Jeff Gordinier interview

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."

Bill DeMain interview

TITLE: 5 Minutes with Steely Dan
INTERVIEWER: Bill DeMain
SOURCE: Performing Musician magazine
DATE: July/August 2003

To interview Donald Fagen and Walter Becker is to accept that at least a third of the answers you'll get will be delivered with a kind of shtick. Non sequiturs, arcane references,wry observations--since they met in the late 1960s at Bard College in New York City, the two friends have been volleying these back and forth with the timing and practiced nonchalance of Bob & Ray.

The affectionate give-and-take is also part of what has made them one of the most unique songwriting teams in pop history. Drawing from jazz, hipster movie soundtracks, Brill Building pop, rock & roll, and the blues (Fagen says that their approach is often about "subverting the blues"), they trade ideas, building up compositions that are both harmonically complex and catchy--a delicate balance mastered by very few. Any danger of preciousness in the music is tempered by a wicked sense of humor in their lyrics. Eschewing the typical you-and-I love scenarios, they create worlds in their songs, alive with colorful characters and telling details (consider the delicious opening lines of Hey Nineteen: "Way back when in 67, I was the dandy of Gamma Chi"). Drop the needle (or laser beam) down anywhere in their recorded works--Bad Sneakers, Any Major Dude Will Tell You, Kid Charlemagne, Peg, Babylon Sisters, Cousin Dupree--and you're instantly transported to a place that could only be Planet Steely Dan.

This holds true on their latest CD, Everything Must Go, the follow-up to 2000's Grammy-winning return Two Against Nature. From the anime-flavored Pixeleen to the humorous Godwhacker (a song about exactly what the title implies) to the film-noirish Green Book, this is Steely Dan still at the height of their creative powers, making grown-up pop music that is fresh and original.

I met Donald Fagen and Walter Becker at a swank hotel in Santa Monica. As the afternoon sunshine filtered through the curtains, the pair lounged on opposite ends of a couch, fielding my questions with equal parts thoughtfulness and irreverence.

BILL: Donald, you've said that you feel like most artists only have a few years when they're at their most inspired. Then it becomes a matter of maintaining some kind of standard. As songwriters, I think you guys are still doing work equal to your best stuff. How do you fight against that inevitable slide that seems to affect to many artists?

DONALD: You don't put out material just to put out material. If you have someyears where you don't have anything percolating, then it's best not to put anything out. You have to sort of stand by that. Even if you're broke.

WALTER: Although in my experience, the years that you're broke are the yers that you do put something out. The other thing is: we don't write songs for other people, for the most part. Donald has had a few tunes done here and there. But sort of our entire output pretty much goes into the Steely Dan records and the solo records that we've done. And we throw away a lot of stuff. We have a lot of songs that we've deleted. I thhink that other people who are producing more probably include more of those things that we have the luxury of not including because we make as few records as we do.

DONALD: I think when we weren't together or weren't writing, we took other kinds of jobs. I was working on various things. Writing for movie scores. And Walter was producing jazz records. You have to find something to do during the daylight hours. I think your unconscious is working anyway and you just have to wait. As Walter says: sometimes when you get really desperate, your mind will get working. Desperation is a great motivator.

BILL: Also, maybe just having a songwriting partner helps to challenge you to do your best work. Keeps you honest.

DONALD: I think you're right about that.

WALTER: It also keeps you productive, in a way. Whereas you could sit by yourself and be stumped or blocked or you could go off on a lengthy self-indulgent tangent of some sort in a way that is your personal thing--if you're doing it with a partner, you're less likely to get off on those tangents. And you're less likely to keep going back and sitting there day after day if you're not producing anything. If nothing's happening, you stop doing it. I think also, with a partner, it makes it more amusing. You're not just confronting problems. On the days that you have where you don't get a lot done, you do something else. You have a few laughs. You go for a walk. Or otherwise console yourselves one way or another.

DONALD: Or write little screeds for the website.

WALTER: That's right. Nurse our petty grudges against various members of the human race.

DONALD: Also, there's always someone there to say: "You know--that idea is psychotic. Let's go on to the next one, okay?"

WALTER: "That's not a chorus. That's a cry for help."

BILL: Have your roles in the co-writing relationship changed over the years?

DONALD: I think when we first started writing in college, maybe Walter was initiating more music. I think now it's sort of like, there's usually some kind of kernel that's developed before we start. The input on lyrics seems to be about the same as it always was.

BILL: I noticed that when you were on Piano Jazz recently, you covered Mood Indigo and Star Eyes. I assume that as listeners, you're drawn to those kind of classic sentimental love-songs. Have you ever tried to write that way?

DONALD: I don't know if I'm drawn to sentimental love-songs. I think the literature of jazz has always been the standards of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Most of which have romantic lyrics. I think we're drawn to those mostly because they are the bones of what you improvise on when you're studying jazz.

WALTER: By and large, the lyrics of those songs are the least interesting and ultimately the most limiting aspects of them as songs. I think for example, one of the things that's hard for me listening to most any jazz song is: "Now we've got to sing Body and Soul or I Can't Get Started." I don't want to make another journey thru that lyric. I've heard it so many times. And it's only so good to begin with, in many cases. And it was stylized to the traditions of the day.

There are some spectacular exceptions, of course. But I think some qualified people, as a group, should untertake the job of getting permission, then rewriting the lyrics of the standard songs. So that some new jazz singer can sing [i]Stella by Starlight[/i] with another set of lyrics. In my opinion, you're not tired of hearing the music. But you are sort of tired of the lyrics in many cases. So I propose that as an endeavor. It wouldn't take much. I think other composers would soon start to follow in our footsteps, don't you?

DONALD: I think it's part of the impulse of singers like Jon Hendricks. And people who improvise and scatted over the choruses to songs. And wrote lyrics to fit the scat ideas. That's part of what Charlie Parker did too. Writing melodies over chords. It's boring to play the same melodies. So one of the functions of jazz is a kind of rescue operation to keep these songs interesting and fresh.

WALTER: Operation Jazz Rescue.

BILL: Steely Dan songs are always harmonically rich. If a songwriter wanted to liven up their chord progressions, what would you suggest?

DONALD: Look to another genre and start your search there.

WALTER: Realizing that chords may have more than 2 or 3 notes in them would be one way. Another way would be to use chords with 2 or 3 notes--but don't use the right bass notes.

DONALD: Read Schoenberg's harmony book. It's very enlightening.

WALTER: Joni Mitchell developed quite an elaborate system of playing triads with different bass notes to achieve a certain effect.

DONALD: We used to be big fans of Laura Nyro. And she would substitute bass notes in a great way. She had a way of combining soul music with more interesting chords. You'd also hear it in Motown records. It's funny. Because with classical harmony, they'd already gone thru this. With Stravinsky and Bartok and Hindemith. But pop music started doing it a little bit later.

WALTER: One of the problems with more sophisticated harmony is that it has a lot of unwelcome baggage for pop music in many cases. So you want to avoid the associations that people have with major-7th chords and diminished chords with other kinds of music that tend to make the thing not sound like pop music or not sound tough or whatever. One of the things that we've worked a lot on is trying to get that richness without getting all of the negative sonic connotations that people seem to have in connection to that stuff. That's why I think Joni Mitchell or Laura Nyro, instead of playing a C-major-7th chord, they wold play a G triad over C. Eliminating the E. And you get some of the lyrical feeling of a major-7th chord. But not so much of the sentimental feeling.

DONALD: If you take the third out, it's not as saccharine. It's more austere-sounding. And yet has the major 7th. When you hear Laura Nyro's music, you wouldn't think lounge. Although of course now, lounge players do that too.

BILL: You once said that a successful song is one that would make you laugh when you listen back to it. Is that still true?

WALTER: I don't feel it's necessary that other people's songs make me laugh. Although I like it when they do. In the right way. But I definitely like it when our songs have a humorous component to them.

DONALD: Sometimes with music that is really great, I don't think there's anything particularly funny about it. But my response will be to laugh at it. Even something like Stravinsky. I don't know exactly why. Something about seeing the way a great artist controls all the elements in a certain way and causes something to happen. It somehow causes a laughter response.

WALTER: It's a complicated thing in general about why people laugh.

DONALD: I'll laugh at the sad parts of Fellini movies.

WALTER: Part of that has to do with the idea that you're not entirely engulfed in the reality of the work of art. You're also looking at it simultaneously from a slight remove. And you're thinking about the artist making that work of art. And when you see him pull off an incredible trick--even if the essence of the trick is to produce a powerful sad emotion or something like that--you're amused and delighted that he did it.

DONALD: You want to give the artist a right-on handshake.

BILL: If you were going to teach a class on songwriting, what would you tell your students?

WALTER: A writer writes.

DONALD: Never buy a hat thru the mail.

WALTER: I would advise them--borrowing from John Gardner--to avoid "the frigidity of Longinus". [Cassius Longinus, c.213-272, a Greek rhetorician and philosopher.]

DONALD: The frigidity of Longinus? You mean when your watch has stopped?

WALTER: John Gardner describes frigidity as failing to sympathize with your characters, in a way. Being false to your characters in a way that your reader understands.

DONALD: Don't ever get involved with technique to the point where it becomes too important. It's the least important thing to have. Some people think it's the most important. At least, conventional technique. Make up your own technique.

BILL: Is there a question you've always wanted to be asked in an interview that you've never been asked?

WALTER: "You want to try some of this Persian heroin?" I don't think anyone's ever asked us that.

Tom Moon interview

TITLE: The Return of Steely Dan
INTERVIEWER: Tom Moon
SOURCE: Musician magazine
DATE: September 1993

The new Rolling Stone arrives. Donald Fagen has heard that the review of his second solo album Kamakiriad is not totally favorable. He's just spent 2hours with once and future cohort Walter Becker deconstructing the myths that gather around Steely Dan like black clouds, so he's ready for a fight. He begins to read aloud.

"If the firmament of pop were a high-school yearbook, Donald Fagen would qualify for either class beatnik or class nerd."

"Already a big mixed metaphor right there," he bristles. "Now am I up in the firmament or in the yearbook?"

He keeps reading. "The futuristic song-cycle suggests the fantasy of an overgrown kid who dreams of touring the galaxy in the coolest automobile ever built." Did I ever go into space in the car? Do you remember that?

"The journey eventually takes him to the Florida Keys, where he fantasizes he's being murdered in On the Dunes." "Now, how does he get from 'it was like homicide' to being murdered?"

Ah, yes. It's been a while. Seems like decades since these acid-tongued bards of thinking-person's pop have had anything to gripe about. They're clearly aware of the adversarial volleys that are now part of the legend. And after all, they're here to kick-start Steely Dan, to return one of the most bizarro success stories of the 1970s to active status following a mysterious decade-plus absence.

Last summer, in one of rock's mmore curious turnabouts, the two artists who spent their stardom swearing they hated touring provided children of the 1970s with something we were brought up knowing we'd never see: thousands of people on their feet, singing along with that resolution about never going back to My Old School. Sure, it was part of the all-star New York Rock & Soul Revue, but so what? The band was roaring and the main men were serene, breathing fresh life into music they hadn't performed in nearly 20 years, if at all. And, wonder of wonders, they enjoyed it. Steely Dan stopped touring in 1974, victims of the bad-PA-opening-for-Slade grind. Evermore a studio band, they became known for wanting to control every guitar quip and cymbal crash. When keyboardist Fagen and guitarist/bassist Becker split after Gaucho in 1980, it was clear they'd worn the concept out.

Yet here they are. Back again, as Steely Dan. Fagen says he and Becker have talked about more collaboration, possibly a new Steely Dan studio album once Becker's solo debut gets finished. Drew Zingg, the guitarist and musical director for both the Rock & Soul Revue and this summer's Steely Dan tour, says Fagen & Becker have had to come to grips with the lingering affection fans have for Steely Dan: "I don't thik they quite understood the phenomenon. That people are fanatic about hearing this music," he said days after tickets for a Madison Square Garden show sold out in some 40 minutes. "He [Fagen] really took it cautiously. From the very first Rock & Soul gigs where he wouldn't sing at all. By the end of the tour last summer, I saw him really enjoying himself."

Zingg says the tour, which may be recorded for a live album, will be anything but nostalgic: "They want to openit up. Have as much of an improvisational approach as possible. The band is geared toward that. And the only way these two will play some of the older things is to substantially rework them. Rewrite the horn charts or something."

These days, rock artists enjoy anendless supply of second acts and Unplugged comebacks. Even the least cynical in Steely Dan's audience must wonder about this: Not them too. Why, after all this time spent with a secure legacy, risk adding another verse? Why return now, at a time when the sons of the Dan (most recently Bruce Hornsby) find themselves hitless? When selections from Kamakiriad (it hurts to report) regularly turn up on jazz-lite radio? When intelligent pop is an oxymoron?

TOM: What made you do it?

DONALD: Money. Of course. I think my manager was trying to prove that this could be done in a way that wasn't too onerous. Cause all we had was memories of the early 1970s, being for the most part an opening act. Kind of rough road-trips. I think one of the big things was that you could be comfortable enough so that you could actually play at night without having gone thru this ballistically bruising traveling.

WALTER: What we did last summer made clear to us that this whole procedure of traveling around with rock-&-roll bands and playing concerts for people has evolved considerably.

DONALD: In a really scientific manner.

WALTER: And the other thing I saw, which I guess Donald had already experienced in his previous ...

DONALD: ... life ...

WALTER: ... live performances. What were you in your previous life?

DONALD: Remember in the movie The Egyptian, the architect who built the pyramids?

WALTER: That was you?

DONALD: Yes.

WALTER: What was I saying? At those shows, I was reminded of the fact that there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for hearing this music performed live. Throughout the Rock & Soul shows, practically everything that we did was really well-received. But there was a certain segment of the audience who were saving themselves for the Steely Dan songs. There was a real demand for it.

TOM: Why now?

DONALD: A lot of it has to do with having some new material. The Kamakiriad record. The fact that Walter's got some new material of his own. It it was just us going out doing Steely Dan material, I'd have to think a lot harder about doing that. eVen with rearranging them and so on, there's still the same element of nostalgia that I'm really not interested in.

TOM: How do you feel about playing arenas?

WALTER: We did at least one arena last year. The Spectrum in Philadelphia. While it was kind of weird-sounding onstage, it actually sounded good out in the hall.

DONALD: We played at Madison Square Garden when we were with Jay & The Americans. On this big oldies show. And that wasn't bad.

WALTER: Hugo lost his tambourines and shakers. You remember that. It was a tragedy. We played there twice. Once it was in the round. And that sounded pretty good. And those were pretty harmonically sophisticated, rhythmically precise arrangements we had with Jay & The Americans. Our Day Will Come sounded great.

TOM: What's your recollection of the 1974 Steely Dan tour?

WALTER: I don't think I was making any memory tracks by the end of that tour. Luckily there were a few recordings. The band was young. And there was a lot of medication of various types going on. As was generally found in the day. Of course, the audience was much more medicated than the band could ever afford to be. There were all sorts of interesting musical and personal clashes going on onstage. There was a core band there--5 guys, right--that was about to disintegrate. It was loud and guitar-heavy.

DONALD: We were getting pretty good by the end of the run. When Mike McDonald joined the band. Jeff Porcaro. We had 2 drummers. It started to have a rich sound to it, in a way. And we had a lot of energy. So we'd play everything really fast.

WALTER: It was frightening up there on those stages.

DONALD: We just wanted to get it over with.

WALTER: What we were lacking in precision we were hoping to make up in enthusiasm.

TOM: What were the clashes?

WALTER: The overall problem was Donald and I not wanting to tour in a bigger league at all. And the other guys in the band, particularly as they were being sort of phased out of the record-making, all they wanted to do was tour. It seemed to us like: "Why should we be doing this when it doesn't really help us make records? In fact, it seems to detract from it by using up a lot of time and energy." And it seemed to them like: "Here we are. We're finally in a position to do what we've always wanted to do. We can make some money. Make some new friends in every town. And why aren't these guys letting us do it?" It was ultimately an irreconcilable difference.

DONALD: Also, the band was put together very quickly. It was while we were making the first album. We'd never played together before. And the record came out and we were expected to tour. So we went out. Also, it was a matter of musical and personal style clashes. We had a pretty good idea of the sort of thing we wanted. And some of these guys, although they were good rock-&-roll players, couldn't handle this different universe. It wasn't as if there was much of a power struggle. They liked all of our tunes. And they were willing to take direction and all that. But even so, they just didn't really understand what we were trying to get them to do. I don't know what was more shocking: finding out who we were or finding out who they were.

WALTER: It was a shock all around, let's face it.

TOM: How did you arrive at the new band?

DONALD: It was the people who didn't have anything booked for the summer. We started a little late.

WALTER: There were no auditions as such. These are all people that we either played with in the studio or heard on numerous records and live performances. So we're knowledgeable about what they're doing. The actual combination of people is just our conception of something that would work well together. The same way it was when we were booking record dates.

DONALD: In other words, it looks good on paper.

TOM: Peter Erskine was an inspired choice for a drummer. He's often underrated.

WALTER: He's not underrated at my house. He always sounds good, any kind of music that he's playing.

TOM: Is there a set list?

DONALD: There's a set list. Half Steely Dan songs. Half my stuff. And a few of Walter's things from his yet-unreleased album.

WALTER: And then we were thinking of doing some songs that people might remember being us but weren't really.

DONALD: Like Ride, Captain, Ride On Your Mystery Ship. Or the one about the horse with no name.

WALTER: Some of the quirkier 1970s things.

DONALD: We're probably gonna do Babylon Sisters. I like the more pop-type songs like Josie. And some of the blues things like Chain Lightning stand up well. I'm a sucker for the blues. Anything based around that progression is fine with me.

TOM: But you've already played them last year. You know they work. How about something like Any Major Dude?

WALTER: That was on our list. I don't know if it'll make the final cut.

DONALD: We're messing around with rearranging things. But when we started doing it, we found it kind of tricky. Say something like Babylon Sisters. We couldn't figure out much to do with it. It was already so complex that we'd probably do pretty much the structure as it is on the record. Most of the lead sheets from the record are missing. So I've had to pick out a lot of things off the record. There are some things that are very tricky. Passing chords and stuff which I don't remember writing. When I finally figure out what it is, I'll remember its structural function. Then we have some of the earlier simpler stuff that's easier to fool around with.

WALTER: You know why? Because the arrangement things we're thinking of doing to the early ones, we already did to the later ones before we recorded them. We're thinking of doing the whole show as a medley. One long Steely Dan medley.

DONALD: Using those little musical bridges in between. Broadway-type things. Modulations.

WALTER: "Way down upon the Swanee River ..."

TOM: Would that require you to play all the hits?

WALTER: A fast few bars of each would probably do it.

TOM: With this body of work, do you feel obligated to play hits?

DONALD: "Body of work" has a nice kind of cadaverous ring to it.

WALTER: We examined the body of work for signs of abrasions or lesions.

DONALD: And found that the time of death was sometime in late 1974.

WALTER: Unfortunately, the body was too dumb to lie down and continued to roam the earth for some years longer.

TOM: Back to the hits.

WALTER: I think we're probably gonna do most of them. Whether out of a sense of obligation or just love for them.

TOM: Musicians who have played on Steely Dan records seem to cherish the work they did for you. They say you were able to get from them something they don't always capture on tape. Why is that?

WALTER: A tremendous portion of the careers of studio musicians--they're submerging themselves to some dreary strictures based on the length of the commercial or the ideas of who's in the room. And yet the kind of guys we're talking about are prepared to go way beyond that. So when the right context comes along, they get a chance to do what they rarely get to do.

DONALD: Soloists are challenged by the complexity of the chords. When we write, the arrangements are set up to make the soloist stand out. There'll be a modulation or something to help him sound good. We build things into the arrangements. The way a good big-band arrangement does. Some of these guys may be great musicians, but they may not be the best writers.

WALTER: Even when a guy's doing his own album, I've noticed as often as not: the things that have the best blowing will be the standards. Tunes they can get right.

DONALD: We tell the guys: "Go out there. Have a good time. Take a few cracks." Everybody mentions Wayne Shorter playing Aja as one of those things that took so long. It really didn't take that long. He rehearsed it a few times. Then he decided he wanted to write out scales. As good as any musician is, when you hit him with some music he's never heard before that's got some complexity to it, sometimes it's better to take a look at it. So he wrote them out. And this allowed him to forget about the mechanics of it. After that, a couple more takes and that was it.

WALTER: Usually, the guy gets it or he doesn't. Maybe the guy basically gets it but there's a little area that's rough. A little passage he's going to have to work on. What's actually on the record are the things when a guy got it. We might have some general kind of rousing advice about the mood of the thing.

DONALD: I remember when Cornelius [Bumpus] came in for On the Dunes. I did suggest that if he had a chance, and it came into his mind, to play By the Sea. Which he didn't for a couple of takes. And then he did, sort of, for the last. It clicked in. In a weird way.

TOM: How has your relationship changed since the 1980s?

DONALD: We're going for the license. Going down to city hall.

WALTER: After Gaucho, I moved to Hawaii and I didn't see Donald for 4 or 5 years. And when we got back together to do some writing, we pretty much found it was an enjoyable process. But it was a commuting situation. It's hard to casually traverse 5,000 miles. But when we are together and we're working together, I feel like it's a similar dynamic to what we were doing back in the old days. We haven't collaborated on writing too much in the last 3 years.

DONALD: We still never touch each other's bodies.

WALTER: Except perhaps a handshake configuration.

TOM: Are there any lingering misconceptions about Steely Dan?

WALTER: Misconceptions? I feel pretty well-understood.

DONALD: It depends on what audience you talk to. For instance, I've known musicians who take the vocabulary of the harmony very seriously. Where for us there was always something funny about that whole thing. Applying jazz harmony to backbeats and everything.

I don't know if a lot of fusion bands see the humor in it. Especially young musicians, learning for the first time, take it seriously. To us, there was some sense of parodying the fact that even before we were born, jazz had already been co-opted: detective shows, The Ed Sullivan Show. We both liked the authentic music. But we liked the fake jazz as well.

WALTER: If not better.

DONALD: We could tell the difference, at least. I think.

WALTER: Maybe we couldn't tell the difference. That was the problem. The other thing was that we were aware of the high degree of incompatibility between jazz and rock music. And that it didn't take very much jazz to offend a rock listener pretty badly in a way they would never ever forgive.

DONALD: What did Chuck Berry say? "I got no something against modern jazz. Unless they try to play it too darn fast."

TOM: Was the legend overblown of the weeks you spent in pursuit of single sounds?

WALTER: There were many stories that were greatly exaggerated or without any truth whatsoever. But that's not to say that we weren't obsessive or didn't take a long time trying to get things a certain way.

TOM: But are you happy with the records?

WALTER: You mean without actually playing them? I manage to live with them as long as no one plays them. Thru the years, we were more and more able to accomplish what we were trying to do without sounding too amateurish. On the other hand, in isolated examples, some of the stuff on the early albums is just as good as the stuff on the later albums. On the early albums, the things that were more ambitious didn't come off as one might have hoped, and still sound that way. Although it's kind of charming that we were trying to do some of the things we were trying to do. You get points for that. To tell you the truth, some things from the first album that were successful were as good as anything else we did. And what they lacked in polish, they made up for in other ways.

TOM: Those obscure lyrics have become touchstones for people, in ways you could never have intended.

WALTER: We were probably just taking the cheap way out with these evocative little names for places or people that we used.

DONALD: Some of them were real people.

WALTER: It was subjective and stylized in a way that lends itself to the type of thing you're talking about. Or to William Gibson naming bars in his books after Steely Dan songs. We were throwing out a lot of little names and places that made it possible to enter the songs. I think it's great up to and including Steely Dave's. It kind of adds to the myth.

TOM: Steely Dave's

WALTER: One of Donald's uncles was going to open a bar.

DONALD: Actually, it was my Uncle Dave. He had this bar in Dayton. The bar was going belly-up. And he called me and asked if he could change the name to Steely D's. Dave, you're down there in Florida now. In the long run, it was better you got out of the bar business. You even sold the beer and wine drive-thru warehouse.

TOM: Hey Nineteen is more prescient than it was when it came out. You guys are part of something that happened a generation back.

DONALD: The sequel's gonna be Hey 34. It's just like the old days. They think we invented jazz chords.

WALTER: That of course adds a lot to the myth--those jazz chords. Remember that, upstairs at Minton's Playhouse?

DONALD: Yeah. We were great.

WALTER: We'd come up there after our regular gig.

DONALD: And explore some of the upper intervals of the chords.

WALTER: Charlie Parker, man? He played with us. He was just a sideman, brother.

TOM: Walter, you're working on your first solo album. Donald has established a certain territory connected to but apart from Steely Dan, with his 2 solo projects. Do you have to avoid certain things?

WALTER: I don't feel any compunction about that. But as a pratical matter, because I was working alone and I don't have the harmonic ability, the compositional ability, and some of the other technical abilities Donald has, it's basically me and a sequencer for most of these songs. A couple of them are guitar-based. But most were written like that. I realized very early on that I should not necessarily try to maintain any particular high level of harmonic sophistication. Because it's just not possible for me to do that without a lot of work. So I started writing things that were simpler and more accessible to me with the skills that I did acquire over the years, which are spotty. For all the years I was writing with Donald, I didn't have to worry about learning the chord voicings or anything. Because Donald already knew all that. The things I have that may sound different or simpler harmonically than Steely Dan things are a product of the fact that it's just me writing. I didn't have Donald's ability in that area. But there are similarities. I notice anything I've had to do with will remind somebody of Steely Dan. Whether it's the lyrics to other people's songs that I didn't write or whatever.

TOM: Anything you've heard recently that you admire?

DONALD: I don't follow it. So it's usually music I'll hear in a cab.

WALTER: I like the Farsi cab guys. Where the dispatcher has echo on his voice.

DONALD: Dentist music. Commercials on tv. I don't watch television hardly at all. But every once in a while I'll hear something interesting.

WALTER: That's where the best musical talent is going. The trained musicians are playing commercials, imitating cab music.

TOM: What about jazz?

DONALD: There's something reationary about it that's just not very satisfying. There's some great players. But it's kinda lost its way. No one wants to hear a retread. It's more interesting if you're a rap group that uses pieces of this and that and puts them together in this kind of collage. Just to recreate one style is an academic exercise.

TOM: The flip side of that is Kenny G.

WALTER: That's another aspect of the problem. The question of style is crucial. Obviously at this moment in history, you can do anything and perhaps be taken seriously for doing it. So anything's possible. And people are looking for slants that are gonna somehow draw attention to them so that their substance, if there is any, will get thru to people. It's hard to get the attention of the musical audience right now. There's been a lot of fragmentation. There's a lot of retro stuff, a lot of very primitive things, very stripped-down in a kind of punk way: "We don't care what this sounds like. It's the attitude more than anything else that we want to present." One night Donald and I went to a club. It was jazz musicians, basically great musicians we were hearing, and they were playing The Anger Of The 60s.

DONALD: We called the mode police on the way out.

WALTER: They were playing this angry type of music that evolved in the 60s. And at the time, I saw it as an aspect of the black experience and the demand for social equality. But here are these guys playing it completely out of context. And in retrospect, it was the least attractive element of that music that's what those guys chose to celebrate.

DONALD: Both the musicians and the audience are on their own sentimental journey. The music takes second place to associations with the music. They're trying to bring back what they think happened. It's not only bringing back the past, but some idealization of it. So it's an illusory experience. Or certainly an inauthentic one.

TOM: You've managed to sidestep this for 2 decades simply by taking yourselves out of circulation. Does this reunion beg the charge of nostalgia?

DONALD: People will probably think that's what it is. What can we do?

WALTER: We could do Sentimental Journey.

DONALD: When people hear some of the old stuff, they'll be in their own world. Thinking about sitting in their Volkswagen with their first love. Or second. Or third. Or maybe several at once. And they'll associate with the music. Rather than actually hear the music. I try not to associate anything. I've trained myself so that I only hear exactly what's happening. I don't bring anything to it. It's called "laser thinking".

TOM: Naturally you'll give workshops on this after the tour ends.

DONALD: That's what the whole tour will be. About a 40-minute lecture and a 10-minute musical demonstration.

TOM: On Kamakiriad, the grooves have much more pure R&B in them.

DONALD: I was researching records at the time of The New York Rock & Soul Revue. I was looking for a more aggressive feel. I had a lot of control because I was building the tracks with a sequencer. Like a mechanical model. I could create these beats that a drummer would not normally play. I was very careful about the groove. I'd run everything thru delays and kinda play around with it until Igot everything really relaxed. Then I'd show that to the drummer. And then he'd ...

WALTER: ... fall to the ground weeping uncontrollably.

DONALD: The drummers were generous about suspending their own feel, their own personal grooves. They got very good at avoiding the expected kinds of grooves and creating what I was looking for.

TOM: Were you thinking about that Stax rhythm section?

DONALD: When I'm playing around with it, I think ofit almost like swing music. Where it's a very laid-back backbeat. More space than Stax had. For instance, for most of the Stax stuff, Al Jackson Jr actually pulls up on his snare drum, and he has a racy feel.

TOM: It's ahead of the 8th note.

DONALD: Yeah. I guess I like a more relaxed thing. To me, it comes from a swing vein. Where it feels like every bar it's about to fall over. That's what I held out for.

TOM: Rhythmwise, was any one track harder than another?

WALTER: Trans-Island Skyway] was a bitch.

DONALD: That was hard. Drummers tend to want to race along. We had to just keep telling em to relax. You know what else was hard to get? Tomorrow's Girls. We had several versions of that I was playing around with.

TOM: What about the vocal harmonies? Do you work them out on a keyboard?

DONALD: Tomorrow's Girls has a basic melody that was very difficult to harmonize. Some of the inner parts are awkward. At times it sounds like parts are crossing. But they're not. It went up a key for the chorus. I knew that I had to amend the melody to be able to sing the chorus. Because my range could not handle it. So we had to kind of spritz that one together a little.

WALTER: It was really loose at times, too. Reminded me of The Band. The way those guys would just slide into those harmonies. The character you're talking about comes from the unusual underlying harmonies.

DONALD: It sounds simpler than it is. The second chord of the chorus is a IV triad. In C. Like an F. But with a major third in the bass. So it's like F over E. But it's a blues thing.

WALTER: When a guy plays blues licks in the middle of a pop-song improvisation, you sit and look at it and say: "This is ridiculous. It'll never work."

DONALD: But then it goes by. And it smooths out. You know how I was able to do it? Laser thinking.

TOM: Were you as concerned with precision as you were as Steely Dan? It sounds as though the tracks are a little less fussy.

WALTER: I think "as though" is a good operational term. The underpinnings of it were as precisely laid out as anything else. With the layers, you try to create the more casual kind of thing. You put it together more carefully to make it work.

TOM: With Aja, the innovation came through structure and harmony. Where's the locus of the next innovation?

WALTER: We can't tell you that. It's secret information. We know. We've thought about it. We've identified it. But it's secret.

DONALD: We've got it in a locker down in Port Authority. You got the key, right? I don't have the key.

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."