Christian Bragg’s featured artist on The A.M. all this week is Steely Dan.
Steely Dan has been more of a conceptual framework for inventive music-making than a typical rock band. Spearheaded by a pair of resourceful musical auteurs – Donald Fagen and Walter Becker – they have done nothing by the books since launching Steely Dan in 1972. The band’s very name is a reference from a novel by Beat Generation anti-hero William Burroughs.
Beneath the highly polished surface of Steely Dan’s music, astute listeners could hear a visceral love of and identification with the very soul of jazz. Fagen and Becker referenced Duke Ellington, Stan Getz and Horace Silver at least as much as any rock-oriented source material. Even so, there was a certain accessible quality to songs like “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Do It Again” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” that allowed Steely Dan to connect with rock fans, especially those who were college-aged and –educated.
Co-founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met in 1967 while attending Bard College in upstate New York. After serving as touring musicians with Jay and the Americans and trying their hand as staff songwriters, they formed Steely Dan in Los Angeles as an outlet for a growing backlog of offbeat, original material that no one else seemed inclined to record. In the beginning, Steely Dan was an actual band with a lineup of Fagen, Becker, guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and drummer Jim Hodder. This configuration cut the albums Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic. Though Dias remained on board through 1977’s Aja, Steely Dan were almost completely Fagen and Becker’s fiefdom by the time of Katy Lied, their fourth album.
