Jim Bickhart interview

TITLE: Mixing The Modes For The Masses
AUTHOR: Jim Bickhart
SOURCE: Down Beat magazine
DATE: 11 September 1975

Steely Dan tops the list of paradoxes in the mainstream music business these days. Pop and rock aficionados find them everything from dazzling and skillfully complex to hopelesly trivial while peer musicians respect them for their technical capabilities and consistency. But Steely Dan looks at itself with a certain amount of cynical distance. Donald Fagen, the New-Jersey-born keyboard player who along with Walter Becker forms the writing and playing core of Steely Dan, epitomizes the paradox. A long-time jazz fanatic, he finds the classic, formal approaches to music challenging, sees rock as simpleminded and jazz stagnating. At the same time he accepts the enduring qualities of pop music which keep it in the forefront of the marketplace. And all this he does with a straight face, at least as straight as Donald Fagen's face ever gets.

Fagen's musical vehicle is the keyboard, which he handles with a fair amount of chordal and rhythmic acumen. "I used to listen to a lot of jazz radio in the east", he says. My hero was Red Garland from Miles's quintet. My first instinct was to try to play like him. But I could never quite get the sound. So I fell into playing rock & roll.

The roots of Steely Dan lie at a small upstate New York liberal-arts college called Bard, where Fagen first met Becker. "I was there to study literature while Walter was there for ignoble reasons at best. He eventually flunked out. We seemed to be the only 2 people there who had listened to the old jazz radio shows. We were also into what was considered progressive rock at the time: Frank Zappa and The Beatles, The Byrds, and so forth.

Bard, with its small enrollment and small-town location (Annandale-on-Hudson), couldn't support too many disparate groups of musicians. What few there were inevitably ended up in close proximity. So it was with Fagen and Becker.

"We had been playing guitar. He was once in a group with Randy California, who's since gone on to Spirit. We played together and began writing songs and got into the music business thru writing. We thought we would 'sell' our songs. Peddle them in the New York sleazo music business. We figured $50 a song was a good price. But it turned out to be a little more complicated than that."

Their original intentions called for commercial material, and they tried to pen slick charts. But the duo didn't get very far. "We hired out as musicians to pay the bills. We played in the backing group for Jay & The Americans on the revival circuit, tried to form our own groups, and did some sessions. Mostly demo sessions, to begin with.

We did an album date for Eric Mercury, a black singer. Gary Katz was the producer. He was an independent producer--which is polite in New York for 'bum'. He heard some of our songs and found them interesting."

In song publishing, "interesting" usually means "I don't understand this, but I don't hate it and I can't use it". Yet Katz, for one, did not discourage the pair.

"He got a job in LA at ABC Records and he talked the head of the company into bringing us out as staff songwriters. There was an underlying intention of forming a band. So he also brought out a couple of guys he'd found in Boston. Including Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias, with whom we played in a group in New York. We would rehearse after hours in an office at the record company.

"That was just as well. Trying to write for other singers wasn't working. We couldn't control the songs lyrically. The pop mold often demands a boy-girl love theme, which we weren't providing. People would hear the tunes, turn around and head out the door. One got covered by Barbra Streisand, with Richard Perry producing. He changed the bridge and messed around with the song a lot."

The distinctiveness of Steely Dan material is almost unanimously considered the band's srongest point. Even those who don't find much to relate to in the lyrics are intrigued by the nature of the songs. Fagen & Becker have evolved a cooperative writing style over the years they've been working together, one which involves collaboration on both lyrics and melody.

"One of us generally comes up with a germinal idea, usually from the same type of inspirations other writers draw upon. We usually work things out on piano. It's easier to develop harmonic interest that way, though you can sometimes find a nice tune without it.

"I think of each piece as a composition, so the arrangements are integral to the actual composition. It's a classical approach. Not so much formal as traditional. It's more traditional to western music than model, formless rock & roll."

Steely Dan's tunes tend to be very well thought out, very structured. There's not a lot of room for improvisation except in certain live situations, in which the band creates new sections of songs specifically to develop instrumental space. The recordings reveal songs whose form is true to established molds.

"I'm very fond of the pop structure and the blues structure," says Donald. "It's fun to adhere to certain rules about length and structure and still put them thru twists and grotesqueries. One of the most interesting things in pop music certainly is to set limitations and then take occasional liberties. Because of those liberties, people sometimes don't realize how much blues we do. Usually at least one per album."

While the groundwork for Steely Dan may have originally rested in Fagen & Becker's material, the band began as an actual playing entity. One which did live gigs in the Southern California area well before anyone had ever heard of their records. As such, they allowed themselves to be portrayed as a recognizable unit of personnel. In rock circles, especially those concerned with commercial matters, that means audiences eventually come to care as much about who's in the band as what the band plays.

"It's obvious to anyone really interested that Steely Dan is a conceptual group. Like jazz bands have always been. Not that I'm saying we're a jazz band by any stretch of the imagination. But whoever's in the band is in the band. We use different people for different purposes. And people we like to work with tend to reoccur in the rotation. It's a good way to avoid stagnation. That's a chronic problem with pop music: the stagnation caused by using the same people over and over. We choose the band to suit the piece."

Because they're not operating in a particularly dynamic musical scene, Steely Dan have to search for the musicians they want to augment their core group. They listen to records with that in mind, and keep an eye on musicians they meet at their own concerts.

"It takes a process of getting to know who's around and to know where to find them when you need them. Once you find people who will subordinate to your trip, you can get somewhere. The best musicians will be able to subordinate either to themselves or to someone else. It comes down to discipline."

Steely Dan's 4 albums feature a core of 3 performers: Fagen, Becker, and guitarist Denny Dias. Plus several "band members" who have come and gone. In addition, there are large handfuls of session musicians, like guitarists Elliott Randall, Rick Derringer, Ben Benay, Dean Parks and Larry Carlton, percussionist Victor Feldman and saxophonist Jerome Richardson. Fagen, Becker, and Katz weave the various combinations into a fairly homogeneous blend, with no particular song requiring anything so tangential as to erase the band's distinctive signature.

Amongst Steely's most noteworthy recorded moments are the album tracks in which riffs and solos leap out from the overall texture and take the spotlight. It doesn't happen often, given the nature of the premeditated arrangements. Reelin In The Years, a major hit single off the band's first LP, features both improvised and set guitar parts which singlehandedly have won them considerable attention amongst technicians in the audience.

"Elliott Randall, a guitar player we know from New York, played that. He was hot that day. He did it all in a few minutes. He's a masterful improviser. But he's had a lot of bad breaks in terms of group affiliations. So you don't hear of him all that much.

"We write some of the solos much as we do other parts. For instance, Dean Parks played a written solo on Rose Darling from Katy Lied (the band's fourth and latest LP). Of our regular people, both Walter and Denny Dias play guitar. Walter has an interesting blues style, not unlike Jeff Baxter's. He's very creative and rhythmically interesting. You'll find his solos on Black Friday and Bad Sneakers. Denny is versatile. He plays anything with a lot of changes, like Your Gold Teeth."

There seems to be a superficial drift away from commercial "hooks" on Steely Dan recordings. Perhaps as a result of the surfeit of time available prior to the first LP (released in 1972), the music had a rockish angularity to it, obviously the product of considerable thought and rehearsal. Reduced time to write, a shorter span between recording sessions, and weeks spent on the road all contribute to the reduction of advance work Fagen & Becker are able to do. The result is more fluidity.

"I find it hard to look for trends in what we're doing," says Fagen. "We write whatever we write and we arrange however we arrange. But I think it's fair to say we're getting more spontaneous. Going with the flow in the studio more than we used to. But it's never been a matter of contriving anything to be commercial. The most obvious examples, like Reelin In The Years, were not contrived. They were composed and then improvised upon."

Donald doesn't abound with predictions about his or anyone else's specific future. But he's got plenty of thoughts on the evolution of contemporary music.

"I don't have any goals. I just enjoy making records. It's fun. It's something to do. You make a little bread, you know? I just bought a new synthesizer to fool around with. An ARP Odyssey. It's not too overwhelming, but the one I had before was even more elementary. I tend to have a low electronic consciousness. Electronic--even electric--instruments tend to have comic purposes. They don't have that classic tone quality that musicians and technicians worked for hundreds of years to develop. 20 years of electric instruments and it's all gone. I think it's one aspect of The End Of Art.

"I'm a jazz fan. I listen to my local jazz station (KBCA). But I haven't heard anything really new at all since about 1965. I still like to listen to my old Blue Note and Prestige albums. The best new records are the Fantasy re-releases of old stuff. You might say both Walter and I have a somewhat narrow spectrum of taste when it comes to that sort of thing.

"I like Sonny Rollins. John Coltrane up to the point where he self-destructed jazz. He got a little too smart and ventured into realms where man should never tread. I also dig Mingus, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, sax players in general, and great rhythm sections. Also Miles's quintets.

"Chick Corea, Larry Coryell, and all these people--what they are trying has all been done one way or another. It's all pseudo-Stravinsky. The only difference is your deterioration of tone quality due to electronics, and the subsequent difference in the overall sound. There haven't been a lot of opportunities for youth other than into atonality. Music is an art which self-destructs: you follow the harmonic series into higher intervals and on into atonality, where it all falls apart. That's what happened after Coltrane.

"Rock & roll is in the same boat to a lesser degree. Everything has already been done. Partly because there wasn't all that much to do in the first place. I think we're rabid examples of the deterioration. But we're examples and commentators at the same time.

"It's interesting how rock & roll seems to be able to revive itself periodically. There's some strange regenerative quality in all that simplicity. You can get away with playing the same thing over and over again and audiences don't mind. In fact, they seem to prefer it."

Steely Dan, while identifiably purveyors of rock & roll of one sort or another, perform their version of the repetitive trick with chord progressions which take more than 20 seconds to learn. Consequently, the music sounds downright complex by simplistic pop standards, and the band has attracted a large number of fans who consider them sophisticated. It's an illusory sophistication, however, partly undone by the basically simple song-structures and the ultimate realization that the lyrics actually mean something.

"None of it matters," concludes Fagen. "We're mainly in this for ourselves anyway. To become excessively popular, you have to cater to the whims of mass tastes, which I don't feel we've done. Popularity is relevant to business but irrelevant to music. And we're only in business to the extent that we have to stay in business so we can afford to make music for fun. I'm pleasantly surprised at the level of acceptance we've attained. It's far beyond my mother's wildest dreams."