to Giant Records--but the opposition has come around. Love for Steely Dan crops up in the strangest places. "Once I was staying at the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles," Fagen marvels, "and the pool guy came over and said, 'Wow, I gotta congratulate you for anticipating the whole ultra-lounge thing.' " This summer Steely Dan's urbane madrigals will be all over Me, Myself, and Irene, a Jim Carrey chuckle-fest from Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the gross-out suzerains who gave us There's Something About Mary. Acts like Wilco, Brian Setzer, Smash Mouth, Nash Kato, and Ben Folds Five are revamping songs like Do It Again, Barrytown, and Doctor Wu for the soundtrack. "I don't see how you could be a musician and not appreciate what they did," Folds says. "This may be a really weird thing to say, but when Beck started to hit, I felt like Beck was Steely Dan." Think about it: the studio wizardry, the white funk, the abstract word games... "Aja always reminded me of that whole first-girlfriend scenario," Kato says. "We conducted all our sexual experiments to it. There's some element in the music that makes everyone want to play naked Indian."
If you have lingering doubts about the Dan's ability to do it again in a wired era, consider their website: Steelydan.com overflows with twisted charts, rants, and pensees. There's a bogus list of "original band names." (Marsupial Soup, Slime Unit, Thunderhurl.) There's a list of "words not to use in songs". (Pinochle, cervix, gonad.) "We used to write things like that before there were any websites," Fagen says. "Just kind of messin' around."
If fans get messed around along the way, well, all the better. Steely Dan thrives on misinterpretation. Take Aja's Deacon Blues, a song that hinges on the famously enigmatic lyric "Call me Deacon Blues". As a kid, says Kato, "I thought they were saying, 'Call me peekaboo'." This reporter used to assume it was "Call me deconfused".
"I actually like that!" Fagen says. "'Call me deconfused ...'"
"Maybe we should start doing it that way," Becker suggests.
"Yeah," says Fagen. "I've gotta write that one down."
