Quantum criminals : ramblers, wild gamblers, and other sole survivors from the songs of Steely Dan 2022034713, 9781477324998, 9781477327463

Table of contents :
Contents
Jack
Walter
Donald
King Richard/King John
Lady Bayside
Chino & Daddy Gee
Michael/Jesus
The Charmer
The Fella in the White Tuxedo
Dan
David
Mr. Whatever
Louise
Cathy
The El Supremo
The King of the World
Rikki
The Major Dude
Mr. Parker
Buzz
Napoleon
The Archbishop
Dr. Wu
Mr. LaPage
Owsley
A Bookkeeper’s Son
The Eagles
Babs & Clean Willie
The Old Man
Pepe
A Wooly Man without a Face
Peg
Sayoko
Peter/Tariq/Daniel
The Expanding Man
Broadway Duchess
Josie
The Babylon Sisters
Hoops McCann/The Dread Moray Eel
The Dandy of Gamma Chi/Aretha Franklin
The Gaucho
A Jolly Roger
Third World Man
Abbie/Dupree
Franny from NYU
Lizzie
Jill
Gina
Dave from Acquisitions
Daddy
Acknowledgments
Notes

Citation preview

uantum Criminals

A mer ican Music Series Jessica Hopper and Charles L. Hughes, Series Editors Bruce Adams, You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music Margo Price, Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir Francesca Royster, Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions Lynn Melnick, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton Lance Scott Walker, DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution Eddie Huffman, John Prine: In Spite of Himself David Cantwell, The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard Stephen Deusner, Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers Eric Harvey, Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality Kristin Hersh, Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood Hannah Ewens, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest Chris Stamey, A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories Holly Gleason, editor, Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives Adam Sobsey, Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography Lloyd Sachs, T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit Danny Alexander, Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige Alina Simone, Madonnaland and Other Detours into Fame and Fandom Kristin Hersh, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue John T. Davis, The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again David Menconi, Ryan Adams: Losering, a Story of Whiskeytown Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Peter Blackstock and David Menconi, Founding Editors

uantum Criminals RAMBLERS, WILD GAMBLERS, AND OTHER SOLE SURVIVORS FROM THE SONGS OF STEELY DAN

LINER NOTES BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS PAINTINGS BY JOAN LEMAY

U niv er sity of Texas Press    Austin

Text copyright © 2023 by Alex Pappademas Illustrations copyright © 2023 by Joan LeMay All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2023 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pappademas, Alex, author. | LeMay, Joan, illustrator. Title: Quantum criminals : ramblers, wild gamblers, and other sole survivors from the songs of Steely Dan / paintings by Joan LeMay ; liner notes by Alex Pappademas. Other titles: American music series (Austin, Tex.) Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Series: American music series Identifiers: LCCN 2022034713 ISBN 978-1-4773-2499-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2746-3 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH : Steely Dan (Musical group) | Characters and characteristics in music. | Becker, Walter, 1950-2017—Criticism and interpretation. | Fagen, Donald, 1948—Criticism and interpretation. | Rock music—United States—History and criticism. | Fictitious characters—Portraits. | LCGFT : Essays. | Music criticism and reviews. | Portraits. Classification: LCC ML 421.S 76 P36 2023 | DDC 782.42166092/2— dc23/eng/20220816 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034713 doi:10.7560/324998

FOR WALTER BECKER

The history of jazz has been the history of people picking themselves up off the floor. —Geoff Dyer

Where’s jazz going? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to hell. —Thelonious Monk

Steely Dan . . . In terms of pure musicianship, I’d put them up against any current band you could name. —Walt er Whi te, Breaking Bad

No hay banda! And yet we hear a band. —Th e Mag ician, Mulholland Drive

Contents Jack Walter Donald King Richard/King John Lady Bayside Chino & Daddy Gee Michael/Jesus The Charmer The Fella in the White Tuxedo Dan David Mr. Whatever Louise Cathy The El Supremo The King of the World Rikki The Major Dude Mr. Parker Buzz Napoleon The Archbishop Dr. Wu Mr. LaPage Owsley A Bookkeeper’s Son The Eagles Babs & Clean Willie The Old Man Pepe A Wooly Man without a Face Peg Sayoko Peter/Tariq/Daniel The Expanding Man

1 7 19 28 33 35 43 48 53 58 63 68 77 78 83 90 95 102 107 110 116 119 124 127 131 136 141 144 149 152 156 161 166 173 181

Broadway Duchess Josie The Babylon Sisters Hoops McCann/The Dread Moray Eel The Dandy of Gamma Chi/Aretha Franklin The Gaucho A Jolly Roger Third World Man Abbie/Dupree Franny from NYU Lizzie Jill Gina Dave from Acquisitions Daddy

187 190 193 197 205 210 214 217 219 227 230 235 238 242 247

Acknowledgments Notes

249 251





Donald Fagen and Walter Becker began writing songs together as students at Bard College in the late 1960s, and in the early ’70s in California they started a band they called Steely Dan. Like a lot of people, they felt their youth slipping away and the world tilting off its axis, but if it got to them, they tried not to let anybody see it. They released seven albums before parting ways in 1981.

They reunited in the late ’90s, and in the year 2000 they released their first new studio album in nearly two decades. A ninth and final album followed in 2003. Walter Becker died of cancer in New York City in 2017. As of 2022, Donald Fagen continues to tour under the Steely Dan name.

JAC K

Jack (Do It Again)

The first person you meet in a Steely Dan song is a guy named Jack. In the first verse of “Do It Again,” Jack kills a man in anger and then evades death by hanging because it’s the hangman’s day off. In the second verse Jack is undone by his devotion to a faithless woman, and then in the third verse he’s undone again at the poker table. Jack is both the first Steely Dan protagonist and the archetypal one. He’s a loser strapped to the karmic wheel, forever slipping out of one trap set by his own dumb desires and into another one, rescuing doom from the jaws of salvation. Over the ensuing decades, Steely Dan will rewrite this song again and again. They will sing about people who can’t help driving headlong toward one form of destruction or another, people telling themselves they’re doing something other than that even when they know the truth. It’s 1972. It’s the third week of November. Practically no one knows anything about Steely Dan—who the members are, where they’re from, what their haircuts look like. In 1972, people still experience pop music through the keyhole of pop radio. There is no MTV to illustrate it, no Wikipedia to make you an expert in seconds. There is so much you can’t know. Steely Dan’s first charting single—the first track on the first side of the first Steely Dan album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, released this same month by ABC Records—is a song called “Do It Again.” The title is maybe the first great inside joke by two of modern music’s greatest inside-jokers. Their names 1

are Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, they will be the only consistent members of Steely Dan from the early 1970s until Walter Becker’s death in 2017, and “Do It Again” is a funny title in part because this isn’t even their real first single. Their real first single, released earlier in 1972, has already come and gone, making so little impact that for decades afterward it will be hard to say whether the record was ever sold in stores or simply pressed up and mailed to disc jockeys who ignored it. The A-side is a song about Dallas, on which they let their drummer sing lead. Presumably it’s Dallas, Texas, but in the song, Steely Dan do not seem to have strong feelings or even impressions of the place. Dallas exists solely as a place for the singer to say goodbye to, because he must. He seems to feel okay about it. The B-side is “Sail the Waterway,” about a man who considers chucking it all to make a life on the sea. These were perfectly decent ’70s rock songs about men and the allure of rambling, a fruitful ’70s rock subject. In 1975 “Dallas” will resurface on the eighth album by the country-rock band Poco, and around the same time Denny Doherty of the Mamas & the Papas will record a version of “Sail the Waterway.” Eventually technology will advance to the point that anyone with an internet connection can listen to Steely Dan’s versions of “Dallas” and “Sail the Waterway” at any time. And by the time that happens, technology will also have made it possible for Donald and Walter—who will have written off the entirety of their first three ’70s albums as “juvenilia” and seem to almost mean it—to describe “Dallas” as “stinko” in an online chat hosted by CompuServe. “Dallas” and “Sail the Waterway” will never appear on a domestically released Steely Dan album or greatest-hits collection. So “Do it Again” is and is not Steely Dan’s first single, in that it’s the first one they’re willing to acknowledge. Donald and Walter will dwell comfortably in this kind of contradiction for the rest of their collective career. They will become a cult band whose catalog, paradoxically, includes at least a dozen enduring radio hits. Precociously jaded, they’ll express their dim view of the present day in songs recorded on the most modern, cutting-edge equipment available. They will embed blue-ribbon misanthropy in music designed to go down as smooth as creme de menthe. They’re grumpy and untelegenic and they fill their albums with songs about pedophilia and heroin, but their hits will be heard in contexts in which they’d never be caught dead. In 1978, six years after Can’t Buy a Thrill comes out and four years after Steely Dan quit touring, Donnie and Marie Osmond and a line of ice dancers will perform “Reelin’ in the Years” at the top of an episode of their ABC variety show, pausing between verses to introduce special guests Ruth Buzzi, Buddy Hackett, and Suzanne Somers. Qua n t um C r i minal s  |   2

Within a few months of its release “Do It Again” will crack the Top 10, but it enters the Billboard Hot 100 at number 98. It slips in through the side door of 1972, when most people are still busy processing new songs called “Starman,” “Rocket Man,” “Lean on Me,” “Heart of Gold,” “Take it Easy,” “Oh Girl,” “Back Stabbers,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Doctor My Eyes,” and “Let’s Stay Together.” Each of these songs feels in its own way like an announcement, a hard line drawn between the musical past and the present. If “Do It Again” takes a while to catch on, it’s partly because “Do It Again” is less of a statement and more of an insinuation. The first four notes pull you in off the street, opening a curtain on a room where the musicians are already playing. The first minute of this song feels like a story already in progress, even before the singer opens his mouth. But it also feels like the story’s been waiting for you, and now it can finally begin. The music tells you nothing about the people who made it. There’s a solo played on something that sounds like a rusty sitar, Latin percussion, a wavering science-fiction-movie organ line. The song seems to come from nowhere, evocative yet uncommitted to any of the styles it touches on—psychedelia, country, the mambo. This band could be a gang of drugged-out longhairs or a lounge act playing the indigenous music of casinos, for all you know. In the liner notes for Can’t Buy a Thrill, “Do It Again” is described with the single word C ORA L S I TA R “Traditional,” as if it’s a standard. It isn’t. But soon enough it will be. It comes from nowhere; anyone can pick it up and play it with the same degree of authority. So it becomes like a standard when it’s still new. “Do It Again” will go on to be far and away the most covered of Steely Dan’s hits, outpacing runners-up like “Dirty Work” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” by at least twenty documented versions. Anyone can make it theirs. It becomes the common thread linking the repertoires of Richie Havens and Lydia Lunch, Falco and Smash Mouth, Filipino garagerock bands and Latin-leaning jazz combos. A funk band plays it like Jack’s a blaxploitation antihero gunning for the Man. In the ’80s a Eurodisco studio group braids together “Do It Again” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” but in that equation “Do It Again” all but disappears, because if you put even a little “Billie Jean” in the pot, all you can taste is “Billie Jean.” In 1983, during a period of his life in which he’s spending $1,500 a day on cocaine, Waylon Jennings will cut “Do It Again” on an album produced by Jack |   3

his drummer. In the verses, his drummer leaves out a beat in each measure, giving the song an eerie, dragging feeling, like an undertow pulling at your ankle. Jennings sings “Do It Again” like he’s lived every detail in it, like he’s singing his own obituary into a mirror. Eighteen years after that, Tori Amos will put a cover of “Do It Again” on the B-side of a European single. She strips the song down to build it up from nothing—a drum loop, some kind of buzzer, a piano stalking the beat like a tiger on a darkened staircase, and Tori smearing the words around. The first verse bleeds into the second after the words “You go back,” as if to leave Jack out of this. When she says his name it’s like Tori is singing right to Jack, a Jack who likes to hear what a bad, bad man he’s been. But then she starts laughing, laughing at him. Her voice gets bigger, until you realize the room she’s singing in is just the inside of her head, that you’re trapped in there with her, and that everything around you has been a projection of Tori all along. She has been the gunman and the mourners and the two-timer. The water and the hangman and the wheel. As for Jack, all we know about him is that he goes back. That he keeps making mistakes like the ones he’s made before. His name might not even be Jack. It might be Jack as in “Buddy” or “Mac.” Jack like the Jack who has to be told to hit the road. Jack as in “Chief” or “Boss” or “Sport.” The three verses might be about three different guys. Or a stand-in for guys in general, as a category of person. Jack is not the singer of this song, but we don’t know how the singer knows Jack, whether CARD S they’re supposed to know each other at all. There is no “I” in “Do It Again.” There’s an “us” down the stretch, in the third verse, but it feels hammered onto the end of a line to make a rhyme for “Vegas,” the way the singer puts on a drawl when he sings the word “singing,” just to make it rhyme with “hanging.” As in so many Steely Dan songs, the singer stands outside the story, like when the camera pulls out during the cold open of a Twilight Zone episode to reveal Rod Serling with his cigarette, saying Presented for your approval. Or Witness if you will. Or You are about to meet a hypochondriac. Except it’s not quite the same. We’re not just the audience. What the singer is actually saying in “Do It Again” is that Jack is you. In the first verse, you wake up in the morning and hunt down the man who stole your water. You shoot, you kill, you love and lose, you bet and curse the cards, you go back, Qua n t um C r i minal s  |   4

you do it again. It’s you making things worse and worse and somehow not dying. There’s no twist ending, no moral, nothing to take away. Just three set pieces about man’s helplessness in the face of whatever tempts him. An open invitation to contemplate your own life, and whichever aspects of it might be futile, in this same terribly cyclical way. This ice-cold ode to the inevitable is kind of perfectly representative of what Steely Dan will go on to do—of their preoccupation with human frailty and delusion and the unsentimental eye they’ll turn on it. But in 1972 you can’t know any of this. Almost nobody does. In 1972, at the beginning of all this, people hear “Do It Again” on the radio and assume it’s by somebody else if they notice it at all. One day it comes on in Walter Becker’s friend’s car and that’s how Walter Becker’s friend hears it for the first time. “Oh, far out, a new Santana single,” the friend says to Walter. “They’re getting pretty good.”

Jack |   5

WALTER B EC K E R

 Walter (Introduction: Adorable Ghost)

He’s born February 20, 1950—Walter Becker, a Pisces, from Forest Hills, Queens. He is the Steely Dan member most easily caricatured in the style of Charles Schultz—the little round-headed boy grown to sardonic manhood. But he’s also, in the mythos, the Dark One in the band, the source of the music’s edge, its ruthlessness, especially about people. The true bohemian, too: in 1974 in the pages of the music paper Zoo World he’s observed riding to sound check in the back of a convertible whose broken top he’s trying to keep closed, taking rain to the face, and grousing, “I don’t want to go to the sound check. I want to go home and listen to far-out jazz.” Forty-two years after his birth, in the press notes for his first solo album, he finally offers this origin story, also involving cars and rain: “Mr. Becker makes his debut as a music lover while huddled in the back seat of his father’s cream and flesh colored Ford Fairlane. As it hurtles down the Henry Hudson Parkway, he watches the advertising billboards slide by and is hypnotized by the rhythmic swooshing of the wipers and the mottled half-light shining through the rain-swept windshield. He begins to enjoy the bland but tuneful renderings playing on the dashboard radio.” In his life as a working musician, he’ll play bass and some guitar, and much later he’ll sing. But his first instrument is the melodica, a sacred sound in reggae, the plastic woodwind instrument Augustus Pablo carried with him to meet King Tubby uptown, although the first time Walter sees one, 7

on television, the musician playing it is talk-show host Steve Allen. After that, Walter tries the tenor sax. It doesn’t take. When he hears Bob Dylan, Walter starts saving money for a guitar and a harmonica. Walter grows up believing his mother is dead. In 1965, his father, who sells paper-cutting machinery, has a heart attack on a plane and dies shortly thereafter, following another one. Many people in this story are dead now. This is partly because much of this story takes place a long time ago, when people knew less about which things could potentially kill them or were more able to pretend they didn’t know. Also, though, people just die sometimes. In 1997, a man named Randy California is pulled out to sea while rescuing his son from a riptide in the waters off Molokai and is never seen again. Before that, he has a bunch of hits as the singer of the rock band Spirit. Before that, he plays in a band with Jimi Hendrix in Greenwich Village, and Jimi gives him the name “Randy California” because another guy in the band is Randy Texas. Before that, he’s Randy Wolf. He lives next door to Walter in a Forest Hills apartment building called the Balfour. He teaches Walter a bunch of blues licks. When Walter is seventeen, he enrolls at Bard College, in the town of Annandale-on-Hudson, in upstate New York. One day he’s playing guitar in a campus coffee shop and in walks Donald Fagen, wanting to meet whichever Bard kid is in there playing like Howlin’ Wolf. They play together in a couple of student bands, with names like the Bad Rock Band and the Leather Canary, sometimes with a drummer named Chevy Chase, whom they’ll later describe as having been one of the funniest drummers they worked with—but maybe not the funniest. Chase will go on to cultivate a comedic persona so cool and ironically removed that many people find him difficult to connect with emotionally, which is also a problem many people will have with Donald and Walter’s music; maybe it’s a Bard College thing. But Donald and Walter also start writing original songs together around an upright piano in the common room of Walter’s residence hall, Ward Manor. Donald’s first documented song is called “The Bus Driver Is a Fruitcake.” They’ll keep at this for forty years. They’ll call their band Steely Dan. They get it from a book. In 2017 the guitarist Steve Khan, who played on Steely Dan’s Aja and Gaucho and then on a lot of Donald’s solo recordings, told Billboard that he once asked Donald what it was exactly that Walter did, and that Donald replied, “He finishes the things that I can’t seem to finish! It could be a line in a song, it could be a missing chord somewhere,” and maybe that explains why after Walter dies Donald starts telling people he maybe can’t write anymore. Qua n t um C r i minal s  |   8

ST E V E K H A N

Walter dies on September 3, 2017, at sixty-seven, four months after being diagnosed with cancer. The cancer that kills him is esophageal cancer, which is the same kind of cancer that killed Humphrey Bogart, Philip Larkin, and Sylvia Kristel. A few months after Walter’s death, his widow Delia Becker says in a statement that his diagnosis had been “a grim surprise.” It’s the one phrase in the statement that sounds like a Walter line. It has the ring of a pulp-mystery title—the final volume of a series, maybe, one more battered paperback on the shelf joining Fire in the Hole, The Royal Scam, Black Friday, and Everything Must Go. Delia Becker also says Walter was cremated, per his wishes, “without ceremony or memorial.” But a memorial had already taken place, in September, on the internet, as soon as the news of Walter’s death broke. In a statement, Donald recalled his longtime writing partner as “cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny.” Later that day on Facebook, Donald and his wife Libby Titus posted the lyrics to a song by the Eels—“Dead of Winter,” the one about cancer and the cold night and the little flame in your lighter as it goes out, the one that calls death the unfinished line—and dedicated them to Walter. On Rolling Stone’s website, Rickie Lee Jones wrote a long, beautiful, Walt er  |   9

unflinching essay about what it was like to know, collaborate with, and occasionally clash with Walter, who took jobs producing albums like Jones’s Flying Cowboys as part of rebuilding a life and career he’d nearly lost to drugs in the early ’80s. Walter’s generational and actuarial peers posted about him—Paul Stanley from Kiss, Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers, Nile Rodgers from Chic, and Bootsy Collins from outer space via P-Funk—but so did Roots bandleader Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who called Walter an “artist’s artist,” and producer Mark Ronson, who called Walter “one-half of the team I aspire to every time I sit down at a piano.” Opening for U2 in Detroit that weekend, Beck paused to observe the passing of a “rock-’n’-roll hero” after slipping a few bars of “Josie” into “Where It’s At.” It went on like that—tribute after tribute, from likely and unlikely fans. Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino and Bryan Adams, Mac DeMarco and Slash, Julian Lennon and John Mulaney, Judd Apatow and Just Blaze, not to mention countless regular people testifying that they too had been shaped —or warped—by Walter’s music. And of course this is what always happens when somebody famous dies. And of course it’s because we live in a splintering culture, and when we get together to mourn somebody, we’re really mourning the passing of one more piece of our shared understanding of the world. And of course nothing spikes a celebrity’s stock quite like death, which summons forth from the woodwork casual appreciators and poseurs in it for the likes, who are all shattered by the news and want you to know it, because nobody wants to admit they slept on an icon. But in Walter’s case, the outpouring of posthumous sadness and appreciation revealed something. At some point between the release of “Do It Again” and the grim surprise, Steely Dan—who’d always presented themselves self-deprecatingly as a marginal band—had stopped being truly marginal. The sadness was just so discombobulatingly unanimous—it was as if half the planet had sung out “Is there gas in the car?” and the other half had responded, on cue, “Yes, there’s gas in the car.” They had been a popular 1970s rock band for a while, with a bunch of songs that made the charts, and rock-’n’-roll never forgets. But then they stopped being a band for a while and fell far enough out of fashion that it became possible to discover them again and experience them like a secret. In 1988, after moving to Norwalk, California, to work as a psychiatric nurse technician at the state mental hospital there, John Darnielle found tapes of Katy Lied, Aja, and Gaucho at a local record store, “spent much of the following year scrutinizing these albums as a jeweler might inspect a rare gem,” and soon thereafter began writing and recording the first songs he’d release under the name The Mountain Goats, many of them recorded Quan t um C r im inal s  |   10

live by a Panasonic boombox, including an anxious 1995 cover of Steely Dan’s “FM.” After the breakup of his art-rock band Gastr del Sol, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke started making albums of “experimental MOR” music like 1999’s Eureka, taking influence from aspects of ’70s music that punk had rendered off-limits and picking up where Steely Dan’s avant-Muzak had left off. The Farrelly Brothers curated a soundtrack for the 2000 film Me, Myself & Irene that included Steely Dan covers by Ivy, Ben Folds Five, and Brian Setzer the way that Something about Mary used Jonathan Richman—inexplicably but enjoyably. A few years after that, egged on by his Dan-loving collaborator Vernon Reid, the writer and musician Greg Tate and his band Burnt Sugar rearranged Steely Dan’s catalog for jazz-rock arkestra. And of course hip-hop has never stopped rediscovering Steely Dan’s fount of sampleable groove, from De La Soul rapping over the hook from “Peg” to Kanye West building “Champion” around a line from “Kid Charlemagne.” In 2019, two years after Walter Becker died, with the Danaissance in full swing, the online music magazine Pitchfork commissioned retrospective reviews of some classic Steely Dan albums from four other writers and me. These days, Pitchfork—founded by a recent high-school graduate in Minneapolis in 1995 and sold to Condé Nast twenty years later—covers everything from experimental noise to high-gloss chart pop, but the site made its name in the early 2000s as a top-of-the-bookmarks-menu resource for fans of a certain strain of guitar-based indie rock, lo-fi in spirit and aesthetic if not in always in execution. There was a time when devoting this much virtual ink to revisiting the catalog of a band like Steely Dan—especially without a new album or a tour or a reissue campaign as impetus—would have been antithetical to Pitchfork’s sense of itself. That time was the year 2000. If you search Steely Dan’s name in Pitchfork’s reviews database, you’ll find my piece on Gaucho along with the four other pieces that ran during Steely Dan Week. But you’ll also find the only other Steely Dan review Pitchfork has ever run—writer Brent DiCrescenzo’s savage hard-pass pan of Steely Dan’s eighth album Two Against Nature, which at the time was the first new music they’d released in twenty years. DiCrescenzo was an early fan favorite among Pitchfork’s writers, but his byline hasn’t appeared on the site since 2004. Any trace of his hyperbolic, pseudo-gonzo approach had been purged from Pitchfork’s house style long before Condé Nast entered the picture. So his Two Against Nature review— a vitriolic 1.6 out of 10—is a time capsule of how Pitchfork used to read. But it’s also a snapshot of how negatively Steely Dan were viewed at the turn of this century, particularly by people whose tastes and values were shaped by late-’80s/early-’90s indie rock. Walt er  |   11

“If you are a die-hard Steely Dan fan from ‘back in the day,’” DiCrescenzo begins, “let me first congratulate you on figuring out how this whole ‘Internet’ thing works.” There are two separate ponytail jokes in the first paragraph alone; in the four grafs after that, Two Against Nature and its overall aesthetic are compared to late-period Rush, “a Daniel Lanois–produced collaboration between the Dave Matthews Band and Kenny G,” and the evil robot spider Will Smith blows up at the end of Wild, Wild West. The last lines are an admonition to any present-day listeners still thinking of cultivating a “hip musical crush” on Becker and Fagen. “Remember,” DiCrescenzo writes, “this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock’s stone-throwing in the late ’70s. People fought and died so our generation could listen to something better. Okay, so they died of overdoses and car-crashes. They still had soul. Keep up the good fight. Put down this sports-utility vehicle of a record. As with the urban yuppie driver, the fourwheel drive is never activated.” The thing is, around the year 2000, a critic could say this sort of thing about Steely Dan on a platform like Pitchfork and be met with very little outrage. Anyone opposed to the received wisdom of the Boomer classic-rock canon was sort of obligated to dislike Steely Dan. Which is ironic, since more than a few influential Boomer critics hated Steely Dan, too. In the 1979 edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, no Steely Dan album rates fewer than three stars out of five. But the book’s overview of their career—written by Dave Marsh, keeper of the flame for a strain of rock and soul that took pride in simplicity and visceral directness—is a thumbs-down evaluation of the band’s whole arc up through Aja. “With Pretzel Logic,” Marsh writes, “the dissonance and beatnik poesy began to take over, and while the band was still capable of something as fine as ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,’ it was also growing much more pompous . . . Katy Lied and The Royal Scam have been defended as innovation and as ideology, but not necessarily as listenable. Steely Dan’s art rock was by now edging ever closer to jazz, the vocals had deteriorated, the lyrics were often obscure for their own sake and the group’s stature seemed to infect the records with an unparalleled pretentiousness.” The straw men change, but the basic thrust of the argument stays the same. In 1979, Steely Dan’s perceived artiness constituted a betrayal of rock music’s core values—what Marsh, assessing Bruce Springsteen much more favorably in the same Rolling Stone book, calls “the hopes and dreams of the rock tradition as handed down from Presley.” And by the time Two Against Nature came out, they’d come to represent an affront to the values that indie rock had inherited from punk—a genre often romanticized as having emerged as a necessary corrective to slick mainstream 1970s and ’80s poprock made in expensive studios by self-regarding cokeheads. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   12

Canonically, they could not catch a break. In his introduction to The Spin Alternative Record Guide, published in 1995, editor Eric Weisbard suggests that “alternative” music originated as “a dissent against ’60s rock,” which isn’t a bad description of what Steely Dan were doing when they showed up in 1972, singing songs full of weird chords and bad vibes. But that book’s survey of a canon that runs from Abba to John Zorn, retconning the likes of Motörhead, Kiss, and Cheap Trick as elder alts along the way, jumps right from Looney Tunes composer Carl Stalling to Stereolab with no mention of the Dan. I treated that Spin book like a bible for years and interpreted its omissions as gospel, too. But I was primed to see Steely Dan as the enemy no matter what. I started listening to American underground music a year or so before Nirvana came out; I grew up primed to reject the sound of professionalism. I prized distortion, drones, flubs, frequency wobble, muffled or off-key vocals, feedback, tape hiss, cheap-sounding keyboards, songs that started with studio chatter or the sound of somebody plugging a guitar into an already-hot amplifier. An errant pop or buzz or a butterfingered guitar solo was proof you were listening to music you could trust, music made by normal people working within their limitations, music that hadn’t been created in a high-priced studio by corporate-rock shills looking to put one over on us. I’ve never been in a real band, but when I was a teenager my friends and I used to dick around with guitars and 4-track cassette recorders; part of why I grew to prefer the indie-rock music I preferred was that it seemed to have more in common with the kind of things we were doing at home. I outgrew that lo-fi chauvinism before too long, and so did most indierock fans. The cultural battles that used to shape people’s opinions about what it meant to sound like Steely Dan are all but forgotten. The equation of slick with inauthentic ceased to mean quite so much once it became possible to make slick inauthentic music at home with nothing but a laptop and a walk-in closet, and indie rock’s evolution into a desktop-speakers soundtrack for creative-class types has helped bring soft and smooth sounds back into vogue. But reflexive anti-Dan sentiment persisted well into the 2000s, even pervading the work of actual Steely Dan fans. On the day Walter died, Judd Apatow tweeted, “I have played no band more often or enjoyed any music more than Steely Dan.” But in 2007’s Knocked Up, which Apatow wrote and directed, there’s a scene where Pete, played by Paul Rudd, is talking to Ben (Seth Rogen) about how tough the present-day music business is. “Steely Dan would never even have a chance,” Pete says. “Well,” Ben replies, “maybe it’s because Steely Dan gargles my balls.” Pete replies the way any Steely Dan fan usually does to this argument—he insists that they’re incredible, then Walt er  |   13

falls back to insisting that they were incredible. Ben’s not buying it. “If I ever listen to Steely Dan,” he says, “I want you to slice my head off with an Al Jarreau LP.” Apatow clearly agrees with Pete, and has said that, in his mind, having Ben be wrong about Steely Dan “was a way to show how immature and not ready for a baby [Rogen’s character] was. Who could trust him?” But the moment can be read both ways. If you think Steely Dan are geniuses, Ben’s inability to appreciate them underlines how little he knows about the world. But if you’re of the opinion that Steely Dan does indeed gargle balls, there’s nothing in the scene to suggest that you should feel otherwise. Apatow likes Steely Dan, but in 2007 he knew a joke at their expense would land, just like the digs at Michael McDonald and “Yah Mo Be There” in The 40-Year-Old Virgin two years earlier.* But as I write this it’s been nearly fifteen years since Knocked Up came out, and on the issue of Steely Dan’s greatness and/or ball-gargling, there now seem to be far more Petes than Bens in the world. The ranks of the Steely Dan faithful still include Oh, Hello types smuggling home-baked edibles into the Beacon Theater inside their New York Review of Books tote bags and your aunt Lynda who’s been married to and divorced from two different guys who drove “art cars.” But they’ve been joined in the last few years by a surprisingly large influx of new fans, many of whom weren’t even born when Kamakiriad came out. These things are hard to quantify, but around 2020 an ongoing groundswell of semi-ironic Dan appreciation became a full-fledged revival—at least online, which in 2020 was technically where most things took place. That was the year Donald told jazz scion and podcaster Leo Sidran that he’d finally started getting recognized on the street, after decades of walking around “fan free.” Donald has no active social-media presence, but on Twitter and Instagram, Steely Dan memes have become a vibrant comedic subgenre unto themselves, thanks to Dan meme accounts with inside-baseball handles like Lester the Nightfly, I.G.Y. Azalea, and Bodacious Callboys. The writer Grace Spelman’s side account People Dancing to Steely Dan celebrates just how well all forms of human movement seem to sync

* And he’s not above coding Pete, the Steely Dan fan, as a nerd with a taste for the hopelessly marginal. Pete not only owns an iron-on T-shirt depicting the cover of Neil Young’s Landing on Water—arguably the most universally disliked ’80s Neil album that isn’t a rockabilly goof, and therefore a perfectly contrarian-snobbish Neil album to champion via one’s shirt, signifying that you appreciate Neil for his contrarian tendencies and not for, like, “Sugar Mountain”—but also, in the scene in question, has chosen to wear that shirt out to dinner at a nice restaurant. (In Apatow’s quasi sequel to Knocked Up, 2012’s This Is 40, Pete sinks his struggling indie label by signing perennial rock-snob favorite and commercial also-ran Graham Parker.)

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with the Dan’s smooth sounds. And the most striking thing about the Good Steely Dan Takes account on Twitter—which retweets pro-Dan sentiments alongside other Dan-related esoterica—is how many of those good Dan takes are written by or about people getting into Steely Dan right now, in 2021 (“seeing somebody discover Steely Dan is like seeing a kid that fell into some toxic goo realize they can fly. wholly joyful”). The account’s handle is @baddantakes because it was once an index of derogatory or ill-informed Dan tweets; as the Danaissance grew, the business model shifted. I have a few—okay, more than a few—ideas about why this happened. It’s partly because revivalism is now a thermodynamic law of the culture. That gum you like is going to come back in style, as the Giant put it to Dale Cooper on Twin Peaks, whose 2017 revival wrapped up the day Walter died. By the mid-’00s, we’d strip-mined the past so thoroughly that there was nothing left to revive but the supposedly super-uncool. At the same time, because Steely Dan’s temporary breakup happened when it did, at the very beginning of the ’80s, and because Donald and Walter never really broke through as solo artists, kids growing up in the ’80s and ’90s didn’t grow up resenting them as classic-rock leftovers hogging MTV and VH1 airtime the way Don Henley or Lindsey Buckingham did. (The high-gloss alienation of late-’70s Steely Dan records like Gaucho is a prescient preview of the ’80s both sonically and spiritually, but it’s impossible to imagine Steely Dan as an active ’80s band. Go ahead and try to picture Walter and Donald sharing a mic with Cyndi Lauper on “We Are the World” or giving earnest interviews to Mark Goodman on MTV. They probably would have gotten along with Kurt Loder, though, and maybe they could have worn sunglasses and learned some ironic, low-impact choreography, like ZZ Top.) And it might be because millennials and Gen Z-ers—for all that’s been said about kids today and their supposed inability to take a joke or distinguish the depiction of bad behavior in art from an endorsement of that same behavior—grew up with Rick Ross, the Weeknd, Tyler the Creator, Fox News, Tony Soprano, and Donald Trump, in an age when a grasp of ontological slipperiness became a prerequisite for decoding pop culture on even the most basic level, and Steely Dan’s music rewards that kind of reading more than most classic rock, because it’s full of unreliable narrators and unlikable protagonists. As with the weird groundswell of hipster interest in the Grateful Dead aesthetic that began around 2018—when high-end streetwear enthusiasts started wearing tie-dye and Birkenstocks like UC Santa Cruz undergrads from 1992 on their way to making bongs in pottery class—some of this appreciation is ironic. Anyone who tweets something like “listening to ‘do Walt er  |   15

it again’ by steely dan and daydreaming that I’m a quaaludes dealer in 1979 facing a crisis of faith after my houseboat sinks off the docks of Sausalito” is riffing on the stereotypical image of a Dan listener and on the band’s reputation as a CD-changer staple for divorced ’80s dads. Steely Dan are an endlessly meme-able band because they’re a hilarious concept on paper—two grumpy-looking guys obsessed with making the smoothest music of all time. But as sure as the Cuervo Gold leads to the fine Colombian, getting into Steely Dan ironically is the gateway drug to appreciating them sincerely. If there’s one work of rock criticism that deserves credit for butterflyeffecting the Dan revival into existence, it’s J. D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair, and Lane Farnham’s early-’00s Web-video mockumentary series Yacht Rock, a cracked-coke-mirror alternate history of ’70s and ’80s “smooth music” as reenacted in cheap apartments by comedians in even cheaper wigs. The series, which began airing in 2005, made eccentric recurring characters out of dollar-bin faves like Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, and Hall & Oates, milking hilarity from the conceit that the people who made this breezy, urbane music were actually hypercompetitive, hard-drinking weirdos who occasionally rumbled like rival gangs. “It’s like when you get a letter from a stalker who’s never met you,” Michael McDonald said about the show. “They somehow hit on something, and you have to admit they’re pretty intuitive.” When we first see Donald and Walter in the episode about Steely Dan, they’re nerds getting noogie-bullied by jocks Don Henley and Glenn Frey. None of it was particularly factual, but by stressing what was funny about this bygone style of music and the images of the men who created it, Yacht Rock also testified to the underdiscussed strangeness of a bygone style that critics and gatekeepers had long dismissed as too pussed-out to be worth parsing. Yachtsmen Ryznar, Stair, and David Lyons have continued to debate the Yacht canon as hosts of the podcasts Yacht or Nyacht and Beyond Yacht Rock; Yacht Rock itself begat a microgenre of parodies on similar themes, like Documentary Now!’s “Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee, Parts 1-2,” with Bill Hader and Fred Armisen as a faux Eagles, and Eagles/ Steely Dan manager Irving Azoff cameoing as “Alvin Izoff.” But “yacht rock” also entered the lexicon as a catchy and evocative tag for a style of music that had never really had a name before. Yacht rock–themed parties and DJ nights have proliferated. Spotify’s official Yacht Rock genre playlist has over 800,000 followers, despite some questionable curatorial choices— alongside six Steely Dan songs, seven by the Doobie Brothers, and four by the Eagles, it features country-rockers .38 Special, Air Supply, “Don’t Bring Me Down,” “Hungry Eyes,” “The Power of Love,” “Jack and Diane,” “Who Can It Be Now,” the four biggest Police songs, and the Ghostbusters theme. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   16

Is “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey a jam? Of course. Could you enjoy it on a yacht? Absolutely. Does its inclusion on this playlist constitute a crime against criteria? Again, yes. Death to false yacht rock; the algorithmic eighties doesn’t have to win them all. But even a playlist like this one has to have helped the Dan make new inroads; there’s no way they wouldn’t jump out as the most lyrically and musically interesting band in this lineup, with the most obvious bangers. I want to believe that this is the real explanation—that Steely Dan are just a really good band, and people are figuring that out. I know this happens, because it happened to me. I bought a copy of Katy Lied in college, almost as a joke. Imagine, me owning this record. I figured I’d play it once, then put it aside in favor of the more important music-makers of my time. The joke’s been on me ever since. That’s how it works: you show up expecting to appreciate them as kitsch, or to find out what the memes are all about. But before too long, if you have any feeling for craftsmanship at all, you’ll start to savor the way the music’s individual elements click into place, and the way the content cuts against those tasteful settings, like the phrase BLEEDING ULCER written in Coca-Cola cursive on a red background. Even if you know nothing about them, you begin to sense Donald and Walter’s presence in the music, free-floating intellects welcoming you in without letting on that they’re glad you’re here, winking behind their shades. But I’m ultimately a cynic about things like this, and I’m pretty sure that if more people are ready for Steely Dan in the ’20s than they were in the ’90s—or even the ’70s—it’s because our fast-warming world is more Steely Dannish than it’s ever been. Donald and Walter’s songs of monied decadence, druggy disconnection, slow-motion apocalypse, and self-destructive escapism seemed satirically extreme way back when; now they just seem prophetic. We are all Steely Dan characters now: Citizens Dan, living in an age of malaise and disillusionment as pervasive as the fog of failure enveloping Gaucho’s fabled fools. And of course millennials—the oldest of whom are turning 40 right about now—have led the charge on the Dan revival, for the same reason they helped make so-called “Dadcore” fashion into a thing. When you’re headed for middle age and traditional signifiers of adulthood like home ownership remain laughably out of reach, dressing like a stockbroker headed to Montauk for the weekend—or listening to music written about and to some extent for wealthy ’70s grown-ups having problems—is a way of cosplaying the chill midlife you know you’ll never get to experience. Author Matt Fraction once suggested that all Steely Dan songs are about weird sex and heroin, and he’s not wrong. But underneath that there’s a longing for the unrecapturable past and mourning for bright sci-fi futures we won’t ever get to see, and every time the hills around here catch fire Walt er  |   17

those sentiments feel less and less abstract. Time has caught up to Steely Dan because it’s catching up to all of us. It only took five decades—Can’t Buy a Thrill turned 50 in 2022—and it happened only after 50 percent of Steely Dan’s creative core was dead and gone, and anyway this uptick in approval might have meant nothing to Walter, who always seemed to care even less than Donald did about how popular Steely Dan were or weren’t. But I like to think he would have appreciated the irony.

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Donald (Midnite Cruiser)

He’s born 1/10/48. Donald Fagen, Capricorn, from Passaic, New Jersey. When he’s ten years old his family moves to the suburbs—to South Brunswick, New Jersey, and specifically to the community of Kendall Park, described by the New York Times many years later as “a post-World War II tract development of more than 1,600 cookie-cutter ranches and colonials on one-third- to one-half-acre lots.” Donald is old enough and snob enough to hate that this has happened to him. There is nothing more beautiful and tragic than a child who’s really into jazz, and Donald is that child, and his parents’ decision to move out of Passaic and therefore farther from Manhattan is a formative trauma. Years later, when E.T.: The Extraterrestrial comes out, he’ll still be thinking about it. “Steven Spielberg makes movies about the suburbs and seems comfortable with them,” he tells Musician in 1983, “but I detested the suburbs I lived in. He has his fantasies, I had mine— I think Thelonious Monk was the alien in my bedroom, rather than a little guy from outer space.” When he’s eleven Donald hitchhikes to the Newport Jazz Festival. He has a cool cousin named Barbara with a superior collection of jazz records and Donald listens to them in Barbara’s basement. In 2016 he’ll describe his younger self as a “real jazz snob” who even looked down on the storied Blue Note Records because the imprint’s founder, Alfred Lion, “encouraged the players to load their tunes up with funky blues cliches.” Jazz is one of 19

D ON A L D FAG E N

the things he finds he has in common with Walter when they meet, part of a mutual “constellation of enthusiasms” that also includes Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Berger; science fiction; the films of Robert Altman; and satirist-musicians like Tom Lehrer and Frank Zappa. When Walter and Donald start Steely Dan, they’ll be accused of being a jazz-rock band, but the dashiki never quite fits. Most rock guys who explored jazz currents in the late ’60s and early ’70s were seeking new paths to ecstatic transcendence and shredding volume, from the MC5 bugging out on Sun Ra and Albert Ayler to Roger McGuinn of the Byrds trying to make his Rickenbacker weep and moan like John Coltrane’s sax. This is not what Steely Dan were after. They’re sometimes accused of having pioneered the self-conscious jazz-rock hybrid that would become known as “fusion,” but Walter dismissed that idea all the way back in 1974: “That kind of marriage has so far only come up with ponderous results. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.” So they were not the Mahavishnu Orchestra and they were not Chicago. They were marked at the cellular level by a specific and finite moment in jazz history, which started when Charlie Parker discovered a parallel universe inside the melody line from “Cherokee” in the late ’40s and ended about three minutes into A Love Supreme, an album that bummed Donald and Walter out because it seemed to mark the “death of chromatic harmony.” Coltrane’s spiritual quest became a totalizing influence on the form; jazz was headed for interstellar space and becoming a platform for a more confrontational expression of Blackness that felt like an aesthetic dead end to both of them. “I thought that it was becoming a political music and, as much as I could sympathize with the political positions, I just didn’t like what was happening to the music,” Donald says in 2012, noting that he heard much more creativity in the Black pop music coming out of Motown, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals at that time. Donald will tell interviewer after interviewer that his list of favorite jazz records hasn’t changed much since high school. And when Walter is asked by Musician magazine, in 1981, to evaluate jazz “that’s come after the religious and political saxophoning of the ’60s—like The Art Ensemble, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton,” he replies, “I don’t like any of it. I’d like to think that I’m open-minded, but nothing could be further from the truth.” So while jazz is very much alive and evolving when Donald and Walter begin writing songs together, they will address it in their music as something that once was and isn’t anymore, because that’s how it felt to them—like a bright hot sun they caught a life-changing glimpse of as it sank into the sea.

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But before he becomes Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Donald has to grow up, and he has to do it in Kendall Park. Jazz radio proves the existence of a real world. Under the covers with a Zenith, he dials in DJs like Ed Beach, Symphony Sid, and especially Mort Fega’s midnight-to-six “Jazz Unlimited” show on WEVD. Everything you need to know about Donald is there on the jacket of his first solo album, The Nightfly, in 1982. That’s him on the front, dressed like his childhood ideal of the coolest DJ ever—the lonesome overnight jock, short-sleeved, cig lit, about to drop the needle on a Sonny Rollins LP. The back cover photo closes the circuit: a single light burns in the upstairs bedroom window of a darkened suburban house on a darkened suburban street. That’s Donald, too, who’ll one day sing I can’t wait until I move to the city. In his book Music for Pleasure, sociologist Simon Frith describes the ambitions, desires, and criteria for “realness” in the 1930s British jazz scene as essentially middle-class and suburban. “In this world,” Frith writes, “American music—black American music—stands for a simple idea: That everything real is happening elsewhere.” So many Steely Dan protagonists share a version of this conviction, from the narrator of the pre-Dan demo “Stone Piano” (“Wish I was a hired gun / Cruel shogun, a poor man’s son”) to the guy who wants you to call him Deacon Blues. They put it most clearly on Katy Lied: “Any world that I’m welcome to is better than the one I come from.” If Steely Dan had a credo— in the way “In the end the love you make is equal to the love you take” is a credo, and in the way “Free your mind, and your ass will follow” is a credo— that was it. That, or the line from “Hey Nineteen” about the transformative effects of Cuervo Gold.

In his first Rolling Stone cover story, from 2019, the breakaway ex-boyband star Harry Styles drives down Sunset Boulevard, arguing with writer Rob Sheffield about Steely Dan. “He insists,” Sheffield writes, “that Can’t Buy a Thrill is better than Countdown to Ecstasy (wrongly) and seals his case by turning it up and belting ‘Midnite Cruiser’ with truly appalling gusto.” Donald once said that “Midnite Cruiser” is “a good example of a song that sets a mood without actually saying anything.” But that doesn’t seem exactly true. “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again” is a pure mood; there are things happening in “Midnite Cruiser” that go beyond mood. If Donald doesn’t want to talk about it, that might be because what it’s actually saying is personal, because it doesn’t bury its central yearning in enough sophistication. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   22

FE LON I OU S

“Midnite Cruiser” is sung from the point of view of a hipster longing for the attentions of some other, greater hipster, whom he calls “Felonious.” “Felonious” might be an easier word to sing than “Thelonious,” as in Thelonious Sphere Monk, who played with his right and left hands in different dimensions and made the piano sound like broken china sutured together with gold. Weird choice of pseudonym, though—Monk’s most notable criminal conviction was a sixty-day workhouse bid on Rikers Island for his “possession” of a baggie of smack that had actually been thrown from Monk’s car window by his passenger, Bud Powell. And some part of Thelonious’s “madness” was undiagnosed bipolar disorder—but so goes the romance of jazz, which is so often about professorial dorks building questionable monuments to Black pain. Donald |   23

Even at this point, in the early ’70s, jazz in the Steely Dan symbology is inexorably tied to the past. “The time of our time has come and gone” is how the narrator addresses Felonious, implying that they’re both marooned in the present. The narrator wants Felonious to step off the bandstand and shake his hand; he wants to be validated as a fellow traveler, to be transported out of the ordinary by contact with visionary Blackness. Felonious occupies the same space for the narrator of “Midnite Cruiser” that someone like Monk would have in the personal cosmology of a young Fagen or Becker. The narrator envies Felonious’s freedom from social stricture, but he also imagines that his own sense of being at odds with his content gives him something in common with Felonious, a kinship he longs to have affirmed. What the narrator is saying to Felonious is I’m like you. I’m more like you than I’m like the people I’m supposed to be like. In other words, he’s longing to slip the skin of his whiteness and be a brother who’s free. Harry Styles could sing this song, but could he get away with writing it, in a world that’s come to understand the white longing to channel Black cool as an expression of privilege? We now have the concept of “romantic racism” to explain what’s happening in a song like this—and for Sal Paradise looking out the window in On the Road and wishing to “exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America,” for Norman Mailer extolling the bravery of the White Negro (“the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin”), for Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, rediscovering his capacity for animal passion by hanging out with blackface crows under a grimy tie-dye sky. Time hasn’t been kind to Kerouac and Mailer’s dreams of seceding from white hegemony. We understand now that there’s something unseemly about white hipsters who identify with Blackness, since they can never assume the risks that come with it, or give up the power white America affords boys born into it. But back when Donald and Walter were coming up, most white hipsters didn’t think about it that way. Which means “Midnite Cruiser” is a little bit ahead of its time—for 1972, and for right now. There are countless songs in the pop canon that are in some way or another symptomatic of the white man’s yearning to possess Black cool, but there are very few songs about that yearning, and “Midnite Cruiser” is one of them. Steely Dan are as guilty as anyone else of borrowing from Black music to advance themselves commercially and artistically, but in the ’70s they’re pretty much the only people actively thinking, and writing, about the debt they’ve incurred through that involuntary transaction with history and the essential unrepayability of that debt. They haven’t solved the problem because there’s no solution. They will go on to write better songs about it than “Midnite Cruiser.” The title track on Quan t um C r im inal s  |   24

Pretzel Logic is “Midnite Cruiser” stripped of anything romantic; its narrator longs to travel back in time and play the minstrel circuit, convinced he’ll be recognized as the genius he is. And in “Deacon Blues” the story comes full circle, and the romance is restored. Whereas “Midnite Cruiser” lionized the jazz musician as dissolute trickster-genius-madman, turning actual Black artists into stereotypes in the process, “Deacon Blues” slyly romanticizes the white hipster outsider’s romance with that same stereotype, rendering it touching and funny precisely because it’s quixotic and impossible. Donald Fagen once said, “Deacon Blues” was “about as close to autobiography as our tunes get.” Even in “Midnite Cruiser,” though, there’s already a slight satirical sting. “Drive me to Harlem,” the narrator begs Felonious, “or somewhere the same,” anticipating later Steely Dan songs like “Bodhisattva” and “Aja,” where deluded white guys will long for a muddled idea of the mystical East. The “constellation of enthusiasms” that brought Donald and Walter together also included the writings of Terry Southern, whose short-story collection Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes—published in 1967, the year the founders of Steely Dan met at Bard—is full of deluded white protagonists who seek out Black authenticity and wind up clowning themselves, or worse. The title story examines the awkward partnership between a kid who discovers a patch of primo “gage” growing wild on his father’s farm and the Black laborer who teaches him to dry, roll, and smoke it. In “The Night the Bird Blew for Doctor Warner,” a musicologist goes undercover as a hipster to research his magnum opus From Bach to Be-Bop, horrifying his colleagues (“‘Ralph,’ said Professor Thomas, ‘let me get this straight. Do you mean you’re going to submit to drug injections?’”) and winds up bludgeoned in a Harlem alley for his wallet and watch. And “You’re Too Hip, Baby” hews closest to the life story of Southern himself, who’d go on to write the screenplays for the totemic counterculture movies Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, Barbarella, and Easy Rider, but before that was a white Texan who moved to Paris in “a period where the Village and St.-Germain-des-Pres were sort of interchangeable.” Southern bought hash from a bartender named Hadj, got high with Jean Cocteau, and saw L’Avventura with Mingus and Miles Davis. The protagonist of “You’re Too Hip,” a white American doctoral student named Murray, cops his hash from a bartender with the same name, and is blowing off his Sorbonne thesis on Mallarmé and the English novel to pal around with “every Negro jazz musician in every club in Paris.” Eventually Murray will be undone no less profoundly than Dr. Warner—he cultivates a friendship with a Black piano player named Buddy, who realizes he’s being cultivated and diagnoses the narrator as “what we might call a kind of professional Donald |   25

n—— lover . . . and I’m not putting you down for it, understand, but, uh, like the man said, It’s just not a scene I make.” The story is among the best character studies ever of the Very Special White Guy, who dreams that his mastery of cool handshakes might exempt him from his racial identity and the strictures that come with it. It can’t, but it can make you feel like you’re not the same as the more squarish whites you grew up around, and for Deacon Blues types like Murray that feeling’s almost as good. “What was best though,” Murray thinks, was to hang around the bar of his own hotel, the Noir et Blanc, in the late afternoon during a rehearsal or a closed session. At these times everyone was very relaxed, telling funny stories, drinking Pernod, and even turning on a bit of hashish or marijuana, passing it around quite openly, commenting on its quality. Murray derived a security from these scenes—the hushed camaraderie and the inside jokes. Later, in the evening, when the place was jumping, Murray kept himself slightly apart from the rest of the crowd—the tourists, the students, the professional beats, and the French de bonne famille—who all came to listen to the great new music. And always during the evening there would be at least one incident, like the famous tenor-man’s casually bumming a cigarette from him, which would prove Murray’s intimacy with the group to those who observed. Old acquaintances from Yale, who happened in, found Murray changed; they detected in his attitude toward them, their plans, and their expressed or implied values a sort of bemused tolerance—as though he were in possession of a secret knowledge.

At first, when The Nightfly was finished, Donald didn’t want it to come out. It said too much about him. He’d later talk about “a distance I could keep” when writing with Walter, and how hard it was to write without that curtain of ambiguity, how scary, and maybe this is the answer to the eternal question of what Walter specifically contributed to Steely Dan—plausible deniability. David Lynch’s collaborator Mark Frost once told New York Magazine about how he and Lynch wrote Twin Peaks: “I would sit at the keyboard and David would sit in a comfy chair, and we would go back and forth. You throw your minds up toward the ceiling, and they meet somewhere in the middle. The author is someone called Lynch-Frost.” When Donald and Walter write together, they create a single protagonist, a protean, aggregate “I”; for the sake of this conversation we can call him Mr. Steely Dan. He is both Donald and Walter and neither; he’s the sum of their experiences and has also been places they’ve never been, tried things they’d never try, things they put you in jail for trying. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   26

Walter was Donald’s bohemian muse, and their collaboration was a platonic love story. Donald grows up alienated in the suburbs, builds a memory palace to safeguard an idea of jazz that’s already be-bopping into antiquity by the time he discovers it, and eventually meets Walter, who likes and hates a lot of the same things he does, who in particular shares his disdain for the pop present but is also in some essential way a product of the mythic elsewhere Donald’s been yearning for. Walter’s from the city or at least its outer boroughs, Walter has a painful personal history, Walter has played in bands already, and when they start writing together Walter gives Donald permission to become the thing he’s supposed to become. Walter, in other words, might be the real Midnite Cruiser—the gentleman loser Donald’s always wanted to shake his suburbanness and become. So the end of Steely Dan is built into the band at its inception because once they’re a working band, it’ll be Walter who gets into drugs and almost chases the dragon to his doom and has to drop out of sight for a while, leaving Donald to figure things out on his own.

Donald |   27

King Richard/ King John (Kings) In Steely Dan’s “Kings,” some guys in a bar toast the apparent death of their old king, whom they call Good King Richard, and his successor, whom they call Good King John, although they also seem like they hate the king and have figured out that being a subject is bullshit. “No political significance” is what the sleeve notes say about this song, but this is either to keep people from hearing “Richard” and “John” and thinking of Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy and getting pissed off for some political reason and writing angry letters to Steely Dan c/o ABC/Dunhill, or maybe it’s a joke. If there’s one thing you can’t trust in this world it’s the sleeve notes to Can’t Buy a Thrill. The sleeve notes to Can’t Buy a Thrill also describe “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again” as “A solemn prayer for peace” and the note for “Change of the Guard” reads “Remember this one from college?” and the note for “Do It Again” just says “Traditional.” The paper ABC/Dunhill sleeve inside my copy of Can’t Buy a Thrill features a sepia-tone image of a happy young ’70s family frolicking in silhouette, and they don’t seem like they’d own a copy of Can’t Buy a Thrill, but you never know about people. Anyway—very untrustworthy album package.* * The front cover collages neon, balloon-animalish ribbons of color, a few bananas, and some disembodied female lips and toes onto a tinted photograph of sex workers lined up in Rouen’s red-light district, which got the record censored in Franco’s Spain; the back cover overlays credits and some self-parodying liner-note pomp (“It has been said many times and in many

28

GO OD K I N G RI C H A RD

G OO D K IN G J OH N

The English monarch Richard the Lionheart died of an infected crossbow wound in the year 1199 CE and was succeeded by John, his brother, who is the historical basis, to the extent that there is one, for the bad guy in the story of Robin Hood, and it’s possible the song “Kings” is actually supposed to be about the politics of the late 1100s, but really it’s about some guys from the past drinking in a bar and also how it maybe doesn’t matter who the president is, in what might be Steely Dan’s opinion. In 1972, when Steely Dan start recording Can’t Buy a Thrill, it’s August and it’s two months after the Washington, DC, police arrested five guys for breaking into the Watergate Complex to fuck with the Democratic National Committee on what has sure started to seem, by the time Can’t Buy a Thrill comes out, like President Richard Nixon’s behalf. That’s in November. By then, Nixon has already flattened his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, with sixty percent of the popular vote, and doesn’t resign until August 8, 1974, five days after “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” peaks on the Billboard charts at number 4. It’s possible that Richard Nixon listens to Steely Dan’s highest-charting single, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” while in seclusion at his home in San Clemente in those first few dark days and nights, and sees in its lovelorn narrator something of himself, Richard Nixon, in this moment, pretending to be waiting for a call he knows deep down is not coming—but it’s only possible and is not actually likely. Steely Dan’s entire ’70s recording career takes place between two historically seismic events involving evil California politicians. They’re born under the sign of Nixon and when they dissipate, the sun is in the house of Ronald Reagan, who’s elected president on November 4, 1980, seventeen days before Steely Dan release what is still technically their last ’70s album, a project that took them so long to finish that the ’70s have ended by the time it’s in stores. Steely Dan are a Ford and Carter administration band, and the first seven Steely Dan albums constitute the Great American Ford and Carter Administration Novel, unlike John Updike’s book about the chad Gerald Ford and the virgin James Buchanan, which is only okay. They are about some years of dispirit and distrust that passed between the fall of King Richard and the rise of King Ron, and they are about them in the sense that they mostly don’t bring up politics at all. Most of the characters in the songs on Steely Dan’s ’70s albums are either longing for some vanished past or too

ways that what the world needs now is another rock and roll band. This could very well be the one of which the pundits spoke . . .”) on a plain tan wrapper spattered with what might be rain, grease, or something far grosser. Inside the gatefold is a photo depicting six dudes and zero smiles. The question it all raises is, What the hell kind of a band is this? Turn the jacket over and over again, as many times as you want; no answers are forthcoming.

K ing R ic ha r d/K ing John   |   31

busy losing themselves in drugs or crackpot spirituality or grasping sexual neediness to even communicate with each other, much less get it together to try to change the world. Everybody had cocaine to do in hot tubs made of mossy teak. A sense of shared responsibility went out the window, and a lot of people wound up lonelier than ever and Steely Dan were too cool to care about this openly but wrote song after song about people struggling to communicate across gulfs born out of this new individualism and the free-swinging sexuality and the sure, whatever approach to nautical drug abuse that came with it. In “Kings” Donald and Walter have diagnosed a condition that will turn out to be more or less permanent as well as universal—the nagging sense that a vote for anyone is a vote for the royal scam. Although they’ll focus primarily on individuals adrift in ethical and chemical fog, the work they’ll do from here on will add up to a portrait of a country that’s ceased to trust the idea of itself, without them ever having to come out and say some shit like that. They’ll end up being the perfect ’70s band for the 2020s—a decade I assume looks even more like the meltdown years of the American experiment from where you’re sitting than it does to me—because they’ve had an eye on this particular widening gyre since before disco died: in a 1995 interview when Walter jokes that the collapse of their empire spurred the British to invent irony, Donald suggests that Steely Dan’s own irony might have come from a similar place. “We can sense that happening here, too,” he’ll say. “The end of the American Empire. We can see it coming.”

Quan t um C r im inal s  |   32

Lady Bayside (The Boston Rag)

Walter was from Forest Hills, Queens, like Joey Ramone and Carroll O’Connor, but said he “culled numerous members for my first rock and roll band” from nearby Bayside. “Bayside had a particular character to the community,” he explained years later, “which ranged from politically, rabidly conservative to absolute congenital mind-damage among its younger citizens. So the young women growing up in this community had a particular kind of character.” The actor Christopher Walken is from Bayside, as is the actor and sexualassault defendant Ron Jeremy, and so is New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who once described Queens in the ’70s as “like death, only less interesting.” For years Peyser was the most exciting writer in the Post’s reactionary Electric Mayhem Band, in the sense that you never knew when she’d come out swinging at some generally uncontroversial person like Tilda Swinton in print or call Christiane Amanpour a “CNN war slut.” Jordan Belfort, the self-described “Wolf of Wall Street,” was also from Bayside, and in a 2013 column about his improbable rise and fall and rise, Peyser described the old neighborhood as “a soulless collection of identical six-story, redbrick co-op buildings and attached garden apartments . . . separated from the bright lights by lack of a subway line or exit strategy, in a neighborhood as intellectually stimulating as a Cialis commercial. Most bored teens I knew 33

got rip-roaring high by the time they hit junior high school.” Is there any proof that Andrea Peyser was a Lady Bayside, if not the Lady Bayside? No. But is there any proof that she was not? Also no.

L ADY BAYS I D E

Quan t um C r im inal s  |   34

Chino & Daddy Gee (My Old School)

In a tribute essay published on Rolling Stone’s website after Walter Becker’s death, Rickie Lee Jones remembered what she’d heard in Steely Dan when she first encountered them. “They seemed to really be obsessed with women they did not really like,” she wrote. It’s not an inaccurate or unfair characterization. Earlier in that same essay Jones suggests that Steely Dan, with their intellect and cool restraint, were “the beginning of college rock,” which is what people called the underground music of the ’80s and ’90s—music that lived on college radio—before the culture settled on more enduring descriptors like “alternative rock” and “indie rock.” But in making their ’70s albums, particularly the first three, Donald and Walter were also drawing on a pool of experiences and ideas dating back to their actual college years. Especially in the early ’70s, Donald and Walter can’t stop rewriting one song, the subject of which is a woman who’s chosen the whole wide world, the world of experience, over a life with Mr. Steely Dan. In every version of this song he tells her she’ll live to regret her decisions, or he tells her she’s an idiot—each time they write it, the melody is different and so is the ratio of condescension to sadness in the lyrics. A drop of smug bile, or enough to dirty a martini. Sometimes it’s easier to empathize with Mr. Steely Dan in his jiltedness, and sometimes Mr. Steely Dan seems like he’s being an asshole. That’s how the guy in Can’t Buy a Thrill’s “Reelin’ in 35

CHIN O AN D DA D DY G E E

the Years” comes off, sneering, “The things you think are precious, I can’t understand,” probably before turning his attention back to this month’s DownBeat. At least when Bob Dylan wrote his version of this song and called it “Like a Rolling Stone,” he laid each cryptic put-down at the feet of his deluded Miss Lonely in a way that made it clear just how thoroughly her leaving had broken him—plus, he could get away with a little sneering, because he was Bob Dylan. And on “Like a Rolling Stone,” the music pushes the song past its inherent bitterness. The same thing happens on the second Steely Dan album, which revisits the territory of “Reelin’ in the Years” twice, yielding one of the Dan’s best A-sides, “My Old School,” and one of its finest deep cuts, “The Razor Boy.” The liner notes to Countdown to Ecstasy confirm that all these songs are taking place in the Bard College Cinematic Universe: “My Old School” as “A poignant memoire inspired by the ‘Giant Girlfriend,’ sometimes referred to as the ‘Anima Camden,’” and “Razor Boy” as a song in which “The legendary ‘Giant Girlfriend’ of the Camden, New Jersey area sees the specter of Benny King as a child in a nightmare of cosmic proportions.” In Ward Manor Donald lived with a Lonnie Younge, and in “The Boston Rag” there’s a Lonnie who sleeps for days after sweeping party favors off the playroom floor; if you assume this is no coincidence, that makes three Bard songs on Countdown, all in some way or another about the tension between present and past, as experienced by characters blown to different ends of the map by the winds of karma. “The Razor Boy” flips “Reelin’” as a lounge-country lament, sung to a girl who’d “gamble or give anything to be in with / The better half,” probably while she’s halfway out the door, off to new heights of social climbing. Mr. Steely Dan wants to know how she’ll feel when she’s on her own, after the Razor Boy—who’s probably Death in this equation, because this is that kind of hyperbolic college breakup—“comes and takes your fancy things away.” (The things she thinks are precious, he can’t understand.) There’s real tenderness in Donald’s delivery, but underneath it all this is a ballad of sexual jealousy: “You think no tomorrow will come when you lay down / You can’t refuse.” The song puts the “Like a Rolling Stone” argument in the most dire possible terms. The narrator is saying sure, go ahead, do what you want to do, but sooner or later you’re going to have to die, and you’re a fool if you don’t weigh that fact against your need to sing that stupid song you want to sing. And underneath THE DAILY N EWS Ch ino & Daddy Gee  |   37

that it’s saying, Don’t go to that party, don’t go meet those people, don’t go on that trip, stay here with me. He’s not really afraid the girl will die; he’s afraid she’ll grow into someone who doesn’t love him anymore, even though she might already be done with him, having had enough of this exact type of exhausting shit. The first line of “The Razor Boy” is “I hear you are singing a song of the past”; the chorus of “The Boston Rag” calls for a revival of what might be a dance step, a popular song, a flag, or a state of mind, but by the second verse, Mr. Steely Dan’s turning his back on Lady Bayside, sighing “There was nothing that I could do / So I pointed my car down Seventh Avenue,” as if turning away from a relationship in the rear view, choosing the future over nostalgia, which arguably ranks just behind coke, heroin, and alcohol on the list of addictive things Steely Dan’s protagonists liked to abuse. There’s an existential struggle within this album and the Dan canon in general between the lure of a possibly-imaginary or at least romanticized past, and an urge to leave things behind and reinvent. I hear these two songs from the first side of Countdown as the bookends of the Bard Trilogy—the beginning of the end in “The Razor Boy” and the end of the end in “The Boston Rag.” Like all songs about breaking up with your college girlfriend, they’re really about early-twenties entropy, the tendency of people to struggle against the inevitable, and the longing to hold on to things they know deep down can’t really be salvaged. And the second act of that trilogy unfolds in Steely Dan’s best-known Bard song, “My Old School.” Empirically the best song ever about packing up a lifelong grudge against your alma mater and moving out to California, it’s also the single most fun Steely Dan hit to sing along to in the car, preferably while doubling Jim Hodder’s hi-hats on the steering wheel and/or miming Skunk Baxter’s licks at red lights. The lyrics—which mention riding to Annandale-on-Hudson (where Bard is located) on the Wolverine (a New York Central Railroad Train that used to service Rhinecliff Station, twelve minutes by car from Bard’s campus)—concern an acquaintance of Mr. Steely Dan’s whose journey from innocence to experience lands her “with the working girls in the county jail.” We already know things aren’t going to work out: she wants to go on living “like a Gypsy queen in a fairy tale,” he wants to take her to Mexico, she tells him Guadalajara won’t do, and then some shit goes down involving “Chino and Daddy Gee,” which the narrator hears about too late to help the girl avoid the clink. “My Old School” is one of the few verifiably autobiographical Steely Dan songs—the only one whose inspiration they’ve admitted to when questioned, anyway. Early in the morning on May 15, 1969, a small army of Duchess County sheriff’s deputies rolled up to Bard’s campus, raiding the Quan t um C r im inal s  |   38

THE RA ZOR B OY

men’s dormitories and several off-campus houses, including the one Donald lived in. They seized a variety of controlled substances and arrested forty-four people. At the Duchess County jail a barber administered institutional buzzcuts to anyone flying a freak flag. “Don Fagen” and Walter Becker were both on the list of detainees published in the next edition of the Bard student paper. So was Donald’s then-girlfriend Dorothy White, who’d been visiting Donald on campus that weekend. Bard’s administration posted bail for all Bard students and former students taken into custody that night. This included Walter, who was still hanging around campus despite having dropped out. It did not include Dorothy White, because she’d never been enrolled at Bard. A few weeks later, at graduation, Donald protested this injustice by refusing, not for the last time, to take the stage. Donald and Walter have never confirmed that the “My Old School” line “Tried to warn you / About Chino and Daddy Gee” refers to G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate infamy, nor have they identified Chino. But they’ve acknowledged what is historically true: before Liddy found his way into history by way of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, he’d been a crusading district attorney determined to protect the good people of Duchess County from the scourge of illegal drugs. “He was an extremely corny cop,” Walter said, eating a grape in an interview with Melody Maker. “He thought he was a detective, Dick Tracy or something.” In 1966, Liddy had directed a no-knock raid on Millbrook, the Bavarian mansion where Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) had settled after losing their positions at Harvard University for supplying psilocybin to undergraduates. Liddy’s plan to raid the house after its occupants fell asleep was foiled when the hippies stayed up late watching movies. (Foiled by Mr. Leary, showing his films in the den.) “The deputies assumed that the movies were pornographic, and there was some competition for the assignment to move into binocular range to obtain further information,” Liddy wrote in True magazine in 1974. The deputy chosen, Liddy said, “returned to report in a tone of complete disgust, ‘It ain’t no dirty movie; you’ll never guess what them hippies are watching. A waterfall.” After the Millbrook and Bard busts, Liddy campaigned unsuccessfully for Congress on a platform of “Law and Order, not weak-kneed sociology.” He lost the Republican primary, threatened to run as an independent, and was bought off with a job in the Nixon White House. On the Oval Office tapes, John Dean calls him “strange and strong” and describes his loyalty as “beyond the pale.” In 1973, after refusing to testify against the president, he was jailed along with six other participants in the Watergate burglary. When he was released in 1977, he told reporters he regretted nothing. He said, “I have lived as I believed I ought to have lived.” He also said, “When the Quan t um C r im inal s  |   40

prince approaches his lieutenant, the proper response of the lieutenant to the prince is, ‘Fiat voluntas tua,’” which is Latin for “thy will be done.” Liddy went on to a surreal pop-cultural afterlife. He and Leary hit the live-debate circuit together and goofed around like a cartoon wolf and sheepdog off the clock. He played villains on TV, in shows like Miami Vice and 18 Wheels of Justice. He’s also the villain of “My Old School.” His presence turns the song into a coming-of-age novel about sixties college students caught up in the warp of history, nabbed on dubious charges by a corny cop who will one day do dirty work for Richard Nixon. If there’s any particular reason Steely Dan never wrote a song containing one iota of political idealism, watching “the Wild Bill Hickok of the judiciary” (as Donald put it) become one of the president’s men has to have had something to do with it. Think of what it would have confirmed for you about this country had your uptight freshman-dorm RA grown up to be Bill Barr. Because he put more of it down on paper, we know more about Donald’s life than we probably ever will about Walter’s. It’s tempting to assume the snide and prideful woundedness in all the Bard songs is purely his. I still wonder, though, how much of the emotional valence of these songs—the feeling of abandonment behind the anger—comes from Walter, who grew up and shaped a life around the loss of his mother, which he’d later come to understand was an abandonment. Whatever is sneering or hateful in the Bard songs takes on a different cast when you think about the prodigal Giant Girlfriend as a stand-in for the absent mother, who dooms the protagonist to reenact her leaving by taking out his anger on a succession of Ladies Bayside. If the move to the suburbs is the wound at the heart of Donald’s nostalgia, losing a mother might be Walter’s, and the Bard songs intertwine those two feelings, one man’s longing and one man’s resentment. The closer you listen to “Like a Rolling Stone” the more you can hear the sneer in it, the derision, the insecurity, but the band behind Bob Dylan is making such an undeniable sound it pushes the song past what’s gnarled and shitty about it, turns it into a fanfare, into bells ringing in towers across the city. The same thing happens on “My Old School.” Mr. Steely Dan says goodbye to all that—his whole East Coast life, Daddy Gee, the county jail, the girl who didn’t care for Guadalajara. It fades in the rear view, and the wind that carries him to California is Skunk Baxter’s barking, backflipping guitar solo, played on a Stratocaster that Baxter had built with his own hands on the afternoon of the day the song was recorded, a guitar that had not yet felt a moment of frustration or neglect at the hands of its maker, and somehow sounds exactly like that.

Ch ino & Daddy Gee  |   41

O MIC HAEL , O J E S U S

Michael/ Jesus (Turn That Heartbeat Over Again)

The Brill Building, once the center of the commercial pop-music industry in America, is still standing, near the corner of 49th and Broadway, at the upper limit of Times Square, when Donald and Walter settle in New York in 1969. But the sun has been setting on its salad days since the first time John Lennon breathed into a harmonica at the top of “Love Me Do.” The Beatles loved the factory production-line pop that came out of the Brill Building, because no factory ever built it better. But because of the Beatles’ outsized influence, the future belongs to those who write and sing their own stuff. The Brill Building chapter of Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! ends with Brill songwriter Carole King in a car headed into Manhattan to see A Hard Day’s Night, begging her friends to turn the car around because she’s convinced the Beatles are destined to end the world as she’s known it. She’s right. By 1969, even King has moved to Laurel Canyon and put a band together. In 1969 Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who met at the Brill Building in 1957, still have a few hits ahead of them. That summer, Don Kirshner’s company down the street at 1650 Broadway will release what ends up being the year’s biggest single—“Sugar, Sugar,” by a studio band called the Archies. But the Brill Building approach to pop—transcendence via the assembly line, hipsters in cubicles folding salsa and R&B and orchestral bombast into precision-crafted hits cranked out on spec for the pop stars of tomorrow— is on its way out. 1969 is the year of Let It Be and Let It Bleed and Altamont and the Band 43

of Gypsys. Neil Young is taking bar-band pounders Crazy Horse into the studio with him for the first time. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are screaming. Miles Davis is in a studio a few blocks from the Brill about to plug jazz into a socket. James Brown is getting ready to throw it to Clyde Stubblefield for an eight-bar drum solo that hip-hop will later repurpose as infrastructure. Even the Temptations are singing about getting high. Yet, in this moment, as the airborne and contagious spirit of the ’60s calls everything about commercial music-making into question, Donald and Walter make their way to the Brill Building, where the action was. Irrelevancy stalks the halls, and the tenants’ efforts to evolve just make things worse. “During the late ’60s,” Donald recalled, “the Brill Building had been converted so that the offices now had all these shag rugs on the walls, this sort of cheesy drug-era stuff—everyone had gumball machines. It was very amusing.” But it’s the world that Donald and Walter are welcome to. They are a white half-Jewish* songwriting team of suburban/outer-borough extraction, so they resemble at least demographically the kinds of writers who made the Brill Building famous. Writing for others is also sort of the only option for two at-that-time-nonsinging songwriters who don’t have a band. But the sense this move makes is not purely logistical or financial. Donald and Walter, who will compose many a Steely Dan song from the perspective of young fogeys dismayed by the present, have finally made it to New York, but when they get there they seek out the last vestige of the old-school way of doing things—what remains of Tin Pan Alley in the age of Crazy Horse and the funky drummer. Of course they’re no more at home in this context than they’d be anywhere else. “They looked like insects, with no vibe coming from them,” a man named Kenny Vance will later say. “Like librarians on acid.” Vance is a member of the pop vocal group Jay and the Americans and a partner in a production and publishing entity called JATA along with Jay Black, the second guy to sing with the Americans as “Jay.” Donald and Walter have established a connection with Vance during a previous visit to the city. The story they tell is self-deprecating. They go door to door in the Brill like a couple of brush salesmen, and there’s some record-business convention so everybody’s out of town and the place is dead, but when they knock on the door of JATA one of the Americans answers the door, and that’s who they end up working with. Vance isn’t sure that Donald and Walter’s songs have commercial potential, but he knows they’ve got something. He hires Donald and Walter to write for JATA, paying them $50 for every song. * Becker was of Bavarian descent, but jokingly claimed tribal affinities as a son of Forest Hills: “I might as well be, you know: yish gdall, yish gdosh, baruch atah Adonai . . .”

Quan t um C r im inal s  |   44

K E N N Y VA N C E

Vance pays them extra to back Jay and the Americans on weekend concert dates. “We were in the band and there were four guys in suits in front of us,” Walter says. “It was like being part of the Four Tops.” Sometimes Jay’s wiseguy cronies come backstage to have their rings kissed, and when they do, they sneer at Becker and Fagen’s long hair. He throws them work arranging strings and horns for Jay and the Americans songs like “Tricia (Tell Your Daddy),” whose Jeff Barry–penned lyrics beg President Nixon’s daughter to use her position at the breakfast table to help stop the war: “Tell him he’s the man, Tricia / The world is in your hands, Tricia / Tell him that you’re not his only child / Cause he’s everybody’s Daddy for a while.” Most importantly, Vance gets Donald and Walter in a two-track recording studio on the Brill Building’s seventh floor and records some of their first professional demos. The idea is that other people might want to record these songs, but this doesn’t really happen. The demos, now widely bootlegged and streamable, reveal that Donald and Walter already knew their way around a chord change—“You Go Where I Go” could be a Goffin/King deep cut. But they also have this tendency to saddle a technically unassailable pop song with a title like “A Horse in Town” or “Android Warehouse” (whose lyrics predict the TV show Westworld’s images of naked decommissioned M ic ha el/J esus   |  45

replicants cooling in storage like statues in a haunted mansion) or an inscrutable lyric that shouts out “Billy Burroughs” or Avogadro’s number—some weird wrinkle guaranteed to turn a pop star’s “Yes” into an “If you think I’m going to record a song called ‘Brain Tap Shuffle,’ you’re out of your mind.” But until you notice the oddness of the words, Donald and Walter’s Brill Building songs almost seem like potential hits. They’re songs designed to meet the requirements of the Brill Building system while subliminally advertising a different sensibility to another, theoretical audience, the kind of people who might enjoy running into a reference to William Burroughs being “still on the nod” in an unexpected context. In other words, in showing off what they can actually do while also nominally doing what they’re being paid to do, they’re developing a primitive version of what will become the Steely Dan approach—lyrics full of oblique images and strange invocations (“Ease your head, play it cool in a patio chair / Try to design a

D EN N Y D IAS (P L AY E R)

Quan t um C r im inal s  |   46

postcard from your mind”) couched in music that slyly impersonates the easygoing mainstream-pop styles of the moment. The Brill Building demos are where Donald and Walter begin to negotiate Steely Dan’s sideways, symbiotic-yet-satirical relationship with pop music and its formulas. Becker and Fagen answer a Village Voice ad placed by Denny Dias, who’s looking for a bassist and a keyboardist for his band Demian, and they schlep out to Hicksville, Long Island, to play with him. Dias’s mountain-man looks belie the sophistication of his playing, but Becker and Fagen end up taking over the band pretty quickly, because they have all these songs; in Steely Dannish fashion one of their first moves is to fire Demian’s drummer and replace him with a guy they know, John Discepolo. Some of the Vance demos feature this band; the Dias/Fagen/Becker unit, credited as The Original Sound Track, records the score for You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat, a counterculture comedy starring future erotic-thriller auteur Zalman King, with cameos from Robert Downey Sr. and Richard Pryor. A review in the New York Times that calls the movie a “genial putdown of the Establishment” marks the first reference in the Paper of Record to Becker and his partner “Donald Fagin.” Once Steely Dan becomes a band, they record their first three albums between January 1972 and August 1974—less than a year and a half, while also touring harder and in a more hardscrabble way than they ever will again. They’ll find it hard to write on the road, and will fall back on Brill-era material, particularly on ’74’s Pretzel Logic, which reaches into the past for “Barrytown,” “Charlie Freak,” and “Parker’s Band.” But on their debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, in 1972, that old contradictory Brill Building Dan feeling comes through most clearly in “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again,” AM-radio pop with so many show-offy little rhythmic shifts and quick-change flourishes that it sounds like a medley, with words built to befuddle: “Love your mama, love your brother / Love ’em till they run for cover” is a natural hook worthy of Three Dog Night, but the next two lines are “Turn the light off, keep your shirt on / Cry a jag on me,” as inscrutable a set of imperatives as anything Bob Dylan burped out with the tape rolling in Big Pink’s basement. “Heartbeat” ends up being the last song on Can’t Buy a Thrill, and as in the first song on Can’t Buy a Thrill, there’s a man caught cheating at the card table, singing “Oh, Michael / Oh Jesus” to the angels, or to two guys named Michael and Jesus who are about to break his legs. What that has to do with “the corpse of William Wright” or the attempted package-store robbery in the first verse is probably not worth pondering. This is bad-faith pop, the message of which is that you should never trust pop songs, which are written for money by clever jerks in New York; put your hands together for the Loathing Spoonful. M ic ha el/J esus   |  47

The Charmer (Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me)

Donald and Walter are also literally writing future Steely Dan songs in their Brill Building period: the Brill-era demos include early stabs at “Barry­town,” “Charlie Freak,” “Any World That I’m Welcome To,” “Caves of Altamira”—which won’t turn up on a Steely Dan album until 1976—and also a mysteriously low-energy party song called “Ida Lee” with a reference to hooters and hats that gets repurposed in ’77 in the lyrics to “Josie.” They’re addressing fundamental new-to-New-York themes like “Everyone in this city is crazy, including me.” They’re workshopping future Dan classics for an audience of coffee cups and ashtrays, whether they know it or not. They’re practicing to be a marginal band that somehow still has seven platinum albums; if we can agree that one definition of “alternative rock” is left-of-center music that nonetheless catches the ear of radio, they’re pioneering it here. But they’re also trying on and discarding personas that won’t suit them. On the Brill Building version of “Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me,” which is still just called “Brooklyn,” Donald wears his Bob Dylan fascination as audibly as a head cold. The pace is slower than the one on Can’t Buy a Thrill two years later, a stroll along Desolation Row. There’s some lead guitar but the dominant instruments are an Al Kooperish organ and Donald’s wheeze, his studied and Dylanesque taffy-pulling of the oohs and ahhs in words like “room” and “dollars.” 48

THE C HARM E R U N D E R ME

“Brooklyn” seems like an attic-dump of oblique poetic images—angels, movie queens, tee times at the Eden Roc—but there’s logic behind it, straightforward and even autobiographical. When Donald and Walter move to New York, Times Square is where they work, but Brooklyn is where they live. They rent apartments in Park Slope. Back then, Donald said once, the neighborhood “had yet to become the Hipster Heaven that was to be. Back then it was still Archie Bunker Heaven. It was the sort of neighborhood where shoulder-length hair could provoke comments like ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ and ‘Go back to the Village!’” The writer Pete Hamill, newly divorced, moves to Brooklyn around the same time, and marvels in a 1969 New York Magazine cover story (“The Sane Alternative Is Brooklyn”) that in Park Slope it is “still possible . . . to rent a duplex with a garden for $200 a month, a half-block from the subway.” Forty years later, Hamill revisited this moment in Brooklyn’s history, in retrospect the beginning of an age of gentrification—the moment when idealistic proto-yuppies waded across the river to stake their claim on parts of Brooklyn that had been abandoned to representatives of Murder Incorporated and teenage zip-gun gangs in the Amboy Dukes tradition. “They found their separate ways to brownstones that were decaying, but not lost,” Hamill wrote. “Many of the older houses were owned by women who had outlived their husbands. They had fixed incomes, Social Security and pensions, and were forced to mutilate the houses in order to live. The long wide floors were often chopped into furnished rooms for single men (and a few women). The old pressed-tin ceilings, baroque fireplaces, and ornate plaster moldings were torn out. Sheetrock walls were built to form smaller rooms. Cheap sinks and toilets were installed in all of them. These young professionals looked at those houses and saw the future. They rolled the dice.” So “Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me” tells a gentrification story, in which two very different species of Brooklynite pass each other on the stairs of history. In this moment, you could pull up a bean bag chair in Donald’s apartment on President Street and listen to someone who’ll be identified in the liner notes to Can’t Buy a Thrill as “President Street Pete” bemoaning the shit that he’s been handed, both as a human being and a Mets fan. “Brooklyn” is Donald and Walter spinning President Street Pete’s internal monologue into something ornate and Dylanesque—Pete asking the universe for “a case of aces / Done up loose for dealing,” his ambitious wife who “daily preaches / On where she wants to be.” It’s cautionary, the tale of people who’ve watched life pass from a stoop; it contains the fear of a climber who worries about ending up a thwarted dreamer. Plus, they’re making fun of this guy a little by putting words this flowery in his mouth. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   50

It has a little of that Barton Fink feeling, a touch of the Young Literary Men Giving Voice to the Simple Folk. Donald and Walter would get better at imagining the inner lives for their characters. Before long, they’d arguably be better at that than Dylan himself, whose characters never seem like anything except shadows in the firelit cave of Bob’s brain. Does that make Steely Dan better than Bob Dylan? It’s an absurd question—but when I think of how many times I’ve opted for one over the other, I know what my actual answer is, even if I’m not prepared to argue it’s the right one.

Th e Cha r mer   |   51

F EL L A ( W HITE T UX E D O)

The Fella in theWhite Tuxedo (Bad Sneakers)

Sunbathe, and I drive Igor in the hills to air out his hangover. —V e ra S travi ns k y, diary entry, January 21, 1948, Los Angeles, California

The most prominent artist to record a pre–Dan Becker/Fagen joint in the early ’70s is Barbra Streisand, who puts “I Mean to Shine” on her 1971 Barbra Joan Streisand album alongside a Bacharach/David medley, two songs by John Lennon, and three by Carole King. It’s a footnote in their legend, but it’s pretty funny and cool that the only artist of any real prominence who tackles one of Donald and Walter’s unrecordable songs in this period is Streisand, another Jewish genius perfectionist obsessed with control of her artistic output. The Streisand deal comes about thanks to Donald and Walter’s friend Gary Katz, and in 1971 when Katz gets an A&R job at ABC/Dunhill Records in Los Angeles, he helps Donald and Walter out again, offering them $125 a week to join ABC as staff songwriters. So, fatefully, they move to LA—but really they move to apartments in a building in the San Fernando Valley, in Encino, because it’s where Gary Katz lives, and there are apartments to be had there. Brand-new ones: “Encino,” Becker would say later, “had apparently been built sometime in the previous two weeks.” In a few years Katz will produce Can’t Buy a Thrill, the first of seven 53

albums he’ll help Steely Dan make. But right now his job at ABC/Dunhill is to find and develop the kind of “underground” talent that ABC/Dunhill doesn’t currently have on its roster. (“Gary had a certain type of mustache,” Becker says later, “that convinced them that he would be a good underground producer.”) Donald doesn’t have a driver’s license and Becker doesn’t know how to drive, so Gary Katz drives them to and from the ABC/Dunhill office on Melrose Avenue every day. As staff songwriters they’re paid to write songs—hits, preferably—for ABC/Dunhill artists like Three Dog Night; Bobby Vinton; the Grass Roots; Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds; and Tommy Roe. “We really had to go out of our way, you know, to write a song for the Grassroots,” Becker told the music tabloid Zoo World in 1974. “We did it. I mean, we wrote some of the cheesiest songs that you ever heard. But, uh, they were so cheesy that they were laughable.”

GARY K ATZ

Quan t um C r im inal s  |   54

“If we had to come up with some good music that might have had a chance at radio,” Donald will say later, “we would spoil it by putting some lyric to it that couldn’t possibly be played on the radio.” Eventually ABC calls Donald and Walter’s bluff and forces them to put a band together. If they’re the only people who can play these songs, then it’s time for them to do so. They send for Denny Dias. Through Gary Katz they find a drummer named Jim Hodder and guitarist Skunk Baxter, who comes from a band called Ultimate Spinach. They meet Roger Nichols, a studio engineer at ABC who tells an interviewer years later that he got into the technical aspect of recording music because “I hated clicks, pops and ticks on records.” He’ll become their closest collaborator in the studio, a partner in perfectionism, the nearest thing to a third full-time contributor to the Steely Dan sound. “It wasn’t a drag for me to do things over and over until it was perfect, [which] would have driven a lot of other engineers up the wall,” Nichols said. “In my own way, I’m just as crazy as they are.” They rehearse at ABC/Dunhill, starting around six o’clock, when everybody else goes home and Skunk Baxter can drive over from his day job at a guitar shop. The group that becomes Steely Dan will play together in a windowless fifteen-square-foot fluorescent-lit office T RA N S I STOR RA D I O with white acoustic tile on the ceiling. What happens in the windowless office on Melrose is the beginning of something that might not have happened on the East Coast. As exiles making art in Los Angeles, Donald and Walter have joined a club that includes Igor Stravinsky, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, and Billy Wilder, and also the Beastie Boys, who like Steely Dan are great New Yorkers who enjoy supplying snappy answers to stupid questions and jazz-funk that weaves in and out of ironic quote marks, and who will come to LA a few years after Steely Dan have left it, in order to make a record that ends up being about New York—the kaleidoscope-eyed Paul’s Boutique, an Orange Julius memory palace populated by real and imagined people, from Ed Koch to Johnny Ryall, the High Plains Drifter to Saduharu Oh and the Egg Man. On Paul’s Boutique, the feeling of being somewhere else and on real good drugs but still longing for the avenues is implied. But “Bad Sneakers”—which surfaces on Katy Lied in 1975—is Mr. Steely Dan coming right out and saying he’s homesick for the city and some state of grace he’s convinced he’ll Th e F e lla in t he Wh it e Tuxe do   |   55

reattain the minute he’s stomping on the avenue by Radio City again, piña colada in hand. When they got to California, Donald and Walter continued writing about East Coast characters—their New York revue of schnooks— “and by the time we were finished, we had moved back to New York,” Walter said, “at which time we immediately started writing about California.” But the Fella in the White Tuxedo seems like LA, part of the scenery of purgatory, your basic attention-seeking Hollywood ding-dong in a getup Donald might nudge Walter to get a load of as they pass him in Gary Katz’s car. Los Angeles, Walter told Sounds in 1977, “does give you a creative vacuum in which to work. It gave us some new characters and new ideas, and it gave us a laboratory-type sterile atmosphere to work in. Because if you walk down the street here in California, you’ll be the only person doing it. Nobody gets out of their cars here. It’s a different kind of society.” Los Angeles plays itself for their enjoyment. They will make the first seven Steely Dan records there, and by the time they return to New York they will know LA well enough to capture what is seductive and ridiculous about it mercilessly and accurately in songs like “Aja” and “Glamour Profession.” But in “Bad Sneakers,” Los Angeles is a pike and there’s nothing good coming down it, and Mr. Steely Dan is far too sharp to let the place make him feel any way except crazy: “Do you take me for a fool / Do you think that I don’t see / That ditch out in the Valley that they’re digging just for me?” An inescapable doom with your name on it, like the Grim Reaper smiling and leaning on a luggage cart at baggage claim with MR. DAN scribbled on a shirt cardboard. To Encino, my good man. The notion of the Valley lying in wait to swallow Mr. Steely Dan whole might be even less metaphorical than it sounds. Reluctant as I am to lend credence to the comments section of Songmeanings.com—the weirdest website on the internet, absolute horse paste theories about music, no interpretation too farfetched, a forum for people determined to believe that Lonnie from “The Boston Rag” was “a little toddler that died of an illness back in 1965, but died after choking on items in the ‘playroom’”—I feel obligated to quote the following vintage traffic report, because I want it to be true: “The ‘fearsome excavation on Magnolia Boulevard’ was a 15-foot deep and wide hole the city dug in the early summer of 1974 that took up most of the right lane in front of the North Hollywood apartment building I lived in. The city left the hole open for several weeks with only a couple of cones and a sawhorse to warn drivers away from it. I felt it was only a matter of time before somebody drove their car into it and was surprised that no one did before they finally filled it in.” Years later, in a column for Premiere, Donald tells the too-good-to-be-true story of a German composer named Fritz Kriesel, who’s pictured in the story Quan t um C r im inal s  |   56

as someone who looks a lot like Donald Fagen in the accompanying photo. After his creative partnership with a playwright named Hugo Spaak goes sour, a Hollywood studio makes Kriesel a “handsome offer of employment.” He flees 1930s Germany and “the gathering eddies of war” for Los Angeles, abandons dissonance to write movie scores in “an illustrative, late-romantic style . . . more appropriate for the Hollywood film,” and marries a young actress. Then the HUAC calls him on the carpet for his association with Spaak. Kriesel denounces him as a Bolshevik, but his career is ruined nonetheless; dismissed by the studio, he spends the ’50s penning scores for low-rent horror movies with titles like The Spine Robbers and “doing his old novelty keyboard routine at parties under the patronizing gaze of Hollywood hostesses.” Then, in 1959, he gets a call from Spaak, who—under the name “Hank Silvers”—has become a TV writer for The Bud Calloway Variety Hour. Kriesel asks Spaak what happened to his ideals—“the violence, the subversion.” Hank Silvers replies, “Fritz, mein Freund, we’re now inside the belly of the beast.”

Th e F e lla in t he Wh it e Tuxe do   |   57

Dan

In the decorative images on ancient Greek pottery, in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, John Donne’s Elegies, Ben Johnson’s “The Alchemist,” the Renaissance-era satirical writings of Pietro Aretino, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, there are dildos. In the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe’s “The Choise of Valentines Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo,” whose dildo reference is supposedly the first in written English, the narrator’s unsatisfied lover reaches for her “little dildoe,” who “bendeth not, or foldeth any deal / But stands as stiff as he were made of steel.” In Restoration England, everyone’s favorite literary dildo is the one in “Signior Dildo (You Ladies All of Merry England),” a satirical poem by John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester. Riffing on the Duke of York’s recent and scandalous marriage to an Italian Catholic princess, Wilmot personifies the dildo as a fictional Italian nobleman who becomes the toast of England: You would take him at first for no person of note, Because he appears in a plain leather coat, But when you his virtuous abilities know, You’ll fall down and worship Signior Dildo.

Signior Dildo really gets around, for nineteen more double-entendre-filled verses. He’ll stand tall as the highest-achieving fictional dildo whose initials 58

STEELY DAN UM E N T A FT E R P H I L I P G U STON

are “S.D.” from the 1670s until the 1970s, when Walter and Donald find themselves in need of a band name and find one in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. In Naked Lunch, the dildo’s full name is “Steely Dan III from Yokohama.” It appears in a movie within the book—a stag film screened at a party in the lawless Interzone. A girl named Mary straps on Steely Dan III while explaining what happened to his predecessors Steely Dan I (“torn in two by a bull dyke”) and II (“Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Dan |   59

Baboons-asshole.”) Once she goes to work on Johnny, she’s joined by a turtle­necked guy named Mark; the wildly hallucinatory bisexual three-way scene that follows includes cannibalism, fire, multiple deaths by hanging, identity-swapping, linear time itself jumping “like a broken typewriter,” and a reference to “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” the Duke Ellington favorite later covered by Steely Dan (the band) on Pretzel Logic. Later, once the dildo becomes rock trivia, people will describe the dildo in Burroughs’s book as “hydraulic” or “steam-powered.” But this isn’t what Burroughs says about it. He calls it a “rubber penis.” It seems like your standard over-the-counter dildo. It does feature a mechanism that lets it spurt milk, but no one ever describes Steely Dan the band as being named for a “milk-spurting” dildo. Nor does anybody ever point out that the very next page of Naked Lunch includes the sentence “She puts on a record, metallic cocaine bebop,” a description that sounds like Burroughs imagining the sound of Steely Dan over a decade before they existed. If you know only one piece of trivia about Steely Dan, chances are it’s the dildo thing. (A Google search for “Steely Dan + dildo” returns almost 600,000 citations.) Every popular band has at least one thing they’re sick of being asked about in interviews. For Donald and Walter, it was Burroughs. In 1974 Walter tells Rolling Stone, “There always used to be a Beatnik Corner in the bookstore—Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder and so on,” and says that’s how he found Naked Lunch. He implies that it’s also an allusion to Skunk Baxter’s pedal steel guitar. Don’t focus on the dildo, is what he seems to be saying. The story’s headline reads “Steely Dan Comes Up Swinging: Number Five With a Dildo.” Becker also says their choice of a Burroughs-referencing band name “shouldn’t be read too literally.” But they weren’t not influenced by Burroughs. In the liner notes to Countdown to Ecstasy, the description of “The Boston Rag” reads as follows: “Enervated after an attack of unrelieved nostalgia, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter sheds his outer skin and stands revealed as a Wild Boy”—likely a reference to the feral, jockstrapped countercultural terrorists featured in Burroughs’s 1971 novel The Wild Boys, also a favorite of David Bowie’s and a key influence on the lyrical content and overall dystopian-sci-fi vibe of Bowie’s album Diamond Dogs, released in 1974. The Razor Boy, from the Countdown song of the same name, might be a Wild Boy, too; Burroughs, the original Razor Boy, used razor blades to produce his “cut-ups,” narratives formed through the juxtaposition of words and sentences sliced from unrelated texts. Donald and Walter were more linear in their approach, but Burroughs has to have shaped their tendency to pack a lyric with colorfully named walk-on characters whose cameos evoke a larger fictional world outside the song. If Burroughs had never dreamed up Green Tony, Hamburger Mary, Quan t um C r im inal s  |   60

Sammy the Butcher, Clem Snide, Doctor Benway, the Subliminal Kid, Colonel Arachnid, or Jimmy the Shrew, we might never have been introduced to Clean Willie, Snake Mary, Hoops McCann, Jive Miguel, or Doctor Wu. The street kids of Tangier, some of whom Burroughs allegedly paid for sex, knew the writer as “El Hombre Invisible.” At a party in Mexico City in 1951, he attempted to shoot a gin glass off the head of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, who was twenty-seven. The bullet struck her in the forehead and she died. He was never prosecuted and went on to be a famous author and a famous junkie, two things he would be for the rest of his life. In 1985 he wrote, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never become a writer but for Joan’s death . . . the death brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.” This is both profound and awfully convenient. Burroughs spoke in a tight Midwestern monotone, the voice of a private detective or an exterminator, two jobs he had in fact worked, and if you discovered him during his ’90s resurgence you probably knew him first as a voice. His struggle with the Ugly Spirit led him to patter over Bill Laswell beats on the college-radio staple “Words of Advice for Young People,” making videos with Ministry and noise records with Kurt Cobain and preaching about technology in a TV ad for Nike’s Air Max2. Everything he got involved with as a pop-culture figure was cooler for his involvement and, at the same time, all of it made Burroughs himself seem less cool. “The junkie on the street in Burroughs’ cosmology is the mythical center,” Marianne Faithfull wrote. “Burroughs, of course, never spent a day on the street and never took off his suit and tie except to fuck.” Conventional wisdom continues to file him in the Beatnik Corner, alongside more traditionally bohemian writers known for chasing kicks and wonder in spontaneous prose. But no other Beat wrote like Burroughs did—his work was nihilistic, violent, anti-authoritarian, steeped in paranoia, populated by fugitive junkies and secret agents. He stood both inside and outside the Beat movement, just as Steely Dan were simultaneously an emblematically studio-slick ’70s California rock band and merciless satirists pissing on the era of peaceful, easy feelings from inside the tent. A few years later, when the  New York Times writer Arthur Lubow tracked down Burroughs and played him Katy Lied, the author filed a thumbs-down review not dissimilar to the prevailing critical line among Dan-skeptical rock journalists. “These people are too fancy,” Burroughs said. “They’re too sophisticated, they’re doing too many things at once in a song. To write a bestseller, you can’t have too much going on. You take ‘The Godfather,’ the horse’s head. That’s great. But you can’t have a horse’s head on every page. These people tend to have too many horses’ heads.” Dan |   61

The dildo reference is the first horse’s head in the book of Steely Dan. It’s a provocation for the squares and a shibboleth for fellow hipsters and the first in a series of ostensibly audience-alienating gestures that become part of the band’s contrary mythos and actually make people like them even more. It’s two guys adopting as their nom de guerre a phallic reference they probably can’t legally explain on the radio. But more to the point, it’s two guys, two men, naming their band after a symbol of the phallus’s replaceability. The dildo threatens masculine primacy and the supposed natural order by offering nonreproductive sexual gratification on demand. Thomas Nashe knew it. When the “little dildoe” enters the picture in “The Choise of Valentines,” Nashe’s poor upstaged narrator spends the next twenty-plus lines talking all manner of shit about his inanimate rival: “Curse Eunuke dilldo, senceless, counterfet, / Who sooth maie fill, but neuer can Begett.” By naming themselves after a prop from a violent Burroughs sex scene, Donald and Walter are framing their band in a tradition of transgressive art about sex and death. But—whether this was intentional or not—the name also invoked falsehood, ersatzness, and masculinity in eclipse, all of which would become central Steely Dan themes. It wasn’t a bad name, in other words, for a band who’d sing song after song about male protagonists desperately clinging to an imperiled sense of world-mastery, with a “band” that was itself a falsehood, a device, a band of stand-ins, a band that, minus Walter and Donald, technically had— I apologize in advance for this—no actual members. It’s probably a total coincidence that a band named after a strap-on later had a big hit with a song called “Peg.” But it can’t mean nothing that, unlike Jelly Roll Morton, Tower of Power, Throbbing Gristle, The Sex Pistols, the Meat Puppets, Whitesnake, Helmet, Tool, Mushroomhead, Swollen Members, Velvet Revolver, and Third Eye Blind, when they picked a phallic band name, they picked one that referred explicitly to an anti-phallus, a counterfeit penis worn in fiction by a sexually dominant woman, as if to call out their swaggering ’70s peers as insecure phonies packing foil-wrapped zucchinis. And in their music, they’d eschew the traditional hard-driving forward motion of guitar-driven rock-’n’-roll in favor of something slipperier and more oblique. They might be the cock-rock tradition’s greatest traitors. But lend them your ears and they’ll sling you a dong.

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David (Dirty Work)

Co-lead singer of Steely Dan, late 1972–early 1973 History has settled the question of who the rightful lead singer of Steely Dan was. No one else but Donald Fagen could dial in the precise ratio of disdain and passion these songs call for. He’s the splash of vinegar that finishes the dish, the grit that makes the oyster. He and Walter were writing these songs for a Donald Fagen type to sing, even if they didn’t know it then, even if Donald couldn’t resist including notes that lay outside his range. There is no one Donald Fagen wouldn’t demand the impossible of, not even Donald Fagen. The fact that Donald is the lead singer of Steely Dan has become apparent to everyone else in Steely Dan and their inner circle by the time Steely Dan are in the studio making Can’t Buy a Thrill. But it’s not apparent to Donald, who still doesn’t think of himself as a singer and has never sung live with a band before. So at some point during the recording of the first album, Steely Dan begins looking around for somebody to share the burden of the lead-singer job, and that’s when Skunk Baxter suggests his old friend David Palmer. Palmer is originally from Warren Township, New Jersey, about forty-five minutes from the part of New Jersey where Donald grew up. He’s the former lead singer of a disbanded folk-rock quintet called the Myddle Class. Their biggest claim to something like fame involves a 1965 gig they played at a high school in Summit, New Jersey, notable because the opening band is the 63

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Velvet Underground, who are playing their first show under that name, and their first with one Maureen Tucker on drums. By the second song in the set—“Heroin,” reportedly—they have driven half the audience to the exits. Pretty much nothing cool happens to the Myddle Class ever again. Some terrible things do. Their guitar player, Rick Philp, moves to Boston, where he plays at least one show backing up a pre–Astral Weeks Van Morrison, and then in 1968 any future the Myddle Class might have had is foreclosed when Philp is murdered by his roommate. When Palmer gets the call about the Steely Dan job, he’s working in a plastics factory. They don’t have to ask him twice. He drives across the country and on the night of his first full day in California, he’s trying out to be the lead singer of Steely Dan. When Palmer joins the band it solves a few different problems, at least temporarily. He can sing things Donald can’t, and in a dim room he could pass for Roger Daltrey or Peter Frampton. He just looks like a rock-’n’-roll singer in a way no one else in Steely Dan does or ever will. No one else in Steely Dan owns a shiny shirt in three hot-dog-condiment colors and velvet bell-bottoms in a matching shade of mustard. In some of the Dan’s 1972 press photos, the band is arranged so that David’s ringleted head looms largest and most centrally, as if ABC/Dunhill’s PR department would be okay with you mistakenly assuming Palmer—and not the two glowering weirdos in the back—was the driving force of the whole thing. Under different circumstances, for a different kind of band, the introduction of a charismatic front man would have been the last piece of the puzzle. In a different band the lead-singer slot could even have become a power-sharing arrangement—Palmer as the extroverted lead singer, Donald as the laconic sunglassed piano player with mystique, their creative tension a perpetual-motion machine. But Steely Dan already has its central binary in Donald and Walter—the laconic guy and the really laconic guy—so Palmer’s not in Steely Dan for that long. He sings lead on two songs on the first album—“Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me” and “Dirty Work.” Donald and Walter write a few more songs for Palmer to sing at shows— “Mega­shine City,” “Hellbound Train,” and “Take My Money,” none of which ever get released. There is not a lot of footage of the ’70s Steely Dan lineup performing live. In the clips that do exist, the band does not make visual sense as a unit. They look like they all answered an ad and somehow a rock show broke out. They look like somebody passed out instruments and microphones to the guys in a police lineup. In one YouTube clip it’s 1972 and they’re playing “Reelin’ in the Years” on the UK’s Old Grey Whistle Test. This is the most instructive live footage of Steely Dan from the David Palmer era, in the sense that it illustrates why the David Palmer era lasted about four months. Dav id  |   65

Donald is on lead vocals, barking out the words as if announcing upcoming subway stops. Palmer has been given no specific job to do, so he frolics all over like some kind of laughing gnome. By the end of the song there seems to be no space onstage that he and his tambourine haven’t explored. He’s exhibiting an unseemly level of rock-’n’-roll enthusiasm, by Steely Dan standards. He will stay in the band long enough to record some backing vocals for the second Steely Dan album, Countdown to Ecstasy, but he’s out by the time it’s released. Palmer goes on to sing with another ABC Records band, the lite-prog outfit Wha-Koo. In 1975, with Carole King, he cowrites the lyrics for Carole’s hit “Jazzman,” about a midnight cruiser who can “fill a room with sadness as he fills his horn with tears,” and when Lisa Simpson’s saxophone mentor Bleeding Gums Murphy dies on The Simpsons, she sings this song to his cloud-ghost. Palmer is mostly working as a photographer now and seems in interviews to be at peace with having had a good time but not a long time with Steely Dan, although he did sue Steely Dan Inc. in 2014 for allegedly screwing him on satellite-radio royalties. Palmer might be a minor character in the Steely Dan story, but his time in the band is still a turning point. Donald and Walter don’t fully dissolve the first incarnation of Steely Dan in favor of a rotation of hired-and-fired guns until after 1974’s Pretzel Logic, but Palmer’s dismissal is the first glimpse we get of them being ruthlessly unsentimental about any notion of a rock band as a gang or a family. It’s where they start to define what Steely Dan is by discarding what they aren’t going to be. From here on they will affirm themselves through refusal. They will not smile in photos, they will not show their faces at all on the front covers of their albums, they will not write as if they care about being fully understood, after 1974 they will not play live for decades, and eventually they will stop playing together entirely, removing themselves from the equation, too. But there are a lot of people out there who know Steely Dan solely through their biggest hits, and for many of those people, David Palmer will always be the lead singer of Steely Dan, because Palmer sang lead on “Dirty Work,” which becomes an enduring classic-rock radio staple. It’s not one of Donald and Walter’s favorites, but it’s a perfect use of Palmer, whose winsome delivery suits the lyrics, the lament of a sidepiece sap who knows he’s cornered on the chessboard of romance. TV and movies have put a lot of mileage on the song and Palmer has represented Steely Dan in some pretty prestigious contexts. When the feds hide a bug in Tony Soprano’s basement while an oblivious Tony drives around singing along with the car radio, “Dirty Work,” is the song he’s singing, which had to be a big deal for a Jersey boy like Palmer. When Bradley Cooper, Amy Quan t um C r im inal s  |   66

Adams, and Christian Bale roll up to a tense meeting at the beginning of American Hustle, “Dirty Work” is how the soundtrack elbows us in the ribs about the precise nature of what they’re up to. And in the 2021 red-band trailer for Suicide Squad, syncopated explosions punctuate a remixed “Dirty Work” that takes Palmer’s already-unlikely pop culture afterlife to an even stranger place; those are David’s tender tones you hear as a man who is part shark tears another man in half at the waist.

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Mr. Whatever (Bodhisattva)

In 1972, in his column in the Pasadena Star-News, music critic Geoff Kelly reviews the latest from John Fahey, the Band’s Rock of Ages, John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High—“[music] as clean and fresh as the photo of the churning stream and snow-capped mountains which decorate the album cover”— and Bobby Charles’s self-titled debut, before finally getting around to a favorable mention of Can’t Buy a Thrill, the first album by a new outfit called Steely Dan. Kelly calls them “a competent folk-oriented rock band,” notes the album’s guest spots by Elliott Randall and Victor Feldman, and mentions that the band are currently appearing at the Ice House in Pasadena. “Steely Dan’s publicist says it’s the group’s debut appearance, as a group anyway,” Kelly writes. “The music shows they’re well worth a listen, even if none of those studio heavyweights”—Randall and Feldman—“are around to add to the proceedings.” But by this point in the column, it’s likely that the eyes of Pasadena have mostly already drifted to the right, lured by the headline JUNKIES COULD LIVE A JET SET LIFE ON COST OF HABIT. In the story, a drug counselor at a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury asks a young heroin addict, “How many Cadillacs do you think you have in your arm?” The apparently average $16,000 per-year cost of regular heroin use, he tells the kid, could buy a person in the San Francisco area: “A new Porsche Model 914 sports car . . . 12 months rent on a luxury apartment on Twin Peaks . . . all expenses 68

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of a three-week vacation in the Mediterranean . . . a complete stereo set Marantz amplifier, A.R. turntable, Bose speakers . . . 30 bottles of Chivas Regal scotch . . . 100 long-playing records . . .” and so on, for another full paragraph of king-sized waterbeds and season tickets to the 49ers and steaks and roasts and other forms of gold pushed straight into the veins of kids too far gone to realize how much they’re missing by neglecting to participate in aboveground capitalism. “Some of these kids are geniuses, creative people reduced to staring at their shoes,” says a Harvard psychologist. “I’d like to see a national research team formed to get to the bottom of this particular kind of death.” Steely Dan play sixty-something shows in 1973 and tape American Bandstand twice. In January, Dick Clark introduces them as purveyors of “thinking person’s music” before they play “Do It Again,” and in November, they come back without David Palmer to play “My Old School.” Everyone commits to the bit at a level of their own choosing, from Skunk Baxter (who, shirtless under white leather, actually pauses to fake-tune his low E string during the second verse like an absolute pro) to Denny Dias (who sways in a voluminous caftan from the My Old Lady Made It collection) to Walter (donning a baseball shirt and appearing almost flamboyantly not interested in pretending to play bass). Donald, free from the pressure to deliver an actual lead vocal, appears to be having a pretty good time, and looks remarkably like Steve Dallas from Bloom County minus the dangling cig. It’s not great television, but it’s great Steely Dan television—some misfits of the arts, shoved into an awkward position whose inherent absurdities they’re not in any way built to overcome, still giving it the old Bard College try. There was no other viable way to exist as a popular rock band in this era, which meant that Donald and Walter would eventually have to invent one. In the meantime, they keep doing shows—with the Doobie Brothers in Oregon and Washington and Utah, with the Guess Who in Chicago, with Sha Na Na and Cheech & Chong and Focus and Bread and Humble Pie and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. The bleakness of the vibe varies by the date, but Steely Dan travel with their own supply of fear and loathing. Donald’s fear is about his voice, especially after the band parts ways with Palmer and the job of full-time lead singer becomes Donald’s alone. In his 2013 book Eminent Hipsters—uncollected prose corralled into the shape of a memoir, including columns published in Premiere in the ’90s and a tour diary from 2012—we learn on page 1, at the outset of an appreciation of the Boswell Sisters, that Donald’s mother Eleanora was a Catskills swing-band singer whose career was cut short by stage fright during a radio appearance at age sixteen. Just over 100 pages later we find Donald, now sixty-four years old and out on the road with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald as Quan t um C r im inal s  |   70

the Dukes of September, feeling debilitated in some hotel in Vancouver, nursing a sore throat and typing with pain in the bones of his fingers from pounding the keys: “My mother was a natural singer, but I fell into the job by accident—I have to work like a dog just to get it out.” In the ’70s, Donald favors a preshow Valium and two immediately preshow tequila shots before taking the stage. But the Cuervo Gold and the fine anxiolytics can only go so far in terms of making the night a tolerable thing. “My voice would give out after two weeks on the road,” Donald will say about this period. “And that in turn would give me anxiety and stage fright.” In May 1973, Can’t Buy a Thrill goes gold. Steely Dan poses for photos with the guys from the record company. ABC/Dunhill head Jay Lasker wears a leisure suit like a prosperous dealer of camper vans. Donald and Skunk both wear platform heels. Denny Dias is wearing those sandals with a loop for your big toe. When the record-company guys step out of the shot, the members of Steely Dan pose with their gold-album plaques suspended from their belts at crotch height, so they resemble naked men who’ve grabbed framed record albums off the wall to hide their junk. Rock groups doing rock-group shenanigans, clowning for the camera together. This is as much of a band as Steely Dan will ever be. The second Dan album, Countdown to Ecstasy, recorded between tour dates in early 1973, is the only one Donald and Walter tailored to the strengths of a preexisting band; nothing else in the catalog rocks as hard or as traditionally as the outro to “The Boston Rag,” when Donald and Walter cede the floor to Skunk Baxter so he can surf lava for two minutes. The back cover of Countdown to Ecstasy is a shot of the band in a recordingstudio control room. Their facial expressions and collective vibe are that of porn-store proprietors caught in the act of fixing peep-show prices. But they also look like the rock band they would never really become—cocky, a little arrogant, a gang of tour-hardened road dogs hitting the studio just to bang out another set of songs as an excuse to get out there and pay dues on the Philadelphia-Atlanta-LA circuit. Hodder is sitting up on the console in a tank top, looking like the Dreamy One you’d foster a crush on. Walter has his shades on and his foot up on the console; Baxter is wearing an Olympia Beer tank top and has both feet up on the console. Denny Dias looks like he’s worried that the camera will steal his soul; Donald looks like he’s on his way to or from a studio-couch nap. There’s also a dirty ashtray positioned in the foreground of this picture, as if it’s a member of the group, and in it a butt still smolders. The ashtray might have ended up in the photo by accident, but an effort has been made to draw our attention to it. The group portrait is in black-and-white with a greenish cast, but certain things in the photo M r . What ev er  |   71

JEF F “ SKUN K ” BAX TE R ( P L AY E R)

have been hand-colored, like the knobs on the control-room machines, and the cherry at the tip of the cigarette is one of those things. Later, Becker will say, “There was an astonishing gap between our pretensions and the reality of our performances in those days, and it didn’t make us feel any better about what we were trying to do.” Touring becomes a confrontation with their own limitations exacerbated by the travails customary in the life of the opening band. Somebody has to play to a half-empty Palladium while fans who’ve come to see Black Oak Arkansas are still finding their seats or puking in the parking lot; if you were Donald and Walter, you might begin to question whether that somebody needed to be you. Pretzel Logic comes out on February 20, 1974, and a month after that they play a gig Quan t um C r im inal s  |   72

at the Record Plant, a Hollywood recording studio where the on-site amenities for visiting rock stars include themed suites in which to crash or stay awake. If these rooms could talk they’d decline to answer without counsel present. The show is broadcast live on freeform rock station KMET-FM, the Mighty Met. A DJ introduces Steely Dan while Jim Hodder is still making his way back from the men’s room. The band tunes up; Donald sings an exploratory Aaaaahhh like he’s opening wide at the dentist. But what follows sounds like an amazing show—the clearest extant recording of what Steely Dan sounded like as a loose and imperfect rock band playing together in a smallish space, just months before they stopped playing live at all. What was good enough for the Mighty Met’s audience wasn’t good enough for Donald and Walter, though. Any given bootleg recording of Steely Dan playing live in the ’70s presents an alternate history, a proposition about what kind of band they might have become if they hadn’t abandoned the road. Sometimes their discomfort with the live setting reads as a nihilistic anti-charisma. “This is a song about livin’ in Los Angeles, California,” Donald tells the crowd before playing “Show Biz Kids” at Java Joe’s in San Diego, audibly sneering like a hostile Arnold Horshack. “It’s about how scummy it is.” The San Diego crowd goes wild; Donald adds, “Put your mouth around that exhaust pipe and you just suck it in, man.” On almost all these live recordings they open with “Bodhisattva,” a song where Mr. Steely Dan vows to sell his house in town to go eat brown rice and polish a guru’s Rolls Royces. They tend to race through the song, as if to put it behind them, because the first song of the set is also the point where the end of the set is furthest away. By Steely Dan standards, these live shows induce in their participants an unacceptable level of terror and exuberance. Every time they play “Bodhisattva” in 1974—in Glendale, California, and Boston and Memphis, in Manchester, in Seattle—it turns into a frantic jitterbug workout, Skunk Baxter peeling off screaming surf-guitar runs, the rhythm section hanging onto the back of a fire truck turning corners on two wheels. Countdown to Ecstasy is the only Steely Dan album written with a touring rock band in mind, but every bootlegged “Bodhisattva” from spring ’74 makes the studio version that opens Countdown sound tentative and way too slow; it lacks the sense you get from the live versions that the band is channeling all their nervousness through the circuits of this music. There is no studio-recorded Steely Dan music that sounds like this; the only thing close is bootlegs of Prince in the ’80s doing “Jack U Off,” a song that is also on the very short list of rock songs you could dance the Charleston to. The ’74 “Bodhisattvas” are also a road map leading to the end of Steely Dan Mark I, which comes in July, after they play two shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. A version of “Bodhisattva” recorded live to tape at M r . What ev er  |   73

J ERO ME AN ITO N

the July 3, 1973, show in Santa Monica turns up at the end of the decade as the B-side to the “Hey Nineteen” single. The extended introduction is by Jerome Aniton, the band’s former equipment-truck driver. (“We had to fire him,” Donald tells Rolling Stone in 1974, “because he kept hitting auditorium doors with the truck, but we kept him on for his buildups.”) At this show Aniton sounds too intoxicated to stand; whatever he’s been imbibing, he’s as full as a glass cowboy boot. He still manages to deliver a consummate hype-man performance:

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. [The band laughs] We’re glad you made it here tonight, because you gonna miss out—you can tell your friend tomorrow that they gon’ miss out on all the [bleep]damn good things that we gon’ give you tonight. [Crowd cheers; rimshots and guitar zingers from the band.] Yeah. Right on. What we gonna give you tonight—it’ll be down to the nittygritty. Yeah! You can tell all your friends, way over in, uh, [place name that might be “Paris”]—hell, I don’t care, you can tell ’em in, over in Watts! [bleep] Ha ha ha. You can tell ’em—you can tell ’em tonight that Santa Monica has been def-un-ly set on fire. And they missed out on a damn good thing. The best thing ever happened to Santa Monica is gonna be here, tonight. And you can also—aww, you little ol’ bitty purty little pretty one, if he ain’t here tonight, huh, you can tell him forget it too. Because Mister Whatever is here tonight! He gonna get down tonight, brother! He gon’ get with it! He gonna give you somethin’ that Santa Monica done never had! If it good to ya, it gotta be good for ya. Right on. [Some feedback.] And one thing I can tell you, brother—he is here tonight. Mister Magnificent One is here.

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[Someone in the background, maybe in the band, says “Steely Dan,” as if willing this introduction to end. Someone else laughs on-mic. A drummer attempts an exploratory count-in.] The beautiful one is here. [laughs] And you little old pretty one here too. You know? Whatever. Here is the magnificent one, the one and only one, Mr. Steely Dan and whatever!

It’s a hilarious way to begin an evening of cerebral and sarcastic jazz-oriented rock, and maybe that’s the only reason it’s the sole officially released live recording of Steely Dan from this era—because it’s funny. But its inclusion on a single released years after they stopped touring also feels like an oblique allusion to why Donald and Walter stopped touring. Aniton, extravagantly wasted before the show even starts, serves as a symbol of everything the touring-rock-band lifestyle permits to extroverts and demands of the introverted. He could be introducing anyone, in any city, for all his introduction has to do with Steely Dan specifically, which might be the point; to continue as a viable touring band, Donald and Walter would have to have become false versions of themselves, powering through with the aid of various substances, Mr. Whatever wearing a lampshade as a mask for his anxiety and resentment, swallowing fear and determined to get down tonight. On July 5, two days after the Mr. Whatever show, they’ll play Santa Monica one more time. Their next live show under the Steely Dan name will not take place until 1993.

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LO U IS E

Louise (Pearl of the Quarter)

In 1974, on “Lady Marmalade,” Labelle made a disco hook out of a New Orleans sex worker’s voulez-vous come-ons, imagining a gray-flannel guy who books a lady for the evening, shares her magnolia wine, gets his world rocked on her black satin sheets, and then returns to his ordinary life, destined to be forever haunted by the memory of her mocha-choco-lata-ya-ya and the passion it brought out in him. “Pearl of the Quarter” came out first but feels like the next chapter of that story, in which we meet that same guy again years later, as a barfly clinging to the memory of a lover who probably forgot his name by the time his feet touched red-light-district sidewalk again, if she ever knew it in the first place. But he hasn’t forgotten hers. It’s Louise, and he wants her to know he still loves her; he’s telling you in case you see her around. He talks about Louise to everyone who comes in here; the regulars probably joke about it. All things being relative, this country lament from the perspective of a customer hung up on a sex worker is the closest thing to a traditionally romantic song on Countdown to Ecstasy and also the most empathetic, not toward Louise—who’s long gone from this story by the time we hear it, and whose own struggles are barely alluded to—but toward the narrator, who’s spent so long searching the night for his Louise that the night is all he has. Then Skunk Baxter’s pedal steel solo wanders in off the street, just to put a tear in everybody’s beer.

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Cathy (Your Gold Teeth)

In pictures of the Studio di Fonologia Musicale de Radio Milano, an electronicmusic facility that opened in 1955 in Milan, Italy, men stand by their equipment in jackets and ties or white lab coats. Their machines are arrayed against the wall in steel cases. The Studio’s equipment includes a tone-burst generator, a white-noise generator, and nine oscillators that can be tuned to produce sound at different frequencies. The Studio also has Cathy Berberian, who becomes known around the lab as the Tenth Oscillator, because she can produce sounds undreamt of by these machines just by opening her mouth. In a 1970 letter to her frequent collaborator John Cage, Cathy lists the vocal styles she can imitate: “Joan Baez, Milizia Korjus,* Sarah Vaughan, Chaliapin† . . . Clara Cluck singing opera (Caro Nome), Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Betty Boop, old fashioned “hilly-billy,” Russian gypsy, Gladys Swarthout,‡ Callas, Sicilian peasant, I can’t think of any more except maybe Mary Garden doing ‘Depuis le jour,’ etc.” She adds, “In any case, I’m willing to try anything.” In her openness to creative challenges, Berberian * Russian-Estonian soprano and 1930s film star, known as “Gorgeous Korjus” and “The Berlin Nightingale.” † Legendary opera singer Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin, popularizer of the Russian standard “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” ‡ American mezzo-soprano and diva of the New York Metropolitan Opera from 1929 through 1966.

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becomes inimitable—not only the most accomplished avant-garde vocalist of her era but also the most creatively down-for-whatever, the funniest, the most Pop. She was Harry Partch and Yma Sumac stitched into the same glittery cocktail-hostess gown. She’s like Steely Dan, in that she’s a titan without obvious inheritors or imitators, because most of what she did was just too hard to replicate. She’s an American, born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1925. When she’s around seven, she finds a pile of old 78s and a Victrola in an attic. As she listens to the Italian tenor Tito Schipa singing the Cavatina from Rossini’s Barber of Seville, she feels herself falling down a rabbit hole. She moves to Milan in the late fifties to study opera, places an ad looking for an accompanist so she can put herself on tape to audition for a Fulbright, and that’s how she comes to meet and eventually marry the composer Luciano Berio, who opens the Studio di Fonologia in 1957 inside S I LV E R S H OE S the headquarters of RAI, Italy’s national public broadcasting service. The following year, Berio invites John Cage to visit the Studio as an artist in residence. When Cage comes to Milan, Cathy hasn’t performed in public for years—she’s been busy taking care of Berio and the daughter they have together. At the Studio, Cage takes a razor blade to tape of Mussolini speeches and Milanese street noise and produces a piece called “Fontana Mix,” named for his Milanese landlady. It sounds like raw data raining on a tin roof—the whole twentieth century swirling down the drain of an electrified metal bathtub. But for Cage, the sound of Milan also includes Cathy. When he hears her singing around the house, he writes a piece for her, called “Aria,” which is meant to be performed on its own or simultaneously with “Fontana Mix.” In Cage’s complex hand-drawn score for “Aria” there are color-coded passages cueing the performer to switch to a different vocal style, but it’s up to the performer to choose which vocal style the colors denote. In Cathy’s version of “Aria,” dark blue means “jazz,” violet calls for “Marlene Dietrich,” yellow is for “coloratura,” and light blue equals “Baby.” Black squares in the score call for nonsinging noises, also at the singer’s discretion. Cathy chooses “tsk, tsk; footstomp; bird roll; snap, snap (fingers) clap; bark (dog); pained inhalation; peaceful exhalation; hoot of disdain; tongue click; exclamation of disgust; exclamation of anger; scream (having seen a mouse); ugh (as suggesting an American Indian); ha (laughter); expression of sexual pleasure.” Quan t um C r im inal s  |   80

“I was like an instrument locked in a box,” is what Cathy later says about her collaboration with Cage. “No one knew what was inside it until John opened it and started playing with some of the strings . . . but there were also many buttons and levers that no one had touched still, waiting to be discovered.” After “Fontana Mix,” Cathy becomes the vocalist to whom composers bring their most impossible and conceptual ideas. Music structured by chance, music where the score consists of fragmented text in dozens of languages, music written for voice and twenty-one types of percussion, including tearing paper and breaking glass. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati’s “Twice For Cathy,” from 1960, consists of ten pages of score. Each page is just a single letter from the phrase CITY GARDEN, to be “performed” in a manner of Cathy’s choosing, accompanied by a tape of the same piece performed with the CITY GARDEN pages in a different order, with reverb, echo, and tape-speed manipulation added, also at Cathy’s discretion. John Cage throws the I Ching, sees how it rolls, and produces Song Books, dedicated to Cathy and the singer Simone Rist, a work that’s less like a score and more like a set of oblique strategies or improv prompts: Using toothpicks and Kleenex . . . build an object resembling a wigwam. Speed—popular music—loss of interest—solfeggio-exercises + TERRIBLE ANGER Go off-stage at normal speed, hurrying back somewhat later.

In a photo taken at the Paris premiere of this piece, Cathy stands over a bemused Cage, handing him a plate of spaghetti she’s just cooked onstage. She splits up with Berio in 1965, throws wild psychedelic parties and wears wild psychedelic patterns, and dyes her hair platinum blonde, which makes her look even more like a pop star—Andy Warhol halfway to morphing into Marilyn. She wants to entertain. She records baroque takes on the Beatles, singing the French-horn part of “Hide Your Love Away” in flawless fa-la-las. Her “Ticket to Ride,” from 1967’s Beatles Arias, is undeniably hilarious, but at no point does Cathy seem to be mocking the Beatles or the idea of doing a Beatles song in the style of a Handel oratorio. She’s imagining an approach to popular art-song that can communicate in the same bold, graspable, disarmingly funny terms as Pop Art. In one filmed interview, Cathy—with a drink in her hand, wearing a turtle­neck and gold chain—says that people in the contemporary music world are like horses in blinders, and that she simply wants them to see Cat hy  |   81

how good the Beatles are, as one way of getting away from the serious, ritualized, mask-like idea of contemporary music. Cathy does not do mask-like. Even as she leaps across different octaves; different languages; impressions; non­verbal sound effects; and actorly simulations of emotions like bewilderment, tenderness, nobility, joy, urgency, her singing always sounds like speaking, like her natural voice. Like a soloist on a Steely Dan song, she takes flight but maintains control of that expression at all times, embodying the paradox of busting loose within parameters. In 1966 she performs her first original composition, Stripsody, the score of which consists of sound effects borrowed from comic strips—words like GRRRR and MEOW MEOW, carefully notated. Performing “Stripsody,” Cathy yells like Tarzan, sneezes, meows, barks, snores, spots a bird or a plane that turns out to be Superman, fires an invisible machine gun, twists an imaginary dial from “Ticket to Ride” to the weather report, and impersonates Charlie Brown yelling at the kite-eating tree, delineating one discrete moment from the next by making panel borders with her hands. Before the guitar break in the song “Your Gold Teeth,” and then again after it’s over, Donald Fagen sings the line “Even Cathy Berberian knows / There’s one roulade she can’t sing.” The song is yet another one about a woman who’s doing the narrator wrong; the line with Cathy’s name in it is just a colorful way of saying that everybody’s luck runs out YOUR GO L D TEETH eventually. You’ll pay the Razor Boy today or you’ll pay tomorrow. But the reference may also speak to how Steely Dan saw themselves. Packing odd-angled jazz chords into songs theoretically destined for FM-radio airplay alongside “Smoke on the Water” and “We’re an American Band” is, in a sense, a mingling of high and low culture as deliberate as Cathy’s mashups of humor and experimentalism, John Cage and bubblegum, Peanuts and Thoreau. In one of her notebooks, later quoted by a biographer, Cathy sums it up in a line that Donald or Walter might have dropped in an interview to befuddle some hapless representative of the teenage rock media: “One man’s kitsch,” she writes, “is another man’s kunst.”

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The El Supremo (Show Biz Kids)

Considering that one thing rock music has always been good at is wedging open gaps between generations, you’d think there’d be more rock songs about being afraid of people younger and cooler than you. The only one that immediately comes to mind that isn’t by Steely Dan is LCD Soundsystem’s instantly definitive anthem of creeping irrelevancy “Losing My Edge,” where bandleader James Murphy speak-sings as an aging hipster of encyclopedic pretension, admitting that even he feels the breath of younger, more knowledgeable downtown cool kids on his neck every time he steps inside the DJ booth. He rattles off his claims to underground fame (“I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids / I played it at CBGBs / Everybody thought I was crazy”) as if scrambling to spend a fistful of outdated currency whose value he knows is cratering. Steely Dan were the first band to sing about this feeling. As much as their 1981 hit “Hey Nineteen” is about plying nubile roller skaters with cocaine and tequila, it’s also about how hanging out with young people can make you feel incredibly old, even if you’re barely out of your twenties. It’s a theme Donald and Walter returned and returned to throughout their career. The Katy Lied album cut “Your Gold Teeth II”—a sequel that has almost nothing to do with the original, except for the morbid image of someone shooting craps with their dental prostheses—is sung by a narrator both tempted and terrified by feral teenagers, asking “Who are these children who scream and run wild / And why do I tremble each time they ride by?” 83

THE EL S U P RE MO

But the first and strangest Steely Dan song addressing the existential threat of young people not giving a fuck about anybody else is “Show Biz Kids,” which appears at the top of Side 2 of Countdown to Ecstasy. In the liner notes it’s explained as follows: “The Dan moves to L.A. and is forced to give an oral report.” The music is urgent and lowdown—session ringer Rick Derringer’s rusty-Sawzall slide guitar out front, vibes pushing hard, a drum groove so insistent it might be tape-looped, backup singers chanting “Lost Wages, you go to Lost Wages” like a cryptic warning to gambler Jack from “Do It Again.” The track’s relentless forward motion urges us to listen, telling us that what Mr. Steely Dan is prepared to reveal here, about the secret lives of the showbiz kids, is no joke—although Donald’s florid vocal clues you in that it might be. Donald sings this one like a country preacher aiming to both thrill and chill his audience with a lurid fire-and-brimstone sermon based on firsthand knowledge of the West Coast’s fleshpots. “Lost Wages” is how Lenny Bruce referred to Vegas, but in this song, it feels like shorthand for Hollywood, too—two sin cities slurred together as Los Vegas, a Grand Theft Autoish conflation of their seamiest aspects. Although Mr. Steely Dan is, in this story, a figure of judgmental rectitude, he has been to Lost Wages and has seen how they do things there. These are his bona fides, his qualifications to judge. He’s been around the world; he’s seen the Washington Zoo. Do you know what happens after closing time at the Guernsey Fair? Do you even know what the Guernsey Fair is? Well, Mr. Steely Dan does, so when he declaims against the showbiz kids, attention must be paid. It would be one thing if Mr. Steely Dan were some naïf from the sticks who’d never seen the inside of the nation’s finer zoos, but he isn’t and he has. So you’d best believe that the showbiz kids’ way of nightlife—because everything Mr. Steely Dan is describing takes place at night, while “the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light,” obligated as they are to get up and work in the morning, like you and me and Mr. Steely Dan are—is pretty shocking, if it’s shocking to a worldly guy like him. Yet there are also hints that Mr. Steely Dan might be a little nuts—about this issue, and maybe in general. He says he’s been in the Washington Zoo, for one thing, which is a strange way of putting it unless he was a literal resident of the monkey house. And when he finally gets down to the specifics of what he’s seen of the showbiz kids’ lives, the first thing he says, before he even mentions the booze or anything else, is “They got the house on the corner / With the rug inside,” as if carpeting is the first and most obvious indicator of monied decadence, as if neither Mr. Steely Dan nor his audience would ever dream of such ostentation, as if even unrolling a nice runner in the hallway would be a sin because you’re hiding your floors from God. Th e El S upr emo   |   85

The line about the rug feels like a placeholder that Donald and Walter never got around to replacing with something else. It’s not like the word “rug” even fits particularly well in the place it’s holding. Donald has to stretch it a little, adding an extra half-syllable’s worth of emphasis, ruuuug as opposed to just rug. So it’s been put there and left there for a reason. We’re supposed to wonder why he’s telling us this about the rug. Maybe it’s that there’s nothing but rugs in the house on the corner, rugs and party supplies—“They got the booze they need / All that money can buy”—and that this is the context in which the showbiz kids will make movies of themselves. It’s possible (and, let’s face it, probable, given whose song this is) that those movies are pornographic in nature, and maybe that’s what Mr. Steely Dan is driving at. As in another LCD Soundsystem song, all the furniture is in the garage, and the rugs are there for the showbiz kids to writhe on and film the action for purposes that might be self-promotional or simply perverted. But I’m not sure we can trust Mr. Steely Dan on the issue of what is and isn’t pornographic. At least here, in the verse about the rug, Mr. Steely Dan seems like he’s the kind of guy whose aversion to dirt is so powerful he cannot bear to wash his hands. His disapproval is puritanical but it’s the puritanism of the scandal-rag newspaper, a puritanism that lingers a little too long at the keyhole, noting and cataloguing every last sin being committed on the other side. It turns out the thing that really upsets and flusters Mr. Steely Dan about the showbiz kids isn’t whatever they’re doing in that house on those rugs—it’s their allure. And he’s trying to tell us that the showbiz kids are frightening for just this reason, because they have the power to fascinate, but he ends up surrendering to his own fascination: “They got the heavenly bodies / They got the Steely Dan t-shirt / And for the coup-a-de-grace / They’re outrageous.” As much as this is a song about Donald and Walter’s experience of LA and its nightlife, it feels like it’s also decanting Donald and Walter’s alienation from and/or fear of their own audience, and their sense—sharpened around this time, no doubt, by the experience of touring the country as an opening band and playing this very considered and erudite and nuanced music to teenybop crowds too wasted to notice the subtleties that they were being robbed of by feckless soundmen and shitty hockey-arena acoustics—that they were beginning to take part in show business in a way that made them feel uncomfortable, turning their art into a series of motions to be gone through, an excuse for the merch guys to sell Steely Dan T-shirts and for the beer guys to sell beer, just another revenue stream for “the El Supremo / In the room at the top of the stairs,” whom I’ve always envisioned as the nebulously mobbed-up creep who lurks in the shadows of every rock show Quan t um C r im inal s  |   86

no matter how ostensibly communal, counting the money after closing time and doling out some insulting fraction of it to the so-called artists. But “Show Biz Kids” is also a deeply and darkly funny song that takes that feeling of sellout revulsion—Donald and Walter’s own arch disgust at their chosen profession and the social realities specific to it—and magnifies those feelings into something severe and hysterical and absurd, something that cannot possibly be taken seriously. They’re cynical about rock-’n’-roll becoming an arm of the entertainment industry, but they’re also cynical about their own cynicism, hence the line about the showbiz kids wearing Steely Dan T-shirts, which is Donald and Walter acknowledging that the problem they’re calling attention to here is one they’re also part of. Their confrontation with a potentially principle-compromising level of rock stardom was coming, but it would have to wait. Countdown to Ecstasy, destined to go down in history as the coolest Steely Dan album, will also end up being the lowest-selling Dan album of their ’70s run—the only one that still isn’t platinum, despite the ubiquity of “My Old School.” In 1973 at least, the showbiz kids preferred Grand Funk, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or Alice Cooper, whose “Generation Landslide” tells a not-dissimilar story from the perspective of the kids whose parents are afraid of them. “Show Biz Kids” itself becomes STEELY DAN T SHIRT a child’s-perspective song some years later, when Rickie Lee Jones puts her version of it on a covers album called It’s Like This, setting a Becker/Fagen original on a symbolic shelf alongside numbers by the brothers Gershwin, Lerner and Loewe, and Lennon/McCartney. Jones takes some of the song’s confusing specifics and converts them into universals. In her version, “The Guernsey Fair” is now “the country fair,” and the part about the Washington Zoo becomes “I’ve been to Washington, too,” and Rickie Lee Jones sings these and the rest of Donald and Walter’s words like she’s a kid telling you a secret, and you’re another kid so new to the ways of the world you barely know to stay away from the El Supremo’s room, or where Washington even is, so you’d better stick with her. Many years later, Jones will write in a memoir about her stint as secretary to a man she calls Rocky the Gangster, who shows her his money clip and the pistol in his drawer and makes her sit on his lap. “Looking at him like he was a creep, I liked to think I shamed him, but he was probably without shame,” she writes. In exchange for enduring Th e El S upr emo   |   87

this, she gets a paycheck and enough time alone in the office to write songs like “Young Blood” and “Company,” another artist striking a bargain with the El Supremo at the top of the stair. “Show Biz Kids” is five minutes and twenty-four seconds long, but the coolest and therefore most important part of the song occurs in the narrow slice of runtime between 3:49 and 3:56. Up until this point Victor Feldman’s marimba has done split duty as a rhythm instrument, a source of supplemental melodic color, and a decorative device to bridge one moment and the next, mimicking and underlining Donald’s vocal—see the little descending flourish of mallet-hits behind “Honey let me tell you” around 2:36. But at 3:49, the guitar drops out for a second and Feldman plays the same one or two marimba bars in double time as Donald gets to the part about the show business kids making movies of themselves and the fucks the show business kids do not give, punching syllables on the downbeat—“SHOW business kids, makin’ movies of ’emselves, you know they DON’T give a FUCK-A-BOUTannnnybody else,” is how it sounds. On Countdown to Ecstasy, Steely Dan seem poised to embark on a long career as a rock-’n’-roll outfit far wilder and looser than the one they’d soon become. But no other seven-second passage on this album goes anywhere near as hard as 3:49 through 3:56 of “Show Biz Kids.” And this truth is not lost on the members of Super Furry Animals, a psychedelic-rock band from Cardiff, Wales. In 1996, they build a song around a sample of Donald singing “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else” and call it “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck.” When they want to release the song as the B-side to their new single, they ask for Donald and Walter’s permission to use the sample, and at first Donald and Walter say no, so the Super Furry Animals go off and come up with a different B-side. But when it’s time to put out their next single they ask again, and this time Donald and Walter agree to let them sample Donald, but they have to kick 95 percent of the royalties back to Donald and Walter. The Super Furry Animals agree to this deal, in part because what they’ve created, in looping these ten words from “Show Biz Kids” and turning it into the backbone of a song, is a piece of music that contains fifty-plus instances of Donald Fagen singing the F-word and is therefore not destined for much more commercial-radio play than “Show Biz Kids” itself ever got, for much the same reason. You can see how Donald and Walter, on listening to “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck,” could have concluded they were entitled to 95 percent of the song, which would not be much of a song without Donald’s voice. But that doesn’t mean the Super Furry Animals haven’t committed an independent act of songwriting in their use of it. “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” begins with a distorted scream, which gets clipped from the mix inside of two seconds, Quan t um C r im inal s  |   88

replaced by hazy keyboards, a rattle of guitar strings, and the voice of singer Gruff Rhys, murmuring about living under a cloud, about feeling like the TV is staring back into him. He’s trying to articulate an emotional state he can’t quite name, something that exists past hopelessness or maybe on the other side of hopelessness. But after a minute he gives up, screams again, and the rest of the band comes crashing in, like some kind of Mad Max chop-shop assault vehicle roaring out of a cloud of desert dust, with that “Show Biz Kids” sample flying like a battle flag and Donald singing You know they don’t give a fuck as if strapped to the front grill as a human hood ornament. The band presses down harder and harder, every instrument a hammer hitting the word Don’t at once. The guitars fill up the mix, until the feedback and distortion become a geyser lifting Donald higher and higher. It feels like they could ride this riff forever, for eight minutes, for ten, or twenty, and at the end of most Super Furry Animals shows for years after this, that’s what they’ll do with this song, sometimes while wearing full-body Sasquatch costumes under their guitars. But on the record, the storm finally breaks and almost everything disappears except one ringing fuzz-tone chord and the ghost of a small piano. The Super Furry Animals come back in gradually, singing “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else” in what becomes droll four-part Beach Boys-at-the-barbershop harmony. This is the only thing they can do with the force they’ve unleashed in the first part of this song, the only place they can take the feeling that comes over you when you’ve chant-screamed You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else this many times while thinking about the Man and the fucks that he does not give about anyone and the cosmic cruelty of that indifference. They have to channel it into a comforting template, into something that resembles a deliberate performance, a show. But the song has other plans. It wants to go back to being a geyser. By the time the second vocal-harmony part comes in, the guitars are revving back to life, getting ready to chase the bass and drums, and before long the sound is swelling into a storm that the Super Furry Animals are trying to outrun, and when the main riff comes back in, the music isn’t a geyser anymore. It’s a wave and the wave is everywhere, a tsunami hurling boats miles inland, blasting beach-town infrastructure into splinters, like maybe later they’ll find Donald’s body in a tree somewhere and marvel at it, how he could possibly have gotten all the way up there, so far from where he started out.

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The King of the World (King of the World)

The first four words of the official band bio posted at the now-infrequently updated SteelyDan.com are “Once upon a time”; the next six are “there were two boomers, Donald and Walter.” The next paragraph describes Donald and Walter’s outer-borough New York childhoods as being generally “placid and suburban” but also colored by “a needling agitation just below the surface of everyday reality” due in part to “the Cold War and the constant, looming threat of a global, nuclear holocaust.” Later, on Donald’s album The Nightfly, some suburban kids throw an underground wingding in their parents’ bomb shelter, dreaming of living long enough to move to Manhattan. But before that, Donald and Walter will imagine California tumbling into the sea in “My Old School,” white-collar crooks cutting out to Australia one step ahead of financial collapse in “Black Friday,” portents of Biblical destruction in “Babylon Sisters.” Later, on their post-9/11 album Everything Must Go, Donald will sing “The Last Mall” in the voice of a retail-store manager exhorting customers to stock up on toys and goodies in preparation for “The Big Adios.” As sons of the nuclear age weaned on literary science fiction, Steely Dan thought more about the end of the world and what might follow it than most rock bands of their vintage who didn’t play metal. “King of the World,” whose mix of bubbling synth and rippling pedal steel uncannily anticipates passages from Stereolab’s 1997 avant-lounge classic Dots and Loops, is their 90

THE CHEC KOU T G I RLS ( “ T H E L AST MA L L” )

first apocalypse song. In this case, the apocalypse has already happened; the King of the World is Mr. Steely Dan, by default, because he’s the only person left. He drives around the wasteland, calling out on the radio in search of someone to share his “poison wine” and smoke his “cobalt cigarettes.” He faces the end of everything the way you’d expect a Steely Dan protagonist to handle such a situation; he reads outdated newspapers and still gets pissed off about the city going to hell, even though all the muggers and panhandlers are presumably long vaporized. “Typical devastation,” Walter said once, explaining this song. “We wrote it after watching Ray Milland in Panic in Year Zero.” In that 1962 film, a blaring big-band jazz score by exotica pioneer Les Baxter seems to menace Milland—who also directed—and his wife Jean Hagen even before a nuke takes out Los Angeles during their family vacation. The radio emits a pulse of dread when Milland and Hagen are just standing in their suburban driveway, wondering what’s keeping their teenage son (a long-in-the-tooth Frankie Avalon). But the way Mr. Steely Dan whiles away the postapocalypse reminds me just as much of Charlton Heston in 1971’s The Omega Man, tooling around downtown LA in a red Ford Galaxie convertible, listening to “Theme from a Summer Place” on 8-track and pausing occasionally to spray abandoned buildings with machine-gun fire whenever he spots a mutant watching from a window. Heston plays a former Army scientist who believes himself to be the lone survivor of a pandemic that’s killed most of the people on Earth and turned everyone else into murderous albino vampire-zombies. But really he seems like he’s just playing Charlton Heston, handling the end of the world the way Charlton Heston would, whether he’s watching the last movie on Earth—the Woodstock concert film—and contemptuously mouthing every word of the insipid hippie dialogue or holed up back home in his townhouse with his looted art collection and his J&B, playing chess with a bust of Caesar and listening to smooth jazz on the hi-fi. He’s not just the last man in the city but the last real man. (The albinos who gather outside his place every night to taunt him from the street are known as the Family, like Manson’s followers.) The movie feels like a satire of alpha masculinity soldiering on, pigheaded and oblivious, despite the downfall of the society that enabled it, although that may not have been the filmmakers’ or Mr. Heston’s intention. We are once again living in apocalyptic times. This book was completed just as the renewed threat of nuclear war with Russia managed to push a still-simmering global pandemic off the metaphorical front page. In 1973, when Countdown to Ecstasy came out, the possibility of old-school mushroom-cloud Armageddon was no less real than it had ever been. But even in the songs that didn’t openly invoke the visions of world destruction Quan t um C r im inal s  |   92

that had shadowed their youth, Donald and Walter seemed to be writing about a different kind of apocalypse, a world where the apocalypse had in some spiritual or interpersonal if not global way already happened, erasing all forms of human obligation and all standards of behavior, just like an actual apocalypse would. Their characters are paranoid, sequestered survivors, sealed off from each other in bunkers of the soul, or they’re showbiz kids and sisters of Babylon losing themselves to indulgence as if there’s no future. Typical devastation: you too might write yourself into an end-ofthe-world story under those circumstances, even if you hadn’t stayed up late smoking cigarettes and watching news of no tomorrow break on Ray Milland’s face.

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RI K K I

Rikki (Rikki Don’t Lose That Number)

There really is a Rikki. Her full name is Rikki Ducornet. Her husband is on the faculty at Bard, and that’s how she comes to know a Bard student named Donald Fagen. She is also pregnant when Donald gives her his number. So when she loses that number she is maybe losing it on principle, but that doesn’t make it into the song Donald writes her name into. Later Rikki Ducornet will remember seeing Donald and Walter play in bands there, and she’ll say she thought they were all right, but that she didn’t think Chevy Chase was much of a drummer. Some years after Donald leaves Bard, in 1974, a Steely Dan song called “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” goes to number 4 on the Hot 100, higher than any Steely Dan song before or since—a much better chart performance, honestly, than you’d expect of a love song about interpersonal entropy that flaunts a piano hook pilfered from Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” as if stepping out in Dad’s old fedora. “Rikki” appears on Steely Dan’s third album, Pretzel Logic, also from 1974. In the album’s gatefold photo, the same five-man Steely Dan lineup that glowered on the back of Countdown to Ecstasy poses under the wings of a barrel-chested stone eagle. They look more like Black Sabbath here than they ever have or will. They also look wary. They have reason to be wary. Three out of five of them—the three guys who are not named Becker or Fagen—are on their way out. 95

Countdown’s back cover includes a detailed list of who played what when, with featured “specialists” like percussionist Victor Feldman and guitarist Rick Derringer separated from the core band and credited in smaller type. The Pretzel Logic package doesn’t name the members of Steely Dan at all, but there’s a paragraph-long “Special Thanks” to eighteen contributing musicians, including a number of future Dan session regulars, from bassist Chuck Rainey to guitarist Dean Parks to drummers Jim Gordon and Jeff Porcaro, as well as keyboard ace Michael Omartian—the only Steely Dan guest star who’ll go on to play on or produce dozens of albums of contemporary Christian music. The rhythm section on Pretzel Logic is mostly Rainey—who around this time is also playing with Aretha Franklin, Joe Cocker, and Donald Byrd—and Gordon, a first-call studio drummer throughout the ’60s and a member of Derek & the Dominos. There’s also Jeff Porcaro, who’s only nineteen but

JEF F P OR CA RO

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M IC H A E L OM A RT I A N

already a veteran of Sonny & Cher’s road band, plays on “Night By Night,” and doubles up with Gordon on “Parker’s Band.” He’ll be twenty when he plays on all but one song from Katy Lied, and twenty-three in 1977, when he co-founds Toto. What these liner notes are explaining, in a polite way, is that on Pretzel Logic the original Steely Dan band is giving way to Steely Dan Mark II—that is, a version of Steely Dan that’s just Donald, usually but not always Walter, and a rotation of hired guns handpicked for the work on deck. The critic and musician and onetime art dealer Dave Hickey once wrote that one of the sacraments of his life as a freelancer was daily reruns of the 1950s TV mystery series Perry Mason, whose depiction of a familial professional unit—Perry, played by Raymond Burr, and his loyal staff—reminded Hickey of the rock bands he’d played in.* In that same essay Hickey notes that when he left graduate school to run a gallery, he spent a year or so “helplessly addicted to Mission Impossible, which I quickly recognized as the Church of

* Hickey: “In this sense, then, both rock-’n’-roll bands and Perry Mason’s staff reconstitute the ideal of the American family in its original, nineteenth-century form, as a quasi-democratic, mercantile unit (the family farm, the family firm, the vaudeville act)—as a collective endeavor in which the static rigor of single-provider patriarchy is mitigated by issues of competence and merit, by the exigencies of collaboration, and finally, by the ethics of the task at hand . . .”

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the Small Business Guy, because for one hour, every week, there was a task to be performed, and by God it was! If you needed expertise, you sent out for the best people—and they all showed up! Right on time, and they didn’t hate one another, or call in sick, or show up stoned, or complain about the bucks, or loaf on the job. They were fucking professionals, who could operate the equipment—and the equipment, my friend, always worked!” Pretzel Logic is where Donald and Walter release themselves from their obligation to pursue the Perry Mason approach and go full Mission Impossible. Pretzel Logic drops in February 1974 and the Dan stop touring in July. After that there’s no need to maintain a full-time band and therefore no argument against bringing in the best session players a day rate could buy. They’ll spend the rest of the ’70s discarding a different Steely Dan lineup at the end of every session, like day-traders dumping stock. The session guys come in and are given their instructions; nobody hears the songs beforehand. (“We wanted their first thoughts,” Gary Katz said.) Whatever combination of musicians ultimately nails the takes that make it onto the record becomes that day’s version of Steely Dan. All this feeds the legend of their perfectionism. But in their view, they’re just after the same level of performance and especially rhythmic tightness that your average R&B bandleader would expect from his musicians. Years later, Donald will say the original members were “good sports” about being slowly but surely replaced, “to the extent that they didn’t quit or throw a screaming shit fit right there on the spot, but it didn’t really make sense to them that we wanted to do that. It was like, contrary to the ethical understanding they had of the band.” Skunk Baxter is the first to leave. He joins the Doobie Brothers the same year Pretzel Logic comes out, and when he recruits Steely Dan backup singer and occasional keyboardist Michael McDonald into the Doobies, their involvement will transform that band. In the 1990s he starts reading aviation magazines, and before long he’s a self-taught expert on missile defense. He goes on to chair Congress’s civilian missile-defense advisory board; he is presumably the only person with top-level Pentagon security clearance who also played pedal steel on the Lemonheads’ It’s a Shame About Ray. Denny Dias is the original member who sticks around the longest. He’s in the mix up through Aja, where he’s one of three people who play guitar on the title track along with Walter and Larry Carlton. He does a little session work for other bands after that, but not much; nothing really compares to being in Steely Dan. Eventually Dias becomes a computer programmer, although he keeps playing music here and there, playing in a band with Spanky McFarlane from Spanky and Our Gang and touring in the ’90s as a guitarist for Toto. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   98

After Steely Dan, Jim Hodder plays on Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” and Sammy Hagar’s first solo album Nine on a Ten Scale and the first three albums by Starsky & Hutch star David Soul. In 1990, he drowns in his pool in Point Arena, California, at the age of forty-two. The local sheriff says his blood alcohol level is .28 percent, three times the legal limit, and that Hodder “had recently been drinking to excess and was taking a prescription medication (Valium) to avert alcohol withdrawal symptoms and another medication for a seizure disorder.” Pretzel Logic is transitional—made fast, between tours, by a band that was functionally breaking up. The rush-job feeling comes through in the song selection, heavy on Brill Building–era Becker/Fagen songs like the bebop tribute “Parker’s Band” and the prog-baroque “Charlie Freak,” plus a cover of the Duke Ellington band’s theme song “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” rendered as Disneyland Dixieland, with Becker imitating the punch-drunk-frog voice

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of Bubber Miley’s plunger-muted trumpet on wah-wah guitar—their only true jazz cover, emblematically ersatz right down to the gong at the end. They do have time to write their biggest hit, a quintessential Steely Dan song in that it’s about both Bard College and the lies men tell themselves. (The only thing that keeps it from hitting the Dan trifecta is the lack of an open drug reference, although the urban myth persists that the “number” in question is a joint someone’s sent to Rikki through the US mail.) The singer might be a stalker, confidently asserting that he and Rikki are meant to be together and in time she’ll realize it. Or it might just be Donald channeling his callow Bard College self again, coming out of the chorus puffed up with snotty, condescending bravado—“You tell yourself you’re not my kind / But you don’t even know your mind”—that deflates by the end of the next line, helplessly hopeful: “You could have a change of heart.” By the end of the ’70s, the name “Rikki” will briefly enter the Social Security A L E T T E R TO YOU RS E L F Administration’s list of the top 1,000 baby names, part of a small but meaningful footprint left in demographic history by 1970s rock songs named after cool girls. In the decade to come, most of these Rikkis will go to high schools full of Brandys, Mandys, Angies, and maybe the occasional Rhiannon, Candida, or Windy. After moving on from Bard, Rikki Ducornet will spend some time in France and come home, in 1974, to find the radio calling her name. Donald Fagen’s voice finds her in airports and sushi bars. “Often it would happen at moments of feeling really lost,” she said in 2019, when a reporter found her alive and well and painting and writing in Port Townsend, Washington, “like I was losing my way.” But “Rikki” becomes a hit because other people also think Donald is singing to them. Or the song makes them think of whoever their Rikki is— that person they wish would pick up the phone and reach across whatever gulf has come between them. In 1974, the seventies are still sorting out the sixties; wondering what became of people is a national pastime. That feeling is already there in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, set in Los Angeles four years before Pretzel Logic came out. Hippie private eye Larry “Doc” Sportello does a lot of looking for people he knows no one can find. “Doc had known it to happen,” Pynchon writes, “that those left behind would refuse to believe that people they loved or even only took the same classes Quan t um C r im inal s  |   100

with were really dead. They came up with all kinds of alternate stories so it wouldn’t have to be true.” But even Sportello has his Rikki, in the form of his old girlfriend Shasta Fay, who resurfaces out of nowhere in the novel’s opening pages to pull him into a vast conspiracy and is last seen on the beach, about to disappear again: “Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did.” Donald sings “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” as if he’d like to come across as another stoic gumshoe too wise to wait by the phone, but with every breath his voice gives him away as the other kind of ’70s man, the guy who’s forever chasing a ghost across the surf.

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The Major Dude (Any Major Dude Will Tell You)

The narrator of “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” is telling you he’s a major dude himself without coming out and saying it, because a major dude is cool and cool don’t advertise. Anyway, his specific dude-dom is not the issue. The point is that he’s telling you things any major dude would tell you, things a major dude understands about the world and the nature of his and others’ places in it. Don’t take his word for it. These truths are noble, universal, dude-evident. Fact-check them with another dude, with any dude. You’ll see. The dynamic of the dialogue in “Any Major Dude” suggests the Fonz dropping knowledge on Richie Cunningham and Potsie, or Damone talking to Mark Ratner about putting on Led Zeppelin IV when it’s time to make out. We’re supposed to find the major dude a little heroic and also a little silly. Some of Pretzel Logic dates back to New York, but “Any Major Dude” was written in California, as Becker and Fagen maladapted to life in a place where saying the word “dude” was but one of many weird things people did unironically. But “Any Major Dude” is also operating in a storied pop tradition. Kenny Rogers in “The Gambler” is a major dude giving advice. So are Mick Jagger in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and Steve Perry in Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” In Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” a major dude tells you what he learned from his mom. Actually a lot of major-dude advice songs are mom songs—“Let It Be” is written as Paul McCartney relaying 102

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advice from “Mother Mary,” and if you believe the story that he wrote it for Julian Lennon during John and Cynthia Lennon’s divorce, “Hey Jude” is a major dude (Paul, arguably one of the most major dudes) singing to a minor child. A major dude might counsel you that life’s a bitch, that everybody hurts, that you’ve gotta fight for your right to party. (Oasis’s best advice song advises you not to put your life in the hands of a rock-’n’-roll band—it’s major dudes telling you not to listen to what major dudes might tell you, a paradox on par with “Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball.”) For me, “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” is all about the Denny Dias guitar breaks at the end of each chorus—the parts of the song that Jerry Garcia might have taken for a long and scenic walk, curlicue riffs shaped like question marks. The question they punctuate: How seriously are we supposed to take “Any Major Dude,” one of Steely Dan’s dumbest songs and one of their most beautiful? The intro, straight-facedly acoustic, teases a campfire “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” until Donald pulls a Rhodes from his rucksack. The words could be a commercial jingle for feelings, or possibly gum: “I never seen you lookin’ so bad, my funky one / If you wanna taste the sunshine try Bubble Yum.” It’s a warm setting for coldly comforting advice. Stepping into Fonzie’s office, we learn that, ayyyyy, suffering is universal and inescapable. It’s not that things aren’t so bad, it’s that they’re tough all over. Even having half a heart hurts. As evidence, the Major Dude submits his own tears. In Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys, the blocked, stoned novelist Grady Tripp and his editor Terry Crabtree are Dan fans who spend hours pondering “the meaning of a certain enigmatic question in the lyrics to ‘Any Major Dude,’” which has to be the query in the second verse: “Have you ever seen a squonk’s tears? Well, look at mine.” In other words, even a major dude cries copiously. Like “skronk,” coined by the rock critic Robert Christgau in 1981 as an Adam West Batman sound effect for the racket made by Arto Lindsay’s no wave punk-jazz combo DNA, “squonk” is a word you could squeeze from a saxophone. But it’s also the name of an apocryphal endangered species. Jorge Luis Borges’s 1969 Book of Imaginary Beings files the squonk between the Sphinx and Swedenborg’s Angels. Its entry consists entirely of a quoted excerpt from forester and conservationist William T. Cox’s Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, an early twentieth-century field guide to the cryptids rumored in logging-camp folklore to inhabit America’s vanishing timberland. Native to the hemlock forests of Pennsylvania and ashamed of its warts, moles, and ill-fitting skin, the squonk cries constantly, and hunters find it easy to track its salty trail. Cox writes that when cornered or surprised, the squonk “may even dissolve itself in tears.” Quan t um C r im inal s  |   104

S QU ON K

Cox then recounts the story of a Mr. J. P. Wentling, who “made a clever capture by mimicking the squonk and inducing it to hop into a sack, in which he was carrying it home, when suddenly the burden lightened, and the weeping ceased. Wentling unslung the sack and looked in. There was nothing but tears and bubbles.” So the Major Dude is comparing himself to an animal that can literally cry itself into incorporeality. The life experience that qualifies him to give advice to the lifelorn has also left him profoundly sad, and maybe this is what it is to be a Major Dude. You wind up crying in a sack because it hurts to be real. The dude knows that all things pass but also understands how cold that comfort is. The inescapability of suffering requires detachment; it might be why “cool” was invented in the first place. You either learn to work the saxophone or die behind the wheel.

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Mr. Parker (Parker’s Band)

Donald, in his seventies, puts on Charlie Parker, volume low, to fall asleep. He relays this to Leo Sidran on a podcast in 2020. He tells Sidran about the things he’s always heard in Parker’s music. A brotherly feeling between the players. A paradoxical sweetness, even in Parker’s heart-racing speedruns through the changes of old standards. “It retained the warmth of Harold Arlen and Gershwin, even though he had these jagged lines that he was playing over it,” he says. “To me it’s like the perfect music.” In that same interview Donald marvels at the cheering audiences you can hear on live recordings of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band from jazz’s heyday, how big those crowds sound, and curses the music’s present-day detractors and desecrators. He tees off on Fred Armisen for making fun of jazz on a stand-up special (“I’ll never watch him again. I never wanna see that guy again. Y’know why? ’Cause he’s an idiot . . . I now despise the guy. That’s just how I am”) and Damien Chazelle (“Fuck that motherfucker”) for “making it seem like white people invented jazz” in La La Land and confusing “stage-band student jazz” for the real thing in Whiplash (“He doesn’t even know what it is, and yet he’s making movies about it? It’s disgusting. He must be really dumb”). Jazz is always under siege, dying, being neglected, dragged through the mud by comedians. It needs champions like Donald and Walter. “Parker’s Band,” from 1974’s Pretzel Logic, is a rock song about Charlie Parker the way Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” is a funk song about Duke Ellington, except that “Sir Duke” is about the timelessness of certain pioneers, whereas “Parker’s 107

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Band” pretends time hasn’t passed. Donald keeps urging us to “come on . . . and take a piece of Mr. Parker’s band,” shouting out “a new saxophone sensation . . . Kansas City born and growing,” using the present tense throughout. It plays like a commercial for Mr. Parker’s band, as if Mr. Parker’s band might be coming to your town soon, as if Charlie Parker is still out there on the road, maybe supporting Mountain or Deep Purple. In reality, by 1974, Charlie Parker has been dead since 1955, the year Donald Fagen turned seven. Nevertheless, the song says in so many words, let us go unto him.

When asked what “Bird” meant to black people, the jazz drummer Art Blakey supposedly replied, “They never heard of him and care less.” But to a certain breed of hipster, Parker—at least between the advent of bebop around 1945 and his death ten years later, of lobar pneumonia exacerbated by years of heroin and alcohol abuse—was the protagonist of the story of jazz in this country, its existential hero. “Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him,” Thomas Pynchon wrote in V, his first novel, published in 1963. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   108

“Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will—a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact—possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: ‘Bird Lives.’” In 1962, roughing up Parker a little in a Saturday Review essay on Robert Reisner’s oral biography Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, Ralph Ellison calls him a “‘white’ hero.” “His greatest significance,” Ellison wrote, “was for the educated white middle-class youth whose reactions to the inconsistencies of American life was the stance of casting off its education, language, dress, manners and moral standards: a revolt, apolitical in nature, which finds its most dramatic instance in the figure of the so-called white hipster. . . . For the postwar jazznik, Parker was Bird, a suffering, psychically wounded, law-breaking, life-affirming hero. . . . He was an obsessed outsider—and Bird was thrice alienated: as Negro, as addict, as exponent of a new and disturbing development in jazz—whose tortured and in many ways criminal striving for personal and moral integration invokes a sense of tragic fellowship in those who saw in his agony a ritualization of their own fears, rebellions and hunger for creativity.” “Parker’s Band” is BIRD LIVES graffiti sprayed by a couple of educated white middle-class postwar jazzniks with a record deal and a platform. At some point you get the sense that Donald’s childhood sense of the important things happening elsewhere hardened into a conviction that everything real had already happened, as it often does. You should see Parker’s band, but you can’t. Everything now occurring in jazz is taking place within an envelope of possibility created by Charlie Parker and defined by what he could do with the music, and in perfecting it he becomes the boundary of what it can achieve, and anyone trying to go past that is vandalizing the music in the name of novelty. But “Parker’s Band” is also a Steely Dan song, which means you can see Donald and Walter winking at you from inside it. Their experience of jazz is culturally white and fundamentally suburban, and by insisting on Charlie Parker’s primacy two decades after his death— pretending the intervening years didn’t happen—they sound just like countless other purists who’ve seen it as their duty to defend jazz against living innovators throughout the music’s history. But by selling you Charlie Parker on a rock album in 1974 as if he’s the newest in new, Donald and Walter are also making a joke out of their own conservatism, and beyond that their own irrelevance to the discussion. They meant what they were saying, but they also seem to have understood how it marked them as a couple of young fogeys. In the end all “Parker’s Band” really has to sell you is nostalgia as narcotic: “We will spend a dizzy weekend smacked into a trance.” M r . Pa r ker   |   109

Buzz (Through with Buzz)

Back when we were courting, my wife and I bought a mirror off the street on whose surface somebody had written, in wax pencil, BENNY—YOU COME FROM A LONG LINE OF FINKS. DON’T CALL. SAM. The guy selling it couldn’t tell us how the words got there; maybe he’d written them himself, hoping the illusion of a backstory would help sell the mirror. Either way, we never cleaned it. “Through with Buzz,” the shortest song on any Steely Dan album, tells a story the way that mirror told a story. The first thing Donald sings is “He takes all my money,” and from there the song unfolds like one side of a phone conversation that is none of your business but that you’ll tell people about later. It compresses what seems like years of burgeoning resentment and weird codependence into a tight ninety-two seconds. There’s even a string section on the track, and maybe that was what was funny to Donald and Walter about “Through with Buzz”—the idea of lavishing all this attention on a throwaway, an interlude. On Pretzel Logic it’s second on Side 2, like a buffer to ease the downshift from the buoyant “Parker’s Band” to the downbeat title track. It’s a song whose significance Walter would later shrug off: “The less said about that one, the better.” What is it about? It’s about ninety seconds. But for a notebook-margin caricature of an anonymous narrator complaining about some frustrating weirdo he knows, it gets at fundamental Steely Dan themes. 110

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The body of work that Donald and Walter produced together is an extended meditation on the unsustainability of the three-way as a shape for human relationships. It’s there right away, on Can’t Buy a Thrill, in “Do It Again”—Jack, finding his “two-timer” in bed with his “only friend”—and “Dirty Work,” the lament of a married woman’s lover, with the husband as the inconvenient third, and it’s there all the way through Two Against Nature, in which the subject of “Gaslighting Abbie” finds herself in a dysfunctional threesome and the narrator of “Janie Runaway” proposes one to his teenage paramour. And the broken relationship eulogized in “West of Hollywood” seems to have flamed out around the arrival on the scene of a Bu zz  |   111

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mysterious extra man: “Now at this time / Into our pretty story / The truth compels us / To bring a certain name / Meet if you will / Dr. Warren Kruger.” Dr. Kruger comes and goes even quicker than Buzz. But what we get from this story and his position within it is that any given relationship might be one Warren Kruger away from collapse. “Jack of Speed,” from that same record, counts too—Mr. Steely Dan breaking it to a friend that she’s lost her man Teddy to a substance (“He’s a oneway rider on the shriek express / And his new best friend is at the throttle, more or less”). There’s a whole mini-subgenre of love-triangle songs in the Dan catalog where one of the parties might actually be a metaphor for some drug. “The Razor Boy” coming to take Mr. Steely Dan’s girlfriend’s fancy things away might be cocaine personified, and probably so’s the monkey in “Monkey in Your Soul,” and in “Doctor Wu,” what seems like a happy and maybe even healthy therapeutic relationship between Mr. Steely Dan and the titular doctor is complicated by the comings and goings of Katy, who lies—unless it’s Doctor Wu who’s responsible for getting Mr. Steely Dan strung out in the first place. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   112

In Steely Dan there are standard love triangles like “My Rival” and “Everything You Did,” the latter a confrontation over infidelity that leads to the narrator demanding his lover participate in a reenactment of what she got up to with the other guy. There are also non­standard love triangles: Babs from “Haitian Divorce,” her new husband Clean Willie, and the island GR EEN EAR RIN G S gentleman Babs hooks up with during a footloose Caribbean vacation post-split. The narrator, his lover, and her emeralds in “Green Earrings,” sung in the voice of a man who can’t be himself in a relationship because at the core of that self, he’s a jewel thief who could never love another person as much as he loves to steal. “Rose Darling” plays like a love song, but it’s a Steely Dan love song, built around asymmetry. Mr. Steely Dan calls to Rose Darling and reassures her

ROS E DA RL I N G

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that “Snake Mary,” who wouldn’t approve, won’t find out—but the first two verses say nothing about Rose, and dwell on Snake Mary: “I would guess she’s in Detroit, with lots of money in the bank / Although I could be wrong.” Snake Mary becomes the biggest part of the song by being the person Mr. Steely Dan tells Rose Darling not to worry about; she seems like the most interesting character in the story. Robert Christgau once referred to Steely Dan as “the Grateful Dead of bad vibes,” and maybe they are, in the sense that an evil mirror–universe Dead would be very into telling everyone in the band what to play and for how long. But maybe Donald and Walter are also the Lennon and McCartney of bad vibes, forever rewriting “Two of Us” as “Three of Us” and struggling to balance the equation. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   114

ANGEL

Napoleon (Pretzel Logic)

Donald Fagen said Pretzel Logic’s title track is about time travel, so Napoleon in this scenario is the real Napoleon, whose Waterloo was, y’know, Waterloo: “When it says ‘I stepped up on the platform / The man gave me the news’ we conceived the platform as a teleportation platform,” Fagen explained. “And there are other key lines like: ‘I have never met Napoleon but I plan to find the time.’ What we’re actually saying is I plan to find the time in which he lived.” Especially in the ’70s, every hard-touring rock band eventually got around to writing a song about what it was like to be in a hard-touring rock band. But it figures that Donald and Walter, nonconforming in so many respects, didn’t get around to writing theirs until they were about to take a nineteenyear hiatus from playing live. Everybody else sang about how hard and lonely touring could be, but Donald and Walter actually did something about it, quitting the road to burrow deeper into their neuroses in the studio. It also figures, somehow, that their hard-touring-rock-band song—their “Truckin’,” their “Turn the Page,” their “Wanted Dead or Alive,” their “Range Life”—is also about time travel, with a slight detour into fundamentally American racial weirdness. “I’d love to tour the Southland in a traveling minstrel show,” Donald sings—and then he sings it again, in case we weren’t already wondering what kind of minstrel show he’s thinking of. What the narrator of the song is really yearning for, though, is access to a 116

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historical moment in which he’d be more appreciated than he is in the present. He wants to tour the Southland in a traveling minstrel show because he’s positive his stuff would kill on the circuit. He says he wants—that he’s dying—to be a star and “make them laugh,” that he wants to “sound just like a record on a phonograph,” and the next line after that is “Those days are gone forever / Over a long time ago.” Like T Bone Burnett said, “Science fiction and nostalgia are the same thing,” and only in a science-fictional universe can Mr. Steely Dan experience show business as he’d have liked to. And even his fantasy of authenticity includes the bursting of his bubble—in the last verse, where Michael McDonald steps in for Donald, the guy imagines arriving in the past and being clowned there: “The man gave me the news / He said, ‘You must be joking, son / Where did you get those shoes?” Nap oleon  |  117

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The Archbishop (Black Friday)

In “Black Friday,” the Archbishop is a little like the guru in “Bodhisattva”— a spiritual figure who might enable our worldly protagonist’s rebirth into a new life. Except in “Bodhisattva,” the narrator knows he’s got to give up his house in town and all it signifies if he wants to be enlightened. The guy in “Black Friday” is thinking ahead to some calamity—a market collapse, or something worse—that he intends to escape by faking his own death, and he wants the Archbishop to sanctify him after he digs himself a hole and lies down in it. The reference echoes “I’m Gonna Dig Myself a Hole,” a 1951 fallout-shelter blues song by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, best known for the original recording of “That’s All Right,” which passed into the historical deep freeze the first time Elvis breathed on it. Crudup looks at his draft notice, considers taking his baby underground, dreams of emerging when there “won’t be no wars around.” The guy in “Black Friday,” on the other hand, thinks about catching a one-way flight to Australia when the shit goes down, and about the chumps who won’t be so lucky, jumping out of their office windows. “Black Friday” evokes the Great Depression but foreshadows a lot of situations Steely Dan cannot have anticipated—Black Monday, the dot-com crash, the financial crisis of the 2000s—in which certain people still got away cleaner, and richer, than most. The collapse of everything presents the narrator with an opportunity for 119

reinvention; the last thing he says is “I guess I’ll change my name.” But the line about the “gray men” falling from the fourteenth floor is retroactively but unavoidably a 9/11 image now, too soon by three decades. Steely Dan painted so many darkly satirical pictures of the near future in their music that have proved uncannily prophetic; this has to be another reason their catalog now spellbinds millennial listeners born years after they stopped making Quaaludes. This is how the fourth Steely Dan album Katy Lied starts—with a song about the upside of calamity, and Donald’s keyboard fading up from silence on the intro. Like Zeno’s arrow, the sound flies at you but never quite arrives. There are better and worse sounding editions of Katy Lied out there, and Dan-heads love to argue about which ones are which, but all of them have the same slightly muffled, remote quality; even when you’re standing in front of the speakers, the music doesn’t push the air around the way a crisp copy of Aja does. This was not an effect Donald and Walter were shooting for. Katy Lied is the first record they made as a purely studio-based unit. On the back cover there are pictures of Donald and Walter and Denny Dias (in a sombrero, holding what’s either a fire extinguisher or a nitrous-oxide tank), but also of session drummer Jeff Porcaro and backup singer Michael McDonL I T T L E B L AC K B OOK ald, as well as engineer Roger Nichols and producer Gary Katz. A liner note refers to the “very expensive German microphones” and the “variable depth helium cooled cutting head” on the lathe used to cut the lacquer for the master recordings. “We had our radical super hi-fi monitor system that consisted of electromagnetic flat panel Magnaplanar speakers with three amplifiers and two sub-woofers and active crossover tuned to the room with a real time analyzer,” Denny Dias wrote years later. “They sounded great. The songs were great. The musicians were grateful. What could go wrong? Well, things happened. Some could be attributed to human error. Others could be blamed on mechanical failure. The rest will never be explained.” Steely Dan entered ABC Recording Studios in 1975 with the best gear and the best intentions and quickly found themselves embattled by the unseen. A steam generator meant to keep the room at optimum humidity acts up, fogging the control-room glass and putting a wet haze on every sound. Later, Quan t um C r im inal s  |   120

a new noise-reduction system—“which was supposed to give us a better signal to noise ratio than Dolby,” Dias wrote—renders the music “dull and lifeless” when they try to mix the 24-track master tapes down to 2-track stereo. The album is remixed using Dolby’s noise-reduction process, but when it’s time to cut a master, it becomes clear that there are frequencies on the original tapes that can’t be transferred to a record. For a time, Dias takes over a process he’ll later describe as “a desperate attempt to produce a vinyl disk that could be played on an average phonograph,” and then Becker steps in to produce the final mix. But there’s still an unbridgeable gulf between what Donald and Walter and the musicians could hear themselves doing in that room, with their electromagnetic speakers and real-time analyzers, and what can be etched into a record for other people to hear. Becker will later say he never listens to Katy Lied. Once you’ve lived with Katy Lied it’s hard to imagine it sounding any way except the way it sounds—the basement-apartment rumble of the bass, the hollow underwater quality of the drums on “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” the way the cymbals on “Dr. Wu” hiss like an inner tube’s last breath. Like the photo on the album cover, the music is greenish-brown and outof-focus, and it doesn’t get that much sharper or more present even if you crank the volume; every copy of Katy Lied sounds like an old cassette tape baked in dashboard sun for three or more summers. You can’t hear Katy Lied the way Donald and Walter intended; the only Katy Lied experience you can have is the compromised version. Steely Dan are famous, or infamous, for their perfectionism, for redoing and redoing and redoing until the oxide flaked from their master tapes. But when you get down to it, so many of the stories about how their records came to be are really stories about human error and Steely Dan falling victim to circumstances even control freaks couldn’t control. In the liner notes to the 1998 reissue of Countdown to Ecstasy, Donald and Walter describe trying again and again to add three notes to a particular section of Denny Dias’s guitar part on “Show Biz Kids.” “No matter how many times we punched in,” they write, “these three notes refused to stick to the tape.” Eventually a surgical splice was performed, and the notes were added manually. Afterward, they wrote, “we sent the little piece of defective tape back to 3M. Months later, they sent us their report. The piece of tape had a tiny blister where the oxide had bubbled up from the backing. Inside this little blister was a drop of mustard. Some clot up in Minnesota had taken his sandwich into the room in the plant where the huge sheets of mylar were coated with oxide, taken a bite and squirted a tiny drop of mustard onto the mylar on the exact spot where we were going to put Denny’s guitar part. Th e A rc hbis hop  |  121

In effect, our efforts had been sabotaged in advance by a careless worker. This was to haunt us over and over in the years to come.” There’s one conception of rock music where the recording process is less about capturing the Platonic ideal of a song and more about documenting people in a room grappling toward that ideal, even if they can’t quite get there; recording is about catching unplanned moments of vehemence or trance or grace or badassery as they happen to happen. Steely Dan were after the actual ideal, and that’s part of what their detractors don’t like about them—they wanted the songs to sound a certain way, and pursued that fidelity at the expense of the spontaneity and friction essential to the part of rock that’s derived from rock-’n’-roll, producing spotless recordings conveying no sense of musicians tumbling down the same hill together or breathing each other’s smoke and funk in enclosed spaces. But the story of Steely Dan is only superficially about a band making the most impossibly smooth and flawless music the world had ever heard; it’s really about a band setting out to do that, committing to the goal so completely they were willing to sacrifice fellowship and profit and even their own mental health to achieve it, and being thwarted over and over—by the limitations of their collaborators, by their ability to capture what those players did in the room, by the technology available to them in their time. On June 1, 2008, the number-one song in America is “Lollipop” by Lil Wayne featuring Static Major, and Yves Saint Laurent is dying of brain cancer at his apartment on the Rue de Babylone in Paris, and in California, just before five o’clock in the morning, a fire starts on the roof of a house on New England Street, a fake suburban lane on the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood. The fire spreads from there to Universal’s ersatz New York City and Courthouse Square, the main drag from the Back to the Future movies, to the mammoth building housing Universal’s King Kong Encounter ride, and from there to a metal warehouse that will be referred to, in early accounts of the fire, as Universal’s “video vault.” More than a decade will pass before an investigation by the New York Times reveals that in addition to videos, the contents of the vault—a near-total loss—also included the original master tapes and session reels from thousands of classic albums by artists who recorded for Universal and its subsidiary labels between the 1940s and that June morning. A confidential report within Universal estimates that the fire destroyed the masters of nearly 500,000 songs, a vast swath of music history floating away as a plume of smoke over the Psycho house and the Munsters’ mansion—John Coltrane’s Impulse! masters and Charles Mingus’s, Buddy Holly’s masters and Chuck Berry’s, the Decca and Chess catalogs, and tapes of music by artists from Ray Charles and BB King to Sonic Youth and Snoop Quan t um C r im inal s  |   122

Dogg, the collective memory of what was then the biggest record company in the world. In 2019, after the Times finally uncovers the story of the Universal fire, Steely Dan issue a shrugging statement through their manager, Irving Azoff: “We have been aware of ‘missing’ original Steely Dan tapes for a long time now. We’ve never been given a plausible explanation. Maybe they burned up in the big fire.” The Steely Dan tapes either were or were not destroyed in the fire; either way you can’t lose something you’ve already lost. Any future Steely Dan reissues will have to be sourced from inferior reproductions, but viewed through a strictly Steely Dannist lens, all reproductions are inferior to the reality of a performance, which in turn is inferior to what it sounded like in Donald and Walter’s heads. There’s no perfection in art, only degrees of graceful failure. Like every work of art, Katy Lied is a tombstone for a different work of art, the one that existed only in the artist’s mind, and could not be made to exist anywhere else. The cake that collapses coming out of the oven. Try as you might, it happens that way. There’s always a mustard bubble in the skin of the tape, some vicissitude waiting to undo the whole plan, just like in life. A clump of malignant cells, some dicey stuff somebody told you was clean, an oncoming car just outside your field of vision, a spark on the roof. The very molecules in the air, working against you even as you breathe them in and out.

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Dr. Wu (Dr. Wu)

“Dr. Wu” has it all: A melody like a fistful of downers, a narrator washed up in seamy circumstances somewhere in greater Miami, and an unanswerable Steely Dan question for the ages. Are you with me, Dr. Wu? The song answers that question with more questions. Is Dr. Wu real, a figure from the narrator’s past who once helped him through a moment of doubt and pain involving hard drugs? (To be “halfway crucified” is, maybe, to be pinned by one golden arm.) Donald has suggested that this one’s about the narrator losing Katy to “a dope habit, personified as Dr. Wu,” but in the actual song, as our strung-out narrator waits for him to come by with “the taste you said you’d bring to me,” Dr. Wu seems more real than Katy—and by the end of the last verse it seems like the Dr. has fallen victim to her charms, not the other way around. So is Dr. Wu friend or foe, the cure or the plug? Is Katy the girl, or is she the drugs? When there was only one set of footprints in the sand, is that where Dr. Wu carried us? Novelist and avowed Steely Dan fan Elmore Leonard not only blurbed Two Against Nature but shouted out “Babylon Sisters” in said blurb. “Dr. Wu,” with its reference to Biscayne Bay, could be a story from Leonard’s Miami, where luxury is always just a few doors down from scuzz. But the Florida crime writer this song recalls the most is John D. MacDonald; the narrator could be any one of the many psychologically broken beta-men who are always stepping shakily onto Travis McGee’s houseboat slash bachelor pad, looking to hire him to salvage whatever he can of all that they’ve lost. 124

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Not counting childhood car-radio exposure, supermarket ambience, and other forms of secondhand Steely Dan absorption, “Dr. Wu” is probably the first Steely Dan song I listened to on purpose, but the version I got to know was not the one on Katy Lied. In 1984 the Minutemen, a punk band from San Pedro, California, covered “Dr. Wu” on their album Double Nickels on the Dime, an album I discovered in the ’90s and played endlessly thereafter, despite owning it only in the unwieldiest possible format, a single cassette containing 45 songs. Double Nickels is one of the great underground-rock thought experiments of the 1980s, positing hardcore punk as an American folk music lingua-francaish enough to wrap its head around funk and country and jazz and even poetry, without sacrificing the kind of immediacy that roils slam pits. D. Boon, Mike Watt, George Hurley; lead guitar, lead bass, lead drums. Dr . W u  |   125

Co-songwriters Boon (the “D” was for Dennes Dale) and Watt were childhood friends, the sons of Navy veterans, true unhipsters raised on Cree­ dence Clearwater Revival (in Boon’s case) and Blue Öyster Cult (in Watt’s). They came to understand themselves as subjects caught up in history and tossed around by power, and they wrote songs about what that felt like, and about the futility of trying to describe how it felt, and they gave those songs titles like “Shit from an Old Notebook” and “The World According to Nouns” and “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?” Behind the scenes, they policed each other’s pretensions: “He’d say my words were too much like Steely Dan,” Watt said in 2017, describing his working relationship with Boon, the Minutemen’s lead singer and guitarist, who died in a van accident in 1985. “His criticism of me—and I agree with him—was that I wasn’t concise with my words.” But they still covered “Dr. Wu” on Double Nickels, alongside Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love” and Creedence’s “Don’t Look Now,” claiming all three bands as part of the muddled artistic inheritance that working-class North American corndogs in the Reagan era had to build on. Double Nickels also has songs called “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing” and “#1 Hit Song”; when they cover Steely Dan and Van Halen, it feels like they’re joking about the idea of a band like the Minutemen ever getting to speak to an audience as big as the cohort that bought 1984 or Aja, while also daydreaming about what they’d say to that crowd if they ever got the chance. But in execution the Minutemen’s version of “Dr. Wu” is simpler than that. There are two vocal lines, but both voices are Mike Watt’s; he’s speaking the words like they’re a weird story he’s unraveling from his own life and he’s singing them like he’s got a Steely Dan song in his head and has to get it out, which may have been how the “Dr. Wu” cover actually happened. Watt told the Believer it was all drummer George Hurley’s fault. “That was another goof,” he said of the cover. “Georgie was really into Steely Dan, we had to hear them out on tour. We had these cassettes with like two of their albums on cassette, so we musta heard ’em each five thousand times. What were their words about? Drugs? I don’t know. We thought they were all about drugs.”

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Mr. LaPage (Everyone’s Gone to the Movies)

“Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” is another pre–Steely Dan song that eventually made it onto a Steely Dan album—they first demoed it in 1971, with the Turtles’ Flo and Eddie on backing vocals and rubber-band funk guitars at the front of the mix. You can hear that demo on Citizen Steely Dan, the hilariously no-frills 1993 box set that compiled the ’70s albums in their entirety plus four, count ’em, four non-album cuts, a selection of bonus material so stingy it’s almost a meta-tribute to D&W’s famously immoderate self-editing. They thought of their first few actual albums as embarrassing juvenilia—they weren’t about to sweep the cutting-room floor for leftovers. On the ’71 version, the guitars do most of the talking—Donald’s vocal is so poker-faced you could miss the fact that this is an up-tempo song about what a fun guy the neighborhood pedophile is. That is what it’s about, though, and when Steely Dan records “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” four years later for Katy Lied, the words haven’t changed but the arrangement now recalls the big splashy all-hands-on-deck number from the first act of a Broadway musical, and the depravity jumps out. The main character is a jolly predator named Mr. LaPage, who enjoys showing porno films to children—or young teenagers, anyway, which I guess technically, specifically, makes him the neighborhood ephebophile. Either way, why someone would leave their kids in Mr. LaPage’s care is anybody’s guess; what else Mr. LaPage intends to do with his young charges is left unsaid but is also creepily self-evident—we 127

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assume he’s not screening these movies just to teach local teens that celluloid running through a projector offers a superior film-viewing experience. The biggest sound in the Katy Lied version of this song is Victor Feldman’s vibraphone. Feldman strikes deep, hollow-log low notes and festive high ones, alluding to the drolleries of lounge-music novelteers like the sombrero-clad Baja Marimba Band while leaving plenty of open space for Donald’s voice and the disturbing events he’s describing. The funny thing about Donald’s early reluctance to sing lead for Steely Dan is that once he settles into the role, he’s actually an amazing lead singer, and some of his Quan t um C r im inal s  |   128

best performances are here on Katy Lied, like his delivery of the line “To teach you a new game to play” on this song. His phrasing is so tender and so careful it makes the content somehow way, way worse. It’s like he’s sweettalking a songbird he’s about to wolf down in one bite. That’s the key to this song—just about every part of it insists that what we’re hearing about is not just perfectly innocent but also delightful; there’s nothing here to suggest anything’s wrong except the buzzing saxophone that nags our ears like a mosquito when Donald sings “Come on / Oh babies, come on.” Katy Lied and “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” came out at a time when it was no hanging matter and no capital crime for an adult man to write and sing songs about underage people being precociously hot-to-trot, from the Rolling Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues” (“I can see that you’re fifteen years old / No, I don’t want your ID,” leered Mick Jagger, although in certain live versions the stray cat is just thirteen) to the self-explanatory “Jailbait” by future conservative icon Ted Nugent. If you were a rock star or any kind of famous person in the ’70s, this was unremarkable behavior. Two years after Katy Lied came out, Roman Polanski would be arrested for drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl by Jack Nicholson’s pool. The story lives in infamy partly because it’s an exception to a rule. So many pop icons engaged in what we could politely call extralegal dating in those days and have avoided even the nebulous semi-cancellation imposed on Polanski (who’s technically been a fugitive from the American criminal-justice system since 1978, but has continued to make films, and won an Oscar for directing The Pianist in 2002, which—like 1977—was apparently also a Different Time). “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” isn’t a deplorably Ted Nugentish kind of song. But it’s also not a straightforward and tragic treatment of child abuse like Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” or Madonna’s “Oh Father,” and it doesn’t feature an abused kid picking up a firearm to blow away their predatory parent, like De La Soul’s “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” or “Janie’s Got a Gun” by Aerosmith (whose front man, Steven Tyler, wrote shockingly and matter-of-factly in his autobiography about dumping his seventeen-year-old girlfriend after she was horribly burned in an accident). These songs take the extremely defensible position that it’s wrong to abuse children, sexually or otherwise; “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” assumes a more slippery stance, viewing Mr. LaPage through the eyes of an anonymous narrator who thinks Mr. LaPage is a great guy who is doing nothing wrong. So we’re not even being asked to empathize in spite of ourselves with some tormented perv plagued by his own unspeakable desires, like the father in Todd Solondz’s Happiness, played with disconcerting empathy by Dylan Baker as a terrible human who’s also a good dad. The narrator is just Mr. LaPage’s M r . L apage   |  129

biggest fan, or his most effective procurer, and none of this is complicated for him; the lyrics are him urging us to go down the hall, check out Mr. LaPage’s porn collection, and see where it goes. Donald and Walter were radicalized by Mad magazine and came of college age in the heyday of the dead-baby joke; they grew up viewing impropriety as inherently countercultural. Their shared “constellation of enthusiasms” included Vladimir Nabokov, the satirist Tom Lehrer (author of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “Wernher Von Braun,” about the reformed Nazi to whom “the widows and cripples in old London town” owe their hefty pensions) and the so-called sick humor of comedians like Lenny Bruce (“I hit one of those things in the street, what do you call it—a kid?”). By making this a first-person song in which Mr. Steely Dan is a party to whatever unpleasantness is about to go down in the den, Donald and Walter are multiplying the blithe wickedness of Nabokov’s Lolita by Bruce and Lehrer, spinning the unspeakable into transgressive comedy. (There’s a touch, too, of Anne Beatts and Rosie Shuster’s “Uncle Roy” sketches for Saturday Night Live, featuring Buck Henry as a lovable pederast whose fellow adult authority figures are oblivious to his predilections.) But they’re also writing past the obvious take on the subject at hand. Mr. LaPage is clearly a monster, but by leaving out even a trace of condemnation and implicating themselves in the horror they’re describing, Donald and Walter are asking us to do something more than mentally rubber-stamp the open-and-shut case that child molestation is a bad thing. It’s on us to formulate an ethical response to what we’re hearing. The critic Tom Syverson (paraphrasing the literary scholar Georgina Colby) suggests that the willful flatness of Bret Easton Ellis novels like American Psycho is not really nihilism or postmodernism but rather a kind of radical neutrality that “creates the possibility of authentic moral choice on behalf of the reader. We can’t truly reject something until we see what it might feel like to affirm it.” In “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” the thoughts and actions of at least two unabashed pedophiles working in tandem are presented without comment, but this approach actually engages us on a more empathetic level than “Janie’s Got a Gun” does, even if “Janie” is more explicit about Janie’s dad getting what he deserved. By addressing us directly in the voice of a creep, Steely Dan are putting us at this story’s unpleasant center, taking the option of passive consumption off the table. We have no choice but to imagine ourselves having no choice—we’re alone with the white light of the projector, the smut flapping in the take-up reel, and Mr. LaPage scootching over, chuckling as he makes his move.

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Owsley (Kid Charlemagne)

Donald and Walter have confirmed that the protagonist of “Kid Charle­ magne”—a visionary chemist of hippie vintage, once a star, now hounded and driven underground—is based more or less on Owsley “Bear” Stanley III, whose acid lit the fuse of the ’60s. Born January 19, 1935, in Kentucky, Stanley was the grandson and greatgrandson of two Kentucky governors. Before he discovers the skill that will make him famous, his biography is a list of institutions that couldn’t hold him: the Charlotte Hall Military Academy, which expels him for alcoholrelated shenanigans; the inpatient psychiatric program at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, where his fellow patients include the poet Ezra Pound, hiding out from criminal prosecution stemming from his pro-Fascist activities during the Second World War; Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia; the School of Engineering at the University of Virginia; the US Air Force; and Rocketdyne, a defense contractor. In 1964, after briefly attending and then dropping out of UC Berkeley, he tries acid for the first time. It’s the kind they make at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, where Albert Hoffmann himself first synthesized LSD in the ’30s. Owsley decides to see whether he can beat it. At the Berkeley library he teaches himself just enough about chemistry; at the same time, he’s reading the Kybalion, an esoteric text on the principles of alchemy that posits the alchemist’s quest to convert lead into gold as a metaphor for the journey to enlightenment. 131

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Before long he will be producing superior doses in Johnson & Johnson bulk. He will put the product in footlockers and check the footlockers onto buses, leaving the drug smuggling to Greyhound. In 1967, he blesses the Monterey Pop Festival with 100,000 tabs of Monterey Purple brewed for the occasion, some of which is concealed inside camera equipment and delivered to John Lennon in England. The Beatles spend three weeks out of their minds, then make Magical Mystery Tour. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   132

First, though, in the summer of ’65, Donald Fagen’s friend Pete comes home from Brandeis with a copy of Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert’s The Psychedelic Experience—a guidebook to help the novice tripper relax and float downstream, modeled on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and dedicated to Aldous Huxley, with the authors’ PhDs listed on the cover alongside a groovy mandala—and 500 micrograms of LSD on a sugar cube. In Eminent Hipsters, Donald gives the experience an enthusiastic thumbs-up while noting that the overall set and setting—which included Pete’s mom puttering around a New Jersey kitchen downstairs—seemed squarish and very “East Coast style” compared with the wilder things already happening out in California around that time. Owsley shows up a few times in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s book about life on the road with Ken Kesey and a busload of Merry Pranksters. “A cocky little guy, short, with dark hair, dressed like an acid head, the usual boho gear, but with a strange wound-up nasal voice, like a head with the instincts of a roller-skating rink promoter,” is Wolfe’s first impression. The second time he shows up in Wolfe’s book it’s December 1965, the night of the third Acid Test, a psychedelic happening held in a log cabin–style lodge at Muir Beach, north of San Francisco. Emerging “from his sub terrain of espionage and paranoia,” Owsley takes his own acid in the Pranksters’ presence for the first time. It’s all too much—the Grateful Dead wandering on- and offstage to play at deafening volume; their associate, Mountain Girl, running slide projectors and weird film loops; zonked Hells Angels on the floor passing around “various glittering Angel’s esoterica, chains, Iron Crosses, knives, buttons, coins, keys, wrenches, spark plugs, grokking over these arcana winking in the Day-Glo,” as Wolfe observes. Owsley freaks out. Owsley falls into deep time like a Philip K. Dick character, imagines himself as the alchemist Caligostro, a hallucination so vivid he can see the flashing eyes and teeth of the rats in the Bastille. Then he’s further back, single-celled; meanwhile, at Muir Beach people watch him pushing an old wooden chair around on a linoleum floor for hours, in love with the sound it makes. At some point he runs to his car and drives it straight into a ditch. By 1966 he’s joined the Dead’s circus as a sound man. His recordings of the band’s live performances spawn the bootleg-beating Dick’s Picks series. It’s also his idea to mark the Dead’s road cases with a symbol: a skull split by lightning, a visual idea that will endure. In 1974 he debuts his greatest nonchemical gift to the Dead’s legacy, the stage setup known as the Wall of Sound. Six-hundred-plus speakers, each instrument given its own channel in the mix, separate sets of quadrophonic speakers for each string of Phil Lesh’s bass, an idyll of perfect sound for an audience busy tripping their Owsley  |   133

balls off and an absurd tower of heavy objects for the band to cart around, load in, set up, and take down night after night. A Rolling Stone cover on the Dead once tagged Owsley “the prince of inefficiency, the essence at its most perverse of what the Dead refuse to give up.” Eventually the auteur sound guy clashes with the Dead’s rugged and increasingly autonomous road crew. Owsley drifts away, grows and sells pot, gets tangled up in circumstances. “Kid Charlemagne” meets him here, in stressed-out decline—Dr. Strange on the run, sweeping test tubes into the trash, hoping there’s gas in the car, his legacy a liability, the decade closing in on him. Alone without a community of revolutionaries around him—“All the Day-Glo freaks that used to paint their face / They’ve joined the human race,” Donald sings—he’s now just another criminal on the run, the first one we meet on The Royal Scam but not the last. At Steely Dan shows to this day you can hear a whole room sing along with “Is there gas in the car? Yes, there’s gas in the car” like it’s the hook of a hit song, even though “Kid Charlemagne” was not a hit and the gas thing was not the hook. The Kid himself, resurrected or reincarnated, shows up years later in several songs by Minneapolis’s finest meta-bar-band, the Hold Steady, who sound like Bruce Springsteen powering through a Hüsker Dü hangover, and whose lead singer, Craig Finn, has mastered the Steely Dan trick of letting you see just enough of an underworld to suggest more vast complexities. Mentioned once on the Hold Steady’s 2004 debut Almost Killed Me—“If they ask about Charlemagne / Be polite, and say something vague / Like ‘Another lover lost to the restaurant raids’”—he becomes a main character on 2005’s Separation Sunday, a concept album about Holly, who ditches catechism class to get high by the Mississippi and ends up spiraling into addiction and crime. There’s a love triangle, too—a three-way tie for lost, involving Charlemagne, Holly, and a skinhead named Gideon. And at the end of “Don’t Let Me Explode,” Holly does as she’s been told. “She said ‘Charlemagne got caught up in some complicated things’ / Yeah, then she wiped at her nose and she winked.” Then in the space of a single line, Finn finds a portal to the Steely Daniverse inside Born to Run: “Tramps like us, and we like tramps.” A few years later Kanye West hears Donald sing, “Did you realize? You are a champion in their eyes,” assumes it’s about him, and doesn’t listen to the rest of the song.

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DAY- G LO FRE A KS

A Bookkeeper’s Son (Don’t Take Me Alive)

“Don’t Take Me Alive” might be the missing chapter of “Do It Again,” taking place after you fire ’til he is done in, but before they catch you at the border. The narrator says he’s merely a bookkeeper’s son, says he means no harm to the cops and other soft targets down on the street. But he also says he has a lot of dynamite, and then he says things like “I hear my insides / The mechanized hum of another world”—paranoidly self-alienated words evocative, for me anyway, of Philip K. Dick’s story “Electric Ant” (1968). In that one, Garson Poole, industrialist, survives a traffic accident, and at the hospital they tell him he’s been a robot all along. The punch-holes in a tape that plays inside his chest cavity determine his experience of reality. Being a Philip K. Dick protagonist and maybe also a very logical machine, Poole extrapolates to the most obvious Philip K. Dick-character conclusion: none of this is real. “I will prick new punch-holes in the tape,” he decides, “and see what presently emerges.” So Poole opens himself up and hacks his own perceptions, and yeah: turns out Garson’s “reality” is entirely in his head but, twist, so is everyone else’s, and a flock of ducks materializes and flaps across the living room. The Bookkeeper’s Son, like Poole, understands truths about himself that he can’t turn away from (“Here in this darkness / I know what I’ve done / I know all at once who I am”) and there’s a terrible freedom in that, as well as a kind of omnipotence: “A man of my mind could do anything.” 136

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The archetypal American of 1976, according to The Royal Scam, is a man in a small room, contemplating the formerly unthinkable. Talking to NME that year, Donald said this song was inspired “by a run of news items where people would barricade themselves inside an apartment house or a saloon with an arsenal of weapons. It’s about individual madness rather than political situations.” He said this ten years after a decorated Marine sharpshooter named Charles Whitman typed a note that included the words “I do not really understand myself these days,” murdered his wife and mother at their homes, then climbed a belltower on the University of Texas campus to punch a few new holes in reality with four rifles and three pistols. Later on, Kurt Russell would play Whitman in a made-for-TV movie. But before that, in 1968, Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt make Targets, with Tim O’Kelly as a California man who embarks on an escalating spree of violence that culminates in him aiming a gun at moviegoers in their cars through a A B o okkee p er’s S on   |   137

drive-in screen. Boris Karloff costars as a horror-movie actor who’s retiring because the violent America of 1968 has made the horror business seem like a quaint waste of time. Throughout the ’70s, for political and nonpolitical reasons, men in distress express it through gunfire, barricade themselves afterward, and are taken alive or carried out. Maybe some people in the ’70s are pessimistic enough to correctly see this the way Karloff’s character did, as the future American status quo pulling back the bolt on its rifle, but most people don’t want to think that way, so, as usual, Steely A CAS E OF DY N A M I T E Dan’s cynicism seems ahead of its time. In another ’76 interview Donald jokes about the Steely Dan fans who formulate “all these weird ideations about these songs,” usually something about Donald and Walter plotting to steal their girlfriends, and write accusatory letters “talking about taking some kind of action.” In the interview, Donald refers to these fans’ issues as “your basic Arthur Bremer syndrome.” Bremer was twenty-one, a son of Milwaukee, who, in the spring of 1972, wrote, “It is my plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.” After repeatedly failing to get close enough to Nixon, Bremer switched his focus to Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor and Democratic presidential candidate, who proved an easier target than a sitting US president. On May 15, the day before the Michigan presidential primary, Bremer walked up to Wallace during a rally at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland, and shot him four times with a .38 revolver, leaving Wallace paralyzed from the waist down. An Assassin’s Diary (1973), the published version of a journal Bremer kept during his months on the campaign trail, is revelatory because it’s boring. Bremer’s mark on history is a record of his gripes. He complains about the weather and how they gouge you at Avis and Howard Johnson’s. He jokes about reading Mao’s Little Red Book for the “sexy parts.” He catches, in theaters, Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends (“as bad as Vixen by Russ Meyer”) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (“fantasizing myself as the Alek [sic] onscreen come to real life”). He visits massage parlors and the National Gallery. He listens to Johnny Cash’s “Kate” and the Original Caste’s “One Tin Soldier,” trash-talks Sirhan Sirhan, and accuses Diana Ross of “water[ing] down her talents for rich whites.” He jokes about abandoning his plans and moving to Hollywood to “[make] my fortune on the old Quan t um C r im inal s  |   138

cilver [sic] screen,” and wonders whether there’s any money in theology. He seems like a crazy person but more than that he seems twenty-one, lost, and desperate to be somebody. Near the end of the book, he writes, “I hope my death makes more sense than my life.” Paul Schrader drew on Bremer’s book while writing Taxi Driver, another bicentennial-year meditation on the American Lone Man. In 1971, in his essay “Notes on Film Noir,” Schrader wrote that the noir era’s final phase, from 1949 to 1953, was “the period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse,” when the genre “finally got down to the root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity, and finally, psychic stability. The third-phase films were painfully self-aware; they seemed to know they stood at the end of a long tradition based on despair and disintegration and did not shy away from that fact.” Like “Don’t Take Me Alive,” Taxi Driver puts A GU N ( LUG ER) us inside the head of a noir protagonist and at the mercy of his perceptions. But there’s a reason Travis Bickle can’t sleep, and it’s the same reason Tim O’Kelly’s character in Targets ends up at the drive-in—they’re both traumatized Vietnam veterans. “Don’t Take Me Alive” accepts the frightening possibility that just having been a bookkeeper’s son might be enough to turn a man into a Lone Man—that everyday life in the 1970s might be trauma enough, that any one of us might be closer than we’re comfortable admitting to that dissociative state where other living beings come to seem like mere holes in our reality-tape. They knew this in part because they read their mail. When an interviewer says to Donald and Walter that surely their more Bremer-ish fans constituted a statistical minority within the Steely Dan fan base, Walter disagreed. “No,” he said, “this is the heart and soul of our audience. Those weird people on the street—every hundredth weirdest one has a Steely Dan record at home.”

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THE EAGL E S

The Eagles (Everything You Did)

“This is our bicentennial album,” Don Henley once said to Country Rambler magazine, regarding Hotel California. “It’s our statement on the mood of the world in 1976 as seen through California as a microcosm.” Steely Dan never said things like this. They never made a record so overtly conceptual it could be described as “our _______ album,” and if they had, they probably would not have volunteered that information to the guy from Country Rambler. And yet: the stories of Americans in extremis presented on Steely Dan’s fifth album—The Royal Scam, released just a few months before Hotel California—sure seem thematically related enough to constitute something like a broader statement on how 1976 felt. Half the characters are criminals, but more to the point they’re fugitives on the run from the consequences of their own decisions—the acid trafficker in “Kid Charlemagne,” the prodigal wife in “Haitian Divorce,” the guy in “Sign in Stranger” being born again in some lawless off-planet paradise for thugs, the killer in “Don’t Take Me Alive.” Even the people who aren’t literally thieves or murderers have no innocence to lose; the title song paints America itself as one big criminal enterprise powered by immigrant suffering, framing the three brokenrelationship songs that precede it on Side B as symptomatic of the country’s corrosive atmosphere. On the cover—the most hideous album jacket of the ’70s, Donald and Walter once suggested, “except for Can’t Buy a Thrill”— a tramp with a hole in his sole dreams on a train station bench while snarling 141

animal heads sprout from the office towers behind him, metaphorizing capitalism’s architecture as thirsty for blood. In “Everything You Did,” Mr. Steely Dan stops browbeating his unfaithful partner long enough to say “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening” as if taunting said partner’s shitty taste in music while letting her know that things are about to get even nastier. Because it’s 1976, Steely Dan’s vision of the world necessarily includes the music of Don Henley and his band, who were having a huge year that year. They had their first number-one album with One of These Nights and then their second one with Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975, which went on to become the best-selling album of the twentieth century. So the image of these songs about peaceful, easy feelings soundtracking an ugly domestic dispute is a perfect mordant detail and also a historically accurate one, because statistically speaking your average couple cranking the stereo to cover the sound of their unraveling were probably listening to “Best of My Love” in 1976 rather than, for example, Katy Lied. Of course it’s also a dig at the Eagles, because it implies that the Eagles had become background music for normies to give their wives a hard time by and were therefore nothing but a pop group, striking self-conscious outlaw poses in songs destined to be fried in the same contextual batter as Tony Orlando and Dawn. The Eagles never copped to being insulted, but they did respond. Years later Glenn Frey would tell Cameron Crowe in an interview that when he and Don Henley began putting words to an evocative instrumental by Eagles guitarist Don Felder, the working title of which was “Mexican Reggae,” they drew inspiration from Steely Dan’s “lyrical bravery” and “willingness to go out there.” The finished song, “Hotel California,” contained the line “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast,” which Frey said was “a little Post-it back to Steely Dan”—a message to Donald and Walter that the Eagles were listening, too. Steely Dan and the Eagles were two quintessential California bands made up entirely of non–native Californians, except for Eagle Timothy B. Schmit, who was from Oakland. You could read them as dialectical nemeses in the Beatles/Stones tradition, and the “Everything You Did”/”Hotel California” exchange as proof of a feud between the cynical jazzbohemians and the in-crowd jocks. It’s the conceit behind the Steely Dan episode of Yacht Rock, in which Henley and Frey are portrayed as sneering alpha bullies and Donald and Walter are the nerds they give noogies to; all is smoothed over when the Dan tap the Eagles to sing harmony on “F.M.,” which did actually happen. In real life, Donald and Walter were not above tweaking Henley and Frey’s band when the opportunity presented itself. The white Drifters, Donald once called them in a radio interview, referring to the former Quan t um C r im inal s  |   142

doo-woppers who sang some of the most romantic songs Lieber and Stoller wrote at the Brill Building; in that equation Steely Dan are the white version of the Coasters, for whom Lieber and Stoller wrote their funnier stuff. But they were more alike than they were different. The Eagles shared Donald and Walter’s cynicism about their field and a version of their perfectionism. “We thought of the Eagles as the rock and roll Camaro, the best-designed car of the seventies and eighties,” Frey once said. “And we always tried to improve the basic design. We realized that rock and roll is a war of attrition. The longer you survive, the more you become an institution.” From 1977 on, the two bands were aided in their survival by the same high-powered manager, Irving Azoff; Donald and Walter said they admired his “taste for the jugular.” And when the Eagles got fed up after years of what they saw as disrespectful Rolling Stone coverage and challenged the magazine’s staff to a grudge-match softball game, Donald Fagen watched from the Eagles’ rooting section as the band flattened their critics 15–8. Over the course of the Eagles’ 1970s run their cynicism only grew. The Eagles’ late LA songs are rooted in a betrayed idealism that Don Henley in particular would keep coming back to in his solo work. Steely Dan had no illusions to lose. “We’re not as negative as the Eagles,” Donald put it in 1977. “They’re totally down on California.” Steely Dan mostly thought the place was funny—“probably one of the funniest of the 50 states that I know of,” is how Walter put it. They started out from significantly different places artistically but found their respective ways to a remarkably similar conclusion. The Long Run, the Eagles’ 1977 follow-up to Hotel California, is basically their Gaucho, albeit without Gaucho’s use of isn’t-this-a-great-party irony as lyrical conceit. It’s the one that took them an exhaustingly long time to make, presaged a multi-decade hiatus, and offered a bleak vision of Los Angeles at the dawn of the ’80s, portrayed on The Long Run as a despairing last-call-at-the-singles-bar moment for serial killers, casting-couch creeps, and jerkoffs in fancy cars. The Long Run is the Eagles recoiling from the gathering darkness of a Los Angeles whose temptations their early music helped advertise, whereas Gaucho is Steely Dan both processing and satirizing their own increasing embroilment in that world. Henley and Frey were just more earnest about their dismay, which is itself a kind of lyrical bravery, albeit not the kind that critics tend to value.

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Babs & Clean Willie (Haitian Divorce)

In “Haitian Divorce,” Babs and Clean Willie are lovers who marry in a fever, hit the rocks before the first verse of the song they’re in is even over, and go abroad for a quickie solution. In the ’60s this kind of uncoupling usually involved a flight south and a ride across the border to Juárez, where Americans could establish residency, obtain a divorce, and, if necessary, get married again, all in the space of an afternoon. “The average wife who hates her average husband and has an average competent lawyer,” Time magazine wrote in 1963, “can get on a plane to El Paso, say, and be back home the next day—divorced.” By that point there was already a pop song about this newish convenience, “Mexican Divorce” by the Drifters, released in 1962. It came out as the B-side to a forgettable single called “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” because back then divorce itself still carried enough stigma to make it problematic as A-side material. “Mexican Divorce” is a Burt Bacharach song with lyrics by Bob Hilliard instead of Bacharach’s more legendary collaborator Hal David, but like a lot of the best Bacharach/David songs—from “Wives and Lovers” to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”—it’s also about how modern life for all its ease and freedom also brings with it novel ways to feel lonely. Rudy Lewis, who became lead Drifter after Ben E. King left the band for a solo career, plays the average husband, coming home to an empty house. The backing vocalists on the hook—“One day married, next day free / Broken hearts for you and 144

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me”—are Cissy Houston, her niece Dee Dee Warwick, and Dee Dee’s younger sister, so “Mexican Divorce” ends up historic because it’s the session where Bacharach first hears Dionne Warwick sing. In the ’60s the state of Chihuahua dissolves Marilyn Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller, Johnny Carson’s marriage to his first wife, Joanne, and Mia Farrow’s marriage to Frank Sinatra. Mexico changes its policies in 1971, but Haiti and the Dominican Republic, sensing that those divorce-travel dollars will have to go somewhere, step in to fill the void. Supposedly an acquaintance of Donald and Walter’s took a flight to the DR for exactly this purpose and inspired them to write about Babs, who lands in the Caribbean a newlywed, extricates herself easily (“If you can say ‘incompatibility of character’ in French,” Donald says in 1976, “you’re as good as gold”) and goes out to taste the nightlife. She ends up dancing “the famous ma-ren-go” with a man the song calls “Charlie with the lotion and the kinky hair.” He maybe/probably slips something in her drink, and the song averts its eyes cinematically from whatever happens next: “Now we dolly back / Now we fade to black.” The last verse twists the knife: Babs runs back to Willie pregnant and contrite, they patch things up, then Babs gives birth to a kid whose looks make Willie wonder, “Who’s this kinky so-and-so?” A white band singing a pidgin-reggae song about Haiti, with sexually colonialist overtones, a put-de-lime-in-de-coconut vocal by Donald, and a guitar solo (by Dean Parks, with Walter adding a guttural quacking-talk-box effect in post) as sleazy as a smear of guano—somehow it’s not surprising this was Steely Dan’s biggest British chart hit ever. It’s as funky as it is offensive, but if any white person came out with a song like this today, we would not take funk into account while voting unanimously to put them under the jail. But “Haitian Divorce” is also an example of Steely Dan’s willingness to gamble their own likability by writing about dislikable characters, thereby exposing truths a lot of songwriters never get to. This song’s Haitian characters are racist stereotypes, sexually aggressive and predatory; as a portrayal of Caribbean culture, it belongs on the shelf next to the booga-booga voodoo stuff in Live and Let Die. “Haitian Divorce” is a dirty joke whose punch line is the appearance of a mixed-race baby, but the joke is ultimately on Babs and Clean Willie, a couple of horny idiots who have to live with the consequences of Babs’s foray into sex tourism. Haiti, for them, is a realm of fantasy where their world’s rules don’t apply and, having slipped across the border to take advantage of the freedoms available on the other side, they find they can’t resume their former lives as easily as they’d anticipated. “Because it’s often said,” guitarist Vernon Reid once pointed out in an interview with writer and musician Greg Tate, “that when you enter the realm of the Santeria and voodoo, to make things happen you Quan t um C r im inal s  |   146

have to be very careful. If you employ the spirits, know they’re very restless and there is a price you will have to pay.” Reid is a fan who hears in Steely Dan’s music the same “noirish disillusionment with the romance of the American ideal” that’s in the voice of Bogart’s Philip Marlowe or Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”—“forever brokenhearted and forever haunted.” When Tate asks Reid whether Donald and Walter, as white guys profiting off a synthesis of blues and jazz, owe a debt to Black culture, Reid replies, “I think simply by the fact that they lived their peculiar kind of ‘truth’ and have been unflinching, I think that’s tribute enough. The fact that there’s so much about the American racial dynamic in their music is a great gift. It chronicles a certain complicated relationship to the perceived outsider, the perceived minority.” In the 2010s, Reid and Tate’s seventeen-piece band Burnt Sugar began performing live sets of Steely Dan covers, as if to interrogate what Donald and Walter had said and failed to say about race traitorship and cultural shoplifting. The set lists zeroed in on the dicey and uncomfortable corners of the catalog. When sung by actual Black people, as opposed to Boomer bohemians whose outsiderdom was elective and ironic, songs like “Haitian Divorce,” the minstrel-show-referencing “Pretzel Logic,” and the hipster’s lament “Deacon Blues” revealed new depths and more serrated edges. In a song like “Deacon Blues,” Reid said back in 2014, “Steely Dan is mythologizing the tragic lives [of jazz musicians], which reduces it to a series of clichés. But when Jeffrey Smith, the leader of our horn section, sings out, ‘This brother is free / I’ll be what I want to be,’ it becomes a very daring claim.” The only way to pay proper respect to Steely Dan’s legacy of sly and loving theft is to steal something back from them and make it your own. As sung by Donald and Walter, “Haitian Divorce” is just a catchy song about a couple of assholes; as wailed by the bassist and singer Shelley Nicole of Burnt Sugar, it’s a curse placed on Babs and Clean Willie by the universe. This, she’s saying, is your “Haitian divorce.” This is what you get for your presumption, for imagining freedom was yours to take.

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THE O L D MA N

The Old Man (The Royal Scam)

If “Hotel California,” the song, is at least partly the Eagles’ answer to Steely Dan’s ostensibly cryptic approach to lyric-writing and The Royal Scam is Steely Dan’s Hotel California, then “The Royal Scam” itself is the East Coast–focused analog to Hotel California’s title track—disillusioned about the country, a little long, a little pretentious and overdeliberately poetic, undeniably a banger nonetheless. It’s the last and longest song on the record, which gives it the weight of a summation. The Royal Scam is America. The people in this song make their ways here across the sea, dreaming of a better life, and end up fighting to survive at the bottom of Manhattan, living twenty to an apartment—more Americans in small rooms—as a “savage winter” rages outside. But when they write to the folks back home in “the city of Saint John,” they sell the lie, talking about the money to be made here, inspiring the next wave of marks, perpetuating a pyramid scheme that’s turned generations of victims into accomplices. Happy birthday, America, from your friends at Steely Dan! “The Royal Scam” dollies back from the rest of the album’s tales of direct interpersonal violence, making room in the frame for the broader cruelties of poverty and exploitation. Walter would admit in a ’76 interview with Melody Maker that the long lines of Donald’s flow were a deliberate attempt to cop cadences from the King James Bible, the Gideons’ gift to musicians writing lyrics on tour. But what the song’s picture of New York City really recalls is Thomas 149

Merton’s description, in The Seven Storey Mountain, of the devouring “dark furnace” of Harlem, a passage Eldridge Cleaver would copy into his prison notebook at San Quentin: All the senses and imagination and sensibilities and emotions and sorrows and desires and hopes and ideas of a race with vivid feelings and deep emotional reactions are forced in upon themselves, bound inward by an iron ring of frustration: the prejudice that hems them in with its four insurmountable walls. In this huge cauldron, inestimable natural gifts, wisdom, love, music, science, poetry are stamped down and left to boil with the dregs of an elementally corrupted nature, and thousands upon thousands of souls are destroyed by vice and misery and degradation, obliterated, wiped out, washed from the register of the living, dehumanized.

L ARRY CARLTON

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This makes “The Royal Scam” maybe the closest thing to a song with overt “political significance” in the Dan’s ’70s repertoire. Donald and Walter’s empathy for actual downtrodden humans in general and the song’s apparently Puerto Rican subjects in particular comes off as a little vague and transitive, roughly on par with whatever Brian de Palma felt for those huddled masses of Marielitos who weren’t destined to become Tony Montana. But the feeling of disgust at the whole sick cycle is unambiguous. These newcomers chewed up by the promised land don’t really need to be individualized in the song, because the point is that they are no different from their predecessors in the eyes of the machine, and not that different from us. We’re all chasing something illusory; we’re all destined to devour ourselves through greed or jealousy or violence when we don’t find it. And as on “Hotel California,” hope and brotherhood get a eulogy in the form of an extended guitar break—in this case, a hard-bitten solo by Larry Carlton that sounds like he’s saying a few unflinching words over the unmarked graves of the song’s unremembered protagonists. This solo points toward one of Steely Dan’s most concrete legacies—their crucial influence on the sax-rock-noir texture of the soundtracks to 1980s cop shows and other kinds of entertainment set in night-cities populated exclusively by criminals, sex workers, taxicabs, and manholes bleeding steam. In a few years Carlton will win a Grammy for playing a more hopeful and TV-upbeat but not sonically dissimilar solo on Mike Post’s theme song for Hill Street Blues.

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Pepe (Sign In Stranger)

“Sign in Stranger” is a pulpy briefing on underworld job openings that becomes a tourism brochure for a place where nobody knows your name; Pepe is some kind of problem-solver you meet in that place, the guy you go see if you need clean papers or want to do dirt. The song floats on the contributions of three guys not named Donald or Walter: Paul Griffin’s piano, Elliott Randall’s yo-yoing guitar, and Bernard Purdie’s skipping-stone drums. The rhythm track’s island lilt reminds us that Walter was a reggae enthusiast. He especially liked dub, and of course he did—a genre where the mix is everything, where instruments bubble in and out of the mix at the flick of a producer’s wrist. The gear that goes on the block at Walter’s posthumous estate auction includes a stage-used Mesa/Boogie speaker cabinet with dub godfather King Tubby’s face on it. But it’s the single reference to “Mizar Five” that really matters. If you’re nerd enough to know what, say, Ceti Alpha V means to James T. Kirk and Khan N. Singh, you’ll hear “Mizar Five” as the name of a planet, the fifth stone from some imaginary sun. Donald has talked and written about how the speculative literature of the ’50s and ’60s shaped him and Walter as readers and then as writers. They were influenced by works like the 1953 book The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, a New Yorker whose prose, Donald suggested, captured “the rapid flow of life in the city” in a way that influenced his and Walter’s lyrical flow: “As Ben Reich glided down the east 152

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ramp with Dr. Tate at his side and murder in his pocket, he communicated with his senses in staccato spurts.” Under the noir finish, “Sign in Stranger” is a science-fiction song. There is a star called Mizar in the Big Dipper’s handle, and in the 1963 space-revenge novel The Star King, by bohemian pulp scribe and occasional jazz critic Jack Vance, there’s a planet called Mizar Six, where members of the devout Tunker sect live lives of total conformity “to protect themselves from the perplexity of wondering about each other’s motivations.” One of that book’s epigraphs, by the way, is the aphorism “Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow,” which is basically what the narrator of “Sign in Stranger” is telling us about what kind of place Mizar Five is. But the more germane sci-fi influence is A.  E. van Vogt, another Fagen favorite, who said he wanted his work to read like “pulp music” and said one of his secrets was a device he called the “hang-up.” A hang-up was an unelaborated phrase or reference designed to make the work skim-proof by forcing the reader to stop and bring their imagination to bear. Van Vogt liked to deliver at least one hang-up per sentence. “Readers of each generation will contribute meaning from their own time, their own era,” van Vogt suggests, “filling in the gaps with M E SA B OOGI E W I T H K I N G T U B BY data that I don’t have now or didn’t have when I wrote the story.” If this feels a little abstract, you can see the technique being put to use in the pulp music of Steely Dan, in which characters and locations keep flashing unintroduced on the screen of the lyrics, demanding exactly this imaginative buy-in. In this song the unexplicated reference to “Mizar Five” is a hang-up, as is the reference to “collecting Turkish union dues,” as is Pepe’s scar from ear to ear; so are Michael and Jesus and William Wright in “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again,” Chino and Daddy G, Carlo from the barrio, Dr. Warren Kruger, and most other names in this book. Bringing it full circle: William Gibson, a confirmed Fagen/Becker fan, says that when he began writing fiction, he tried to emulate the “hip, almost Quan t um C r im inal s  |   154

subversive science fiction aesthetic” of Steely Dan’s lyrics in order “to not have my science fiction come out as this lame dorky thing that the genre had gotten to be.” Years after “Sign in Stranger” comes out, Gibson will write the official Steely Dan bio circulated with review copies of Two Against Nature. But before that he’ll fill his own work with proper names guaranteed to hang up Fagen/Becker fans, as in the title story from Burning Chrome, which features a bar called the Gentleman Loser as well as a girl named Rikki whose memory the narrator can’t erase from his hard drive: “I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye.”

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A Wooly Man without a Face (Caves of Altamira)

The Woolly Man isn’t real, and that’s where the sadness of “Caves of Altamira” comes from. It’s a song about an introverted kid who sneaks off to a cave with a candle and makes imaginary friends out of the painted animals and early men whose images flicker on the cave’s walls. Later, as an adult, he returns to the cave but is unable to access whatever part of his brain once brought the figures there to life—he sees only “a woolly man without a face / A beast without a name.” Nothing here but history, he thinks to himself, and steps, bummed, back into the sunlight. It’s a retelling of Plato’s allegory of the cave that focuses on the sting of that story’s central realization (that moving pictures don’t tell the truth.) It’s an atypical Steely Dan song in that there’s a child in it who’s not at risk of being molested. The only stakes here are existential, because childhood is temporary. Walter called this song “a story about the loss of innocence,” an oddly earnest angle for a couple of famous ironists to work, and you get the feeling that Donald and Walter also felt this way, and had to put some distance between themselves and this song’s chorus, which marvels at the way cavemen still marked their walls with minerals and animal fat despite there being no chance their work would get optioned for the movies. “Caves” started life as a Brill Building demo—Donald sings while fingering the notes of a circular piano part like they’re a set of worry beads, mapping out an anxious melody that refuses to groove and leaving room for a big 156

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gulp of practice-space air after every end-rhyme. At one point between the lines, you can hear paper rustling in the 1960s. By the time it makes it onto The Royal Scam the song has become a snazzy, swaggering late-nighttalk-show theme whose buoyant horn charts puncture the pensiveness of the lyrics before Donald sings a word. It’s Steely Dan as leathery showbiz cynics, reaching back in time to buy a sentimental song from their Brill Building selves and recasting it as winking kitsch. They skip over the verse from the demo where the cave becomes a ticketed attraction with a line A Wo oly Ma n without a Face   |   157

out the door and a sign reading SEE THE WAY THINGS USED TO BE; by twisting this song into something flashier, Donald and Walter have already established, just through arrangement, that show business and spectacle are all-corrupting. “Caves of Altamira” is “based on a book by Hans Baumann,” says the Wikipedia page for The Royal Scam—but it says so in a sentence that begins by asserting that “Kid Charlemagne” is about Owsley Stanley, a sentence whose only citation links back to the transcript of a March 2000 live chat between persons identifying themselves as Becker/Fagen and the BBC, in which only the “Kid Charlemagne” detail is confirmed by both B & F. Donald does talk about “Caves” in that chat, but he describes it as “a pretty straightforward story about a guy who visits the caves of Altamira which have famous drawings by prehistoric men or women as the case may be, and he registers his astonishment.” He never mentions Baumann or any book. So the Baumann connection is a “fact” in the sense that it sits near other, more concretely verifiable, facts; it is fact-adjacent. If “Caves of Altamira” is based on one of Baumann’s works, it’s undoubtedly The Caves of the Great Hunters, from 1954, the first of many novels Baumann wrote for young adults. The book adapts the true story of four French teens who in 1940 chased their dog into the cave system at Lascaux in southwestern France and found hundreds of paintings of Upper Paleolithic vintage on the walls of its chambers. In Baumann’s version, the kids reveal their find to their teacher, who sumA CA N D L E mons the great archaeologist and abbot Henri Breuil from Paris. Breuil tells the boys a story about another set of cave paintings, which were discovered forty years earlier on the nobleman Don Marcelino de Sautola’s estate in Altamira, Spain, by the Don’s daughter, nine-year-old Maria. One interesting thing about Baumann is that between his birth in Bavaria in 1914 and the publication of The Caves of the Great Hunters in 1955, he was a Nazi. Specifically, he was a Nazi songwriter—his compositions include the official Hitler Youth rally anthem “The Rotten Bones Are Trembling,” sung in German by the sanitarium patients in Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, and “High Night of Clear Stars,” the “Silent Night, Holy Night” of the National Socialists’ de-Christianized Christmas songbook. After the war and a stint Quan t um C r im inal s  |   158

in a POW camp, he distanced himself from his Nazi past and won awards in America as a writer and translator of books for children and young adults. His postwar catalog includes historical fiction like I Marched With Hannibal and Dimitri and the False Tsars; a number of jolly little books about dragons, bears, and intrepid desert foxes; and at least two collaborations with beloved illustrator Eric Carle, of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame. Caves of the Great Hunters is a characteristically square boys’ adventure story from the 1950s, in which some enthusiastic young people make an amazing discovery, and the adult authorities reward them with a series of lectures. Only the Altamira passages—the story within the story—really tunnel into the mystic. “Then suddenly Don Marcelino saw the animal which Maria had taken for a bull,” Baumann writes. “It was a bison in its death agony. It was looking down at them with its big eye, which had a black circle round it. And Don Marcelino saw the heavy shadow which the bison cast. A deep hollow nearby was filled with the shadow. The deep black made the red of the mighty bison’s body glow more strongly. In the candlelight it seemed as if the beast were heaving itself up and breathing. But the eye was motionless. The look which came from it seemed to be its last.” A professor from Madrid examines the paintings and reports back to the King of Spain, who pays a visit to Altamira and stoops to enter the cave, the monarch humbled before human history: “When he wanted to look at the animals on the many-humped roof, he too had to make himself small.” Later, though, the professor’s colleagues judge the find to be a hoax, and the newspapers turn on de Sautuola. SPANISH NOBLEMAN PRODUCES FALSE MAMMOTHS, one headline reads. At this point, Maria—into whom Baumann has never really breathed much life as a character—fades from the story. Baumann’s greatest sympathies are with Don Marcelino, who will have died in disgrace by the time the cave paintings are finally authenticated. As he grows old, he dreams he’s fighting bison and cave lions. Pushed to the edge of a cliff, he imagines falling, and then being overtaken by glacial ice. In this moment Baumann might be decanting the anxieties of the artist who knows his destiny is to be forgotten, or perhaps the Nazis’ lizard-brained terror of being supplanted by their supposed inferiors. But the Don also becomes a Steely Dan protagonist, as anxious about his creeping irrelevance as the guy from “Hey Nineteen.” Waking up, he wonders, “Am I really a dead man? . . . Have the professors pushed me aside for ever, as the bison pushed me in my dream? And will their silence roll over the pictures also, like a glacier?”

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P EG

Peg (Peg)

Peg is somebody’s sweetheart, maybe even somebody’s wife, and the person singing the song is urging her to make love to the camera, or watching her do it, feeling themselves falling in love in a different way than before, imagining the gaze of untold others falling on the pictures being taken, and getting turned on by the thought of others getting turned on by them—a doubly eroticized breach of Peg’s secret self. But the narrative is less important than the construction, or maybe the construction is the narrative. There’s a mesmerizing complexity to the way each individual part of the finished version of “Peg” fits together. Its perfection is the perfection of a fractal, where each component contains the DNA of the whole piece in miniature. Writing about Two Against Nature the year it came out, William Gibson welcomed the return of “that patented Steely Dan studio wax, as though one were listening down through a hundred coats of hand-rubbed sonic carnauba, each glossy layer somehow highlighting a different aspect of the composition.” That’s what “Peg” sounds like—a hundred layers carefully positioned to create the illusion of casual cohesion, a whole ecosystem arrayed in a shape as sleek as a surfboard. I’ve heard it hundreds of times and almost every time I play it, I pick up some nearly subliminal detail that I’ve never noticed before, and those tiny sonic events become things I wait to hear the next time I play “Peg,” quirks of the landscape that become destinations unto themselves. 161

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Lately I’m pretty into the little pizzicato rhythm-guitar flourish that shows up in your left speaker or earbud as the verse cedes the floor to the chorus about sixty seconds in. The way the last bent notes of guitarist Jay Graydon’s solo keep on ringing over the first two lines of the second verse, not fully fading out until Donald is finished singing “I like your pin shot / I keep it with your letter.” The backup singer ad-libbing “No matter what you do” the third time Michael McDonald sings “It will come back to you” during the repeat-chorus-and-fade part of the song. All these voices singing in Peg’s ear, telling her it’s okay to let go and be lost, that she will be found again, that it will come back to her.

Six years ago someone uploaded a Japanese-subtitled rip of a British television documentary called Classic Albums: Steely Dan—Aja to YouTube, and I have watched it more times than I can count. It’s my favorite foreign movie. It cuts back and forth between footage of Donald and Walter in the studio Quan t um C r im inal s  |   162

C H U C K RA I N E Y

revisiting songs from Aja—their sixth and most commercially successful album, released in 1977—and new talking-head interviews, with people who worked on the album and well-known musicians who admire it. Each time I watch Steely Dan’s Classic Albums I have a new favorite detail. I like Ian Dury’s reading glasses, Roger Nichols doing his talking-head interview in a nice teal polo like the offensive coordinator of a state-school football team, the cutaways to stock-photo B-roll of seagulls and Los Angeles from the air. But the most important parts of the Aja documentary, the parts that I return and return for, are the scenes where Donald and Walter sit side by side at a mixing console, fading up isolated tracks and unused takes for closer scrutiny and occasional ridicule. The interviews and stock-video cutaways in this documentary are fun, and I also enjoy the footage of Donald and Walter and original Steely Dan sidemen like Rick Marotta performing Aja songs in the studio with brisk professionalism as if ordered to do so by a judge. But I’m pretty sure I could watch Donald and Walter snicker at rejected solos for at least three hours. P e g  |   163

The album version of “Peg” features a solo by Jay Graydon that zigzags across the track like a red line in a movie montage, charting a path to Honolulu and exotic destinations beyond. In the documentary, Donald and Walter explain that Graydon’s solo made the cut only after many other players came in and tried and failed to pull the sword from the stone. DONALD: “It wasn’t quite what we were looking for, until we got through three or four, five players . . . ” WALTER: “Six or seven . . . ” DONALD: “. . . six or seven. Eight players.”

The also-rans reportedly included Robben Ford, Rick Derringer, and regular Steely Dan contributor Elliott Randall. In the documentary we watch as Donald and Walter play back a version of “Peg” with these unused solos faded up. They sit unmoved for a few seconds, listening to an unidentified guitarist hot-dogging around. After a while Donald says, shruggingly, “There you go. In other words,” and Walter, finishing the thought, says, “Speaks for itself, really.” Which it does. So they play another one, whose inappropriateness is equally self-evident. Donald cracks a smile and says to Walter, “Wouldn’t you hate if somebody did this to you?”

JAY G RAY D ON

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Donald and Walter are going back, in this scene, to performances they dismissed twenty years ago and finding them just as dismissible as they remembered. This segment of the documentary arguably illustrates their mercilessness, and maybe the pleasure they took in mercilessness, but for me it also clarifies and qualifies their mythic perfectionism. It might be the best illustration of what that perfectionism was for, the value system it was in service of. The endless revolving door of first-call session guys and the labors Donald and Walter put those guys through may have been about micromanaging the minute details of a track. But when they play back the “Peg” solos, you can also see how much of their supposed perfectionism was really just a search for something they could not name until they heard it in the room. The solos are the most famously overdetermined parts of Steely Dan’s songs, but they also tend to be the emotional crux of each song. They are the one moment in a Steely Dan song where the deeper feeling of the song is allowed to break free of its tightly composed and arranged frame, the one time a player is permitted to step outside the constraints of the track, breaking through the conceit of anonymized slickness this band used to such brilliant rhetorical effect. Walter is personally responsible for a few of the best ones, including the jagged blues runs at the end of “Black Friday” and the slippery, eloquent solo on “Josie.” Listen to WALT AN D D ON AT THE CO N S OL E that one, which begins with Walter’s guitar mimicking Donald’s vocal line syllable for syllable, and you can hear what they valued in a soloist. They liked articulation, an eloquence derived from speech—they wanted soloists who could create that sense of a moment of abandon while still turning a phrase. People like to say there are no mistakes in art, but of course there are. Not everything is subjective, and something is not right just because the universe provides it, and any small brushstroke can ruin the painting. Steely Dan’s famous perfectionism is really just them accepting this essential truth and trying to work around it. The space in “Peg” where a guitar solo goes is the question, and Jay Graydon’s solo is the correct answer, and the other six solos are mistakes. And while Donald and Walter are nice enough in the documentary to not identify the people responsible for the solos they didn’t use, they are not going to pretend those solos weren’t all wrong for “Peg,” and if this makes them seem like fussy jerks, well, shrug. There are artists who don’t work this way, but none of them have made “Peg.” P e g  |   165

Sayoko (Aja)

The woman pictured in dim profile on the cover of Aja is a model and performance artist named Sayoko Yamaguchi. She was born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1949, and by the early ’70s she’d become one of the first Japanese supermodels. She was a muse to designers like Issey Miyake, as well as Kansai Yamamoto, who created the kabuki-inspired costumes David Bowie wore onstage during his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane tours. Yamaguchi was the first Asian woman to walk the runways of Paris, modeling for Chanel, Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent. And in 1973, she became the face of Shiseido cosmetics. She was one of the first fully Japanese models to front a beauty campaign in Japan, where advertisers had long preferred models whose mixed heritage gave them a more European look. Yamaguchi, by contrast, was a classical Japanese beauty who wore her black hair in a short bob with straight bangs, a traditional haircut known as the okappa, and used dark eyeliner to give herself a dramatically almond-shaped eye. In 1977, the year Aja came out, Newsweek put her on a list of the world’s top fashion models. She was photographed hanging out with superstars like Bowie and Mick Jagger. And her likeness could be seen in store windows around the world, thanks to the Sayoko Mannequin, designed in Yamaguchi’s image by the mannequin sculptor Adel Rootstein. Yamaguchi died in 2007, at fifty-seven, of pneumonia. By the end of her life, she had incorporated other disciplines into her practice—stage and 166

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screen acting, costume and puppet design, and dance, specifically butoh, an expressive hybrid of dance and experimental theater born in the Japanese avant-garde after World War II. Her second-to-last film appearance was in 2001’s Pistol Opera, director Seijun Suzuki’s spiritual sequel to Branded to Kill, a neo-noir deconstruction of the Yakuza crime-film genre so wild it got him fired from the Nikkatsu film studio in 1967. In Pistol Opera Yamaguchi plays Sayoko Uekyo, a crime boss who is both mentor and rival to an upstart hit-woman, Stray Cat, played by Makiko Esumi. The movie is about Stray Cat hunting a killer who’s bumping off the world’s top assassins—but as Donald once wrote of one of his formative influences, the ’60s TV detective show Peter Gunn, the characters “may as well have been drifting through a landscape of boomerangs and parallelograms, so little did the plots matter.” The movie is about blazing color and ultra-stylized movement, and Yamaguchi owns every scene she’s in, striking poses that turn her body into a slash across the film frame itself, an actor but also a visual element no less vibrant than the squares of bold color that Suzuki loves to position his actors in front of. “I want to die gloriously,” Uekyo tells Stray Cat, as the movie lurches toward a climax somewhere between Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. “The killer’s runway. To die atop the stage, like an actress. At the peak of aesthetics.” You could say that Yamaguchi’s peak aesthetic helped popularize non-Western ideas of beauty in both Japan and the West, and you would not be wrong. You also would not be wrong to say that in disrupting one set of stereotypical, European-derived ideals about what and who was considered beautiful, Yamaguchi was escaping into another trap, cultivating a look that played to Western stereotypes of Asian women being doll-like and mysterious. But you could also say she played on those stereotypes. You could say that everything is a performance, particularly abstractions like race and nationality, and that Yamaguchi—who didn’t call herself a model, preferring the more active term “wearist”—was a performance artist from the beginning, and that part of that performance was about working knowingly and maybe even ironically within the boundaries of a set of visual clichés—not unlike the way Steely Dan conformed to the sonic vocabulary of commercial pop in order to smuggle their strange tales of troubled Americans into the mainstream. The photo on the cover of Aja, taken by Hideki Fujii, is Yamaguchi demonstrating how much work can be done within a narrow range of expression. You can only see a sliver of her face—her nose, her top lip, the hollow of an eye—against the hard black background. Other than the words “Aja” and Quan t um C r im inal s  |   168

“Steely Dan,” the only visual element in the image is a vertical strip of red and white that on closer inspection turns out to be the trim of Yamaguchi’s kimono. I wonder how many copies of Aja are in circulation on vinyl with the name of a former owner inscribed in that narrow strip of white; my first copy of Aja had once belonged to a J SAMANICH, who claimed it in emphatic ballpoint caps. Reduced to blotter-tab size on your iPhone screen, the Aja cover says nothing. But the cover of the LP feels like a performance—Yamaguchi finding exactly enough light to draw your eye, sculpting the negative space around her body, not so much in shadow as wrapping it around herself. It is one of the most striking rock album covers of the ’70s. It’s also a stereotypical geisha-girl image of Asian womanhood that your average white band would be justifiably pilloried for using today. Even in 1977 it was at least a little bit retrograde; back in 1974, Sparks had put two models in traditional Japanese dress on the front of Kimono My House, the cover of which almost looks like an Aja parody even though it came out first. In 2006, when Rolling Stone gently inquired about the Asian-derived imagery and language in his songs, Donald owned right up to the implication. “It’s traditional in Western literature and music to use the East as a symbol of sensuality,” he said. “In the days of political correctness, there’s been criticism in objectifying Asia and Asians—luckily, I don’t give a shit about any of that stuff.” Any attempt at apology would have seemed like a dodge; the cover of Aja is indisputably a fetishistic image of Sayoko Yamaguchi that uses her as visual shorthand for broader notions of the mysterious Orient. But unlike, say, David Bowie’s hit cover of Iggy Pop’s “China Girl,” “Aja” the song doesn’t really objectify a person. Aja is addressed by name, and as “you,” but the song is about a place—Aja is a personification, the way Los Angeles is granted sentience in Frank Sinatra’s “L.A. Is My Lady.” “Aja” is a classy ode to dissipation dressed up in opium-dream mysterioso and vague notions of adventure. Exotica was what they called this sort of thing back in the ’50s, when bandleaders like Martin Denny and Les Baxter started composing imaginary-Pacific-isle song cycles for landlocked cocktail-partiers getting dumb on rum.* As a genre, exotica spoke to a fas-

* Fagen: “We were interested in a kind of hybrid music that included all the music we’d ever listened to. So there was always a lot of TV music and things in there. It was very eclectic, and it used to make us laugh: we knew something was good if we would really laugh at it when we played it back. We liked the sort of faux-luxe sound of the Fifties, there was just something very funny about it. I grew up in a faux-luxe household, and it was a very alienating world, so for me it has the opposite effect: muzak is supposed to relax you, but it makes me very anxious. So in a way, I think I get it out of me by putting some of it in my songs. Then I start to laugh at it when I hear it.”

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cination with and longing for anywhere but here, and rendered geography fuzzy—its Polynesia of the mind, based on no real Pacific island and all of them, was always just a Chinese-junk ride away from the mysterious and equally imaginary East. Like those albums and the basement-tiki-bar owners who played them, Mr. Steely Dan’s own interest in Asia or Asianness doesn’t seem to go beyond the level of “vibes.” Mr. Steely Dan, for example, says he likes to hear Chinese music drifting through the banyan trees, but he doesn’t pretend to know or care what the stringed instruments used in traditional Chinese music are actually called. They look and sound like angular banjos to him, so he will call them “angular banjos.” Angular banjos sound good to him. This is all he needs to know. He doesn’t care what those traditional Chinese stringed instruments are called. He has drugs to do. “Chinese music” was Louis Armstrong‘s thumbs-down review of bebop when it came along, so in this case the Chinese music might be something like Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins’s slow-unwinding “Pannonica” from Brilliant Corners. And Mr. Steely Dan says he cannot wait to run back to Aja when his “dime dancing” is through. Performance for money, which is what a touring musician does; this is a song about a guy who just wants to go home and listen to far-out jazz, preferably while smacked into a trance. If “Aja” is about any real place it’s about Los Angeles, specifically the wealthy, coastal, secluded parts. The line about being at a dude ranch above the sea suggests a nonsensical adjacency that makes total sense if you’ve ever visited Malibu, where you can leave the beach and drive mere minutes to the former site of a Wild West ghost town built for the movies. But it’s also about a metaphorical place—a hidden world that reveals itself all-tootemporarily to the extremely high, a Shangri-La inside your brain, where you can lie back in a perfumed garden and watch the stars in the sky braid themselves into strands of DNA. The music piles crescendo on crescendo, like a trip that keeps on unfolding—the sound of a parade, a fiery sax solo by Wayne Shorter, and finally Steve Gadd kicking the seventh minute of the song into tightly syncopated double time. Decades later the Detroit-techno pioneer Anthony “Shake” Shakir will stretch this part of the song out for another eight minutes and call it “Arise”—a dance track that feels like being inside the tube of an endlessly breaking wave. Whoever or whatever Aja is, Mr. Steely Dan tells us that the Hill is where she’s waiting. Mr. Steely Dan has told us about the Hill before. On “Black Friday,” the Hill is where Mr. Steely Dan says he’s going to be when the market crashes and maybe takes the world down with it. What Mr. Steely Dan actually calls it in “Black Friday” is That Hill, like he’s pointing to it in the distance. The Hill in “Black Friday” is a line of demarcation between Quan t um C r im inal s  |   170

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one life and another, like the Hill in “Mansion on the Hill,” the one Hank Williams looks up at from his lonely cabin in the valley, thinking of the one who left him to live there. In “Aja” Mr. Steely Dan has finally made it to the Hill, and tasted its luxuries—but you can still hear him wondering whether he belongs there. The people on the Hill think he’s okay, or so they say; they never stare because they just don’t care. So they’re either really open-minded or really self-involved, and with all due respect to Los Angeles, a place far too complex to be contained by any set of stereotypes, given the context it’s probably both. The sense you get is that the people on the Hill are beautiful and maybe crackling with negative energy at the same time and that life among them as an East Coast outsider is probably easier to take if you’re good and fucked up most of the time. It’s impossible (and when I say that, I mean it’s impossible for me) not to think of “They think I’m OK / Or so they say” as an example of Donald Sayoko  |  171

and Walter using Mr. Steely Dan to say something about themselves and (in this case) their relative success, and how they felt about their place in the 1970s California rock music industry milieu in which they now operated, and specifically about what it meant that this world had begun to accept them. And it’s therefore tempting to read “Aja” as being specifically a Walter song at least in its core sentiment, and to imagine it as a song about someone unexpectedly reaching a luxurious station in life where the amenities include ready access to drugs that are—almost—pain-annihilating enough to let the luxurious-station-attainer forget for a while the nagging sense that he does not belong there. This makes “Aja” one of two songs on Aja about making uneasy peace with being marooned in a comfortable place—the corollary to “Home at Last,” a metaphor for marriage as a state of contented captivity, with Donald singing as an Odysseus returning to the land of superhighways and sunshine and wondering if he’s still “tied to the mast.” I think that’s beautiful. I also think it’s beautiful that having finally accepted themselves as lotus-eating LA recording artists, they promptly packed up their habits and made most of their next album in New York.

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Peter/Tariq/ Daniel (Black Cow)

Classic Albums again, another shot of Donald and Walter at the console. Donald cues up the intro to “Black Cow”—a drumbeat under a loping clavinet part played by Joe Sample, founding keyboardist for the Crusaders. He bobs his head a little, then starts rapping: “Uptown, baby / We gets down baby / Upon the crown baby.” Walter laughs, doubling over at the control board. Scenes from a marriage: Donald and Walter at the board, exchanging inside jokes. In this case the joke goes unexplained; either you get it or you don’t. A few years later, the rapper Peter Gunz sat for an on-camera interview with VladTV, in which the whole story of his life—and his history with “Black Cow”—seemed to come out as one long sigh. In 1997, Gunz and his then-partner, another Bronx MC who went by Lord Tariq, put out their first single, “Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)”. The song layered a borough-boosting club chant—“If it wasn’t for the Bronx, this rap shit probably never would be goin’ on”—over a slightly speeded-up loop of the intro to Steely Dan’s “Black Cow.” Released independently, it became a hit, and Tariq and Gunz signed a million-dollar record deal with Sony. But to rerelease “Deja Vu” as a Sony single, Tariq and Gunz were obligated to clear the “Black Cow” sample with Donald and Walter, who as it turned out were willing to authorize their use of it—in exchange for 100 percent of the publishing royalties, sole writing credit, and $115,000 in cash. 173

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“People are under the impression that we put the record out and got sued,” Gunz said. “We didn’t get sued. We got stuck up.” Gunz alleged that around the time “Uptown Baby” broke, Steely Dan had just approved the use of a “Black Cow” sample in a forthcoming song produced by Sean “Puffy” Combs. Combs was riding high in those years with a series of hit singles built around big sloppy bites from ultra-familiar Top 40 hits like the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” flaunting his ability to pay bank-breaking sample-clearance fees in a way that mirrored the diamonds-and-Bentleys lifestyle-porn subject matter of the music. By beating Puffy to the “Black Cow” sample and mooting whatever plans he had for the song, Gunz said, he and Lord Tariq had inadvertently scotched an undoubtedly lucrative P. Diddy payday for Donald and Walter, and Donald and Walter had seemingly chosen to take it out on Gunz and Tariq in trade. Figuring this was a mere bump at the beginning of a long career, Tariq and Gunz agreed to Donald and Walter’s terms, and twenty years later there was Gunz on VladTV, clearly wishing he had another story to tell aside from the one about how he and his old partner forked over all the rights to what would end up being the only hit song from their one and only album.

Before copyright law caught up with digital-sampling technology and the uses hip-hop found for it, the whole history of recorded sound was a playground and a candy store for any young rap producer with an open ear and access to cheap used vinyl. In 1989, on De La Soul’s “Eye Know,” the Amityville-bred producer Prince Paul set the keys from Steely Dan’s “Peg” against Otis Redding’s whistling from “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay” and hooked the chorus around Donald’s voice singing I know I’ll love you better. This was on De La Soul’s debut LP Three Feet High and Rising, an album that marked one pinnacle of hip-hop’s golden age of uncleared sampling and also the beginning of the end of that age. Paul and the group took the creative freedom of their moment further than anyone had before, throwing everything at hand into the album’s porridge: Hall & Oates, Liberace’s version of “Chopsticks,” Bob Dorough’s Schoolhouse Rock standard “Three Is a Magic Number,” Eddie Murphy soundbites, the living-coal-mine voice of Johnny Cash, Fiorello LaGuardia reading Dick Tracy comics over the radio during a newspaper strike—What does it all mean?—and, most infamously, twelve seconds of “You Showed Me,” the Turtles’ 1969 recording of a song by Gene Clark and Jim McGuinn of the Byrds. “You Showed Me” was the Turtles’ last top-10 hit. They broke up in 1970. Billed as Flo and Eddie, the group’s founders, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, then passed through Frank P e te r/Tar iq /Daniel  |   175

Zappa’s Mothers of Invention circa 200 Motels and sang backup on a few pre–Can’t Buy a Thrill–era Steely Dan demos, including a very early version of “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies.” In Kaylan’s memoir he says that when Steely Dan first got together, Donald offered him the job of lead singer, a position Kaylan turned down out of loyalty to Volman. Twenty years after the intial release of “You Showed Me,” De La Soul layered snippets from a French-language instructional record—Il y a saucisse, sans doute—over a four-bar loop of the song’s intro and put it on Three Feet High and Rising as a one-minute interlude called “Transmitting Live From Mars.” Before Three Feet High and Rising was released, De La Soul’s label Tommy Boy Music brokered deals with some of the artists sampled prominently on the record, including Steely Dan, but neglected to reach out to the Turtles. When the album came out and the Turtles complained, the label offered them a flat fee of $1,000, and Kaylan and Volman responded by suing the group and the label for $1.7 million in damages, describing themselves as “genuinely upset with the way De La Soul chopped up and mutilated their song.” The case was settled out of court, but two years later rapper Biz Markie was found guilty of criminal copyright infringement over an uncleared sample of the Irish singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again, Naturally.” The case set a precedent, requiring artists to “clear” any reuse of copyrighted music with the owners of the relevant copyrights before releasing it. Since only the most well-heeled artists could afford to pay sample-clearance fees, the decision changed the sound of hip-hop. Sampling didn’t die, but a chilling effect hampered the craft, since anyone who lifted from a recognizable song and failed to clear it risked being taken to the cleaners. The Turtles, the rest of their legacy aside, would go down in hip-hop history as a scourge on creativity—the greedheads who narced on De La Soul. Steely Dan’s legacy in this department is more complicated. They’re infamous for putting an end to Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz, but they’re also one of the most widely sampled white rock bands of all time. On The Predator, in 1992, Ice Cube and coproducers Rashad and DJ Pooh looped Bernard Purdie’s drums and Donald’s AM-radio-newsbreak keyboards from “Green Earrings” to create “Don’t Trust ’Em,” updating a Steely Dan song about a jewel thief robbing his own paramour—“Sorry, angel, I must take what I see”—into an Ice Cube song warning gentlemen of the ’90s that “the dating game ain’t what it used to be” because today’s independent women are as capable of gaffling as any man. New York rappers Organized Konfusion had already flipped “Green Earrings” one year earlier, braiding it with Verdine White’s bass line from Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Runnin’” to build the backing track for the hectic, pretty “Walk Into the Sun.” (Only Ice Cube’s album is Quan t um C r im inal s  |   176

available on the major streaming services; like De La Soul’s entire pre-2000s catalog, Organized Konfusion’s first two records float in copyright limbo because of the uncleared samples they still contain, the legal equivalent of unexploded ordnance.) A few years later, Naughty By Nature and Master P’s “Live or Die” bounced Percy Miller’s signature unnnngh off Donald’s Rhodes piano from “Third World Man,” dialing into the original’s tone of smoked-out, hazy foreboding. In 2004, on the mixtape deep cut “Ride Up,” Freeway and Joe Budden spit screw-faced bluster over a sample of “The Royal Scam”; on his first mixtape, a sixteen-year-old Kendrick Lamar would add his own voice to the track, proclaiming himself the Black Clark Kent, vowing to “chaperone you to a casket,” and rhyming “God’s children, what can you do to us?” with “This rap shit ain’t new to us / Been real since Mama was stroller scootin’ us” like the rap messiah he was about to be. On Sleepy Brown’s “Dress Up,” Brown and fellow Dungeon Family forefathers Ray Murray and Rico Wade fold “Midnite Cruiser” into erotic origami, with Brown’s voice chasing a snippet of the old song’s intro up and down the scale. And of course there’s Kanye, whose 2007 hit “Champion” digitally fattens a sample from “Kid Charlemagne” into a bloghouse anthem for Day-Glo freaks in shutter shades. “Walter and I listened to [‘Champion’], and although we’d love some of the income, neither of us particularly liked what he had done with [‘Kid Charlemagne’],” Donald said in 2012. “We said ’No,’ at first, and then he wrote us a handwritten letter that was kind of touching, about how the song was about his father, and he said, ‘I love your stuff, and I really want to use it because it’s a very personal thing for me.’ . . . It was such a good letter that we said, ‘All right, go ahead,’ and we made a deal with him.” The existence, in the world, of “Champion” is proof that Donald and Walter were capable of mercy; they were also capable of mercilessness. “They would not even give us writing credit,” Gunz lamented. “So if you look at . . . the information on the CD, it’s ‘Written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.’ Two old, white men. They not from the streets, they not from the hood, they not from Brooklyn, Queens or none of the boroughs. But it was ‘written by’ them.” “So Donald Fagen,” Gunz said with a rueful laugh, “wrote ‘I’m quick to slide off and slide this dick up in your wife.’” It’s not really that hard to imagine Donald writing a line like that, or at least admiring someone else for having done so. And although his formative years probably didn’t resemble those of 50 Cent or Kool G. Rap, Walter actually was from Queens. That said, if you were an aging rapper who’d been more or less robbed of all right to profit from your only hit song by a couple P e te r/Tar iq /Daniel  |   177

of guys who looked like seedy trigonometry teachers, you’d probably impugn their street cred, too. But even if nothing about Steely Dan was hip-hop, everything about them was hip-hop. If the sad tale of Peter Gunz proves anything, it’s that they were about that cash. And they relished taunting their enemies in public— Donald joked about l’affaire Gunz in the Classic Albums doc, but there’s also footage on YouTube of Walter hanging out in his home studio, grinning and showing off a plaque he was awarded for the impressive sales of “his” song “Deja Vu (Uptown Baby.)” They also wrote with name-brand specificity about decadent luxury lifestyles and sang in the voices of criminals and sociopaths, withholding moral judgment to get at colder truths about human nature. In the studio, they sought to combine the metronome thwack of disco records and the irreplaceable sound and feel of live musicians, so their engineer Roger Nichols devised a computer system that would allow them to program drums, snipping the perfect bar and looping it endlessly—years before digital sampling became a commonplace technology and a building block of hip-hop production. And like so many of the best rappers, Donald and Walter dwelled comfortably in contradiction. For guys who were quick to call their lawyers when sampled nonconsensually, they could be pretty sticky-fingered in their own songwriting. “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” might not exist without Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” after all, and while Silver reportedly took the quotation as a compliment, the same cannot be said for Keith Jarrett, who took successful legal action after Donald and Walter acknowledged how much “Gaucho” owed to his composition “Long as You Know You’re Living Yours.”

A few years before “Uptown Baby” happened, another rapper and producer had also built a song from a piece of “Black Cow,” but didn’t make the mistake of asking for permission. One night in December 1994, while broadcasting live to a narrow band of underground hip-hop fanatics on Columbia University’s student-run WKCR-FM, DJs Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia stopped busting each other’s balls and futzing with faulty equipment (“Yo, hittin’ it ain’t gonna help”) long enough to press play on a demo no audience had ever heard before. “Coming up right now is my man that’s down with KMD,” Bobbito said. “His name is Doom. Solo joint. Check it out.” That intro collapsed a whole lifetime into a few words and prefigured years of elusion and half-truth that lay ahead. Daniel Dumile was born in London in 1971 and raised in Long Island, New York; KMD was the Quan t um C r im inal s  |   178

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rap group he founded in the ’80s with his brother Dingilizwe, known as Subroc. Doom went by Zev Love X. The two KMD albums map a journey from innocence to experience. Mr. Hood is bright and goofy, the sound of young devouts spreading street knowledge like good news; Black Bastards, inspired by former Last Poet Gylan Kain’s proto-rap opus The Blue Guerilla (liner note: “No land, no god, no language, we have nothing of substance other than ourselves. We are the existential reality; philosophers forced to become court jesters to amuse and modify the dickless aristocrats”) sounded crowded, conflicted, and like it was made by people coming down off something. It was still unreleased in April 1993 when Subroc was struck by a car while trying to cross the Long Island Expressway. He died in the hospital that same night; friends remember Dumile playing Black Bastards on a loop at his funeral. Then Elektra Records dropped KMD in a dispute over cover art, and after that people didn’t see Dumile for years. P e te r/Tar iq /Daniel  |   179

Later in interviews he’d allude to periods of near homelessness; in his songs he alluded to jail time. Meanwhile he built a myth around his disappearance and reappearance. After he resurfaced, he was never seen in public without a metal mask inspired by the Fantastic Four’s nemesis, Doctor Doom, who in comics canon had been scarred in a laboratory accident while mixing science and black magic. A cult formed almost immediately, superseding KMD’s original fan base, and Doom became one of the most acclaimed rappers of his generation without losing his capacity to bewilder. Like Donald and Walter, he was an artist whose work drew on memories of formative schlock, referencing the Marvel canon, movie monsters like Gheedorah, and pro wrestling; the song “Hey!” lifted horn stabs and haunted-amusement-park atmosphere from the opening credits of Scooby-Doo. Doom would send masked accomplices out on the road to perform live shows on his behalf, so that each tour generated a new trail of conspiracy theories. He died on Halloween in 2020, of still-undisclosed causes, in England, where he’d been living since being refused reentry to the United States after a tour in 2010—it turned out he’d never been an American citizen—but news of his death didn’t break until December of that year. One last mysterious lapse of communication, one more mystery to ponder. When Bobbito Garcia plays the demo version of Doom’s “Gas Drawls” on the radio in 1994, all this is ahead of him. The vocals are double-tracked, as if two Dooms are crowding the mic, packing the margins of the verse with parentheticals and buried asides, rhyming the title phrase with “Breaking glass and plastic jaw like federal drastic law,” the words coming out like trauma-jumbled memories rattling in his armored skull. (Hittin’ it ain’t gonna help.) He gets worked up, but the backing track remains implacable: a loop of the five-second moment in the middle of Victor Feldman’s otherwise busy Rhodes solo where the whole band pauses to let five or six descending notes breathe, plus the voice of Donald Fagen saying, “You were very high,” compressed the way a scratched-in sample always sounds, a record inside a record, a transmission from Mars. Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz sampled the first sound you hear when you drop the needle on Aja, and got caught before they could run; Doom finds a trap door inside “Black Cow,” slips through it, and builds a world inside a crawlspace.

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The Expanding Man (Deacon Blues)

There’s a case to be made that the quintessential Steely Dan song is “Dr. Wu,” because it’s a druggy and ambiguous depiction of a love triangle and it builds to a ripping sax solo. You could also argue that the Steeliest Dan song is “Do It Again,” the point where Donald and Walter began their double life as beloved Hot 100 hitmakers and inscrutable cult weirdos, or “Babylon Sisters,” which exemplifies both their borderline-psychotic commitment to quality control (it was mixed more than 250 times before Donald would let it go) and their unparalleled ability to set a mood. It might be “Peg,” because the quintessential Steely Dan song should probably be one that features Michael McDonald, and “Peg” is amazing. If your thing is guitar solos, your Steely Dan ur-text might be “Kid Charlemagne” or “My Old School” or “Reelin’ in the Years.” If the salient point of Steely Dan to you is that they’ve been dirty old men since they were barely twenty-five, it’s either “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” or “Hey Nineteen.” If you’re a true fan you’re probably also an insufferable contrarian and are ready to go to the wall for, I don’t know, “Here at the Western World” or “Soul Ram” or something even more obscure. But if humanity ever gets it together to load another golden record onto a deep-space probe bound for any world that welcomes us, and there’s room on that record for one track that sends the message We were a species that despite our failings and frailties managed to create smooth yet sarcastic 181

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jazz-inflected rock music loaded with obscure cultural references and a pervasive sense of nostalgic/escapist yearning, deep cuts won’t cut it. We can and should explain Steely Dan to the star-children with one song and one song only, and that song is “Deacon Blues.” Admittedly, this is a pretty sturdy limb to go out on: “Deacon Blues” is one of the best-known songs on Aja, the most popular record of Steely Dan’s career. It’s the one Dan album where everything actually worked out. It wasn’t rushed out between tours or limited by the capabilities of a fixed fiveman lineup like the first three albums. It wasn’t jinxed by tetchy technology like Katy Lied was. And it isn’t a document of a band undone by drugs and the dark magic of primitive drum machines like Gaucho is about to be. It’s not that Aja isn’t a monument to Donald and Walter’s perfectionism—while recording the song “Home at Last,” Donald reportedly spends multiple nights in the studio trying to nail his delivery of the two-word phrase “Well, the . . . ” at the top of the chorus—but this time, all that attention to detail paid off commercially as well as aesthetically. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   182

Within a month of its release, it peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200, outselling everything but Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Linda Ronstadt’s Simple Dreams. It went on to sell two million copies and became one of the first albums ever certified platinum—with a little help from the Dan’s new manager, Irving Azoff, who arranged to offer Aja to retailers for a dollar less than the standard $7.98 list price in order to ensure the kind of healthy chart performance that would translate to radio airplay. “Think of the biggest American supergroups,” Azoff said to Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe in a 1977 Steely Dan profile. “Fleetwood Mac. The Eagles. Chicago . . . and Steely Dan. Everybody knows Steely Dan. They belong in that list. All we had to do was make it official.” “Deacon Blues,” the second single from Aja, went Top 20 in June of ’78. It’s preternaturally supple, rock fused with jazz at the molecular level, a sound they’ve spent years groping toward finally realized. Some of the musicians are Dan mainstays—Larry Carlton on guitar, Bernard Purdie on drums—but the tenor-sax solo, all-important narratively as well as musically, is by Pete

B E RN A RD P U RD I E

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Christlieb, a West Coast studio veteran whose resumé includes everything from Tom Waits’s The Heart of Saturday Night to a stint in the brass section of the Star Trek: The Next Generation orchestra. Donald and Walter first heard him on the Tonight Show, playing in Doc Severinsen’s band.* “We did our best work behind the Alpo dog food commercials,” Christlieb said. “I sold a lot of dog food.” He dropped by one day after a Tonight Show taping and tried the solo twice; the second take is the one on the record. “I was gone in a half-hour,” Christlieb remembered in 2015. “The next thing I know I’m hearing myself in every airport bathroom in the world.” Sometimes, that’s life as a working musician—airports and dog food. “Deacon Blues” paints a more romantic picture of the jazzman as existential hero, unmoored and doomed but capable on a good night of breathing his own irreducible truth through a horn. The important thing about “Deacon Blues,” though, is that it’s not actually a song about being that kind of artist; it’s about imagining being that guy. “The protagonist is not a musician,” Walter says in the Classic Albums episode. “He just sort of imagines that might be one of the mythic forms of loserdom to which he might aspire. And who’s to say he’s wrong?” As usual in Steely Dan’s songs, jazz represents a timeless state of grace and an escape hatch from workaday reality; the protagonist calls himself the Expanding Man because he dreams of being something more than what he is right now. The protagonist wants people to call him Deacon Blues the way they call Alabama’s football team the Crimson Tide, because if he can’t be a winner he wants to be the kind of loser whose name also rings out. He yearns for a context and a sentimental vocabulary that might render his loserdom noble—something, to paraphrase Frank O’Hara, to make the catastrophe of his personality seem beautiful and interesting and modern— and believes jazz might be it. In other words, whether his fantasy of transcending spectatorship (“Seems like only yesterday / I gazed through the glass / At ramblers, wild gamblers / That’s all in the past”) actually hinges on transcending his skin tone, he’s still delusional. He might not even play the saxophone—he might not even own a saxophone—but he’s already dreaming of pouring out his soul through music, making “languid and bittersweet” love to women, and a blaze-of-glory death.

* London Sessions, Doc Severinsen’s 1980 collaboration with the National Philharmonic of London, features covers of semi-contemporary hits like “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and “Sometimes When We Touch”—and a brisk, jaunty rendition of “Peg,” which reveals just how close the song was to being talk-show music in the first place.

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Of course it sounds dumb when you put it that way, but the music enfolds this suspect scenario in rare-by-Steely-Dan-standards warmth and empathy. The specific life the protagonist yearns for is a patchwork of bohemian clichés, but even as it walks up to the line of parody, “Deacon Blues” romanticizes the yearning itself—Deacon Blues, the guy, is heroic because what he wants is hopeless, and even though he probably knows that, he can’t help wanting it anyway.

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MIC HAEL Mc D ON A L D

Broadway Duchess (I Got the News)

Michael McDonald cuts his teeth in St. Louis Top 40 cover bands and winds up gigging around Los Angeles in the early ’70s. He meets sometimes Dan session drummer Jeff Porcaro when they’re both booked to play for the cast and crew of the NBC series Emergency! as they toast their just-wrapped season on the Universal Studios lot. By 1974 McDonald has joined the soonto-be-dissolved Steely Dan touring band on keyboards and backing vocals. He and Skunk Baxter go off to join the Doobie Brothers when Donald and Walter retire from the road; McDonald sings on a string of Doobies hits, eases into a solo career. But he also comes back for Steely Dan sessions any time they need a voice that sounds like crushed diamonds mixed with silt. He’s the guy they call when a song needs a high part that’s out of Donald’s reach or a color that isn’t on his palette. Donald can sing to Rose Darling all night long but only a voice like Michael’s can write her name in gold across the sky. When the band was still touring, McDonald often sang lead on songs like “Pretzel Logic,” but in the studio he’s been the key to many sublimely ridiculous Steely Dan moments just by belting out a single phrase, like “Going insane!,” or even a single word in stacked harmony, like the title phrase from “Peg.” When he wasn’t busy with the Dan, he could be heard adding the same crucial emotional emphasis to recordings by countless other soft-rock legends. In a brilliant SCTV sketch from 1977, a fake-bearded 187

Rick Moranis plays a genial but overworked McDonald who speeds to the studio in a convertible, bursts into the recording booth just in time to hit his marks on Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind,” then splits for his next gig. McDonald happened to be watching TV the night that the sketch aired; he’d just smoked a potent joint with Doobies guitarist Pat Simmons, and for a moment he believed that he was looking at himself. “I went, ‘Am I having a psychotic breakdown?,’” he told Ultimate Classic Rock in 2018. “I’m going, ‘I know that guy!’” (Until he realized what he was watching, he briefly contemplated swearing off doobies for life.) When I think about Michael McDonald, I think about “I Got the News,” the least-played song on Aja according to Spotify’s customer-facing playcount stats. There are very few Steely Dan songs in which horniness is not the prelude to betrayal, doom, disappointment, or criminal charges, but “I Got the News” might be one of them. Sooner or later every art-band guy accepts that he has a body and begins listening to it. In the process of discovering sex, they learn that they themselves have hips and butts. And that they can move these parts in tandem. With other people around, even. This is the news! It makes for embarrassing words and better music, usually. It leads to cranking the bass. Later examples include David Byrne (who gets wiggly circa mid-period Talking Heads and now leads dance classes over Zoom) and Thom “The Body” Yorke. “I Got the News”—a bulletin direct from the singer’s lizard brain, a pheromone ping—is where it happens for Donald Fagen. It’s a song about love growing, which leads to love coming in spurts. Donald would suggest years later that Steely Dan had more in common with punk than they did with their AOR milieu. He meant it sensibility-wise, but I hear it in the way all the music on this song answers to the tight-lipped little five-note bass line, a high-tension wire everything else hangs from. The rhythms denote puppetry, jerking up and down, man marionetted by desire. This is Steely Dan doing sex-disco and it’s as uptight as punk, hard as a starched cravat, but also urbane, classy. It pogos in white gloves, holding a cane horizontally. The lyrics are nonmetaphorical: they describe two people really giving it to each other. Mr. Steely Dan is nuts with lust. “You’re a screamer. You’ve got the muscle. Spanish kissin’, see it glisten. Slow down, I’ll tell you when / I may never walk again.” It’s another Steely Dan melody built from interlocking layers—little accentuating swirls of organ dropping in and out, synthesized strings swelling behind the guitar solo, horns underlining the rhythm guitar as needed. Nothing sticks around longer than necessary to add a particular color at a particular moment. And all of it is just driving toward the part where Michael McDonald swoops in to sing the words Broadway duchess, which is Quan t um C r im inal s  |   188

when the clavinets kick in and the drums step up in the mix and the whole song becomes a moving sidewalk for McDonald’s voice to dance across. Donald sings everything up to that point, but Broadway duchess is a part of the melody that requires a pinch-hitter. Only Michael McDonald can move this pent-up, worked-up song to a moment of release. At the same time, McDonald could not sing this entire song. Michael McDonald singing the entirety of “I Got the News” would be too powerful, would unleash more salt-andpepper-bearded orgone energy than this song or any other song could ever hope to contain. So he sings “Broadway Duchess,” the only part they need him for, and then rides like the wind to wherever else he’s needed next.

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Josie (Josie)

From behind a curdled sneer, Donald tells the Classic Albums camera crew: “I kinda like ‘Josie,’ because ‘Josie’ sounds like a good rhythm-and-blues record, y’know? It has all the stuff I like about, like, a good Junior Parker record or a Bobby Bland record. There’s a lot of that stuff in it. Plus some other stuff.” “Josie” is an R&B party song that bumps hips with disco while turning the storyline of “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More” inside out—instead of the absent father, the subject is a magical mother figure who’ll bring the good times back with her when she finally returns, like Quinn the Eskimo or Auntie Mame. The narrators might be greasers out of Bruce Davidson’s Brooklyn Gang pictures; they want to dance and rumble and have sex on the beach. We don’t learn much about who Josie is, why she left, whether she went to Hollywood or reform school, but a line like “She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire” implies that a propensity for religious rapture is part of her overall appeal. “Prays like a Roman” is a classic van Vogtian hang-up, like the reference to “battle apples,” a slang term for cherry bombs that Walter and Donald made up. As much as “Josie” sounds like Steely Dan trying to make a good rhythmand-blues record, going undercover inside a genre, it also sounds like them putting the idea of an R&B record inside quotation marks. It’s an exercise and the question it explores is how many hang-ups the exercise can contain, 190

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how many knots of musical information you can tie in the groove before it stops grooving. They can’t help spiking the formula with things that are not supposed to be there, and the things that don’t quite fit the song become the point of the song. If the song’s sleek groove is a Mercedes, Larry Carlton and Dean Parks’s intertwined dual-guitar intro is a spiny Alexander Calder hood ornament and Jim Keltner’s drum break, played on a garbage-can lid, ties tin cans and string to the rear bumper. These sounds put everything else in context, claiming it for art, the same way the act of framing a candy wrapper or an airsickness bag and hanging it in a gallery invites us to ponder the weirdness of these objects, but also the invisible fluencies of their design. Josie  |   191

BABY LO N S I ST E RS

The Babylon Sisters (Babylon Sisters)

Aja peaks at number three on the Billboard 200, remains to this day the highest-charting Steely Dan album ever, yields a pair of Top 20 singles in “Josie” and “Deacon Blues.” They start to think it might be time to tour again and get as far as putting a band together and booking some rehearsals. “As we started to run down the tunes, this incredible sense of ennui came over both of us,” Fagen said in 1981. “We had 4,000 dollars worth of musicians in the room,” Becker said. “Guys who wouldn’t go out on the road for Miles Davis, literally, and they were committed to doing this. And we both left the room together and said, ‘What do you say, you wanna can it.’ And we both said ‘yeah’ without thinking twice.” The album they would make instead would exhaust them as much as any tour could have. Gaucho marked the end of Steely Dan as they had known it, whether they knew it at the time or not. It might not have been the first time their perfectionism crossed the line into madness (Well, the . . .), but on Gaucho that side of their process became the process. Eleven different engineers and forty-two session musicians cycled through the studio, most of them playing music no one would ever hear. After Donald and Gary Katz finished mixing album opener “Babylon Sisters” for the 250th time, the engineers on duty presented Donald with a custom-made plaque commemorating that worrisome milestone; Donald proceeded to mix the song twenty-eight more times. 193

“In some ways, the early, rougher ones sound better now than the later ones,” Walter said in 1995, “whereas at the time it seemed like we were ever rising toward the light. I think because of the kind of music we were doing, it seemed to us that it should be real seamlessly put together and have a high level of polish to make it work. . . . Our own harsh appraisals of our talents dictated to us that we work harder to make it really smooth and flawless.” Depending on your taste in Steely Dan songs, Gaucho is either the point where Donald and Walter’s quest for a flawless sound finally sucked the last of the oxygen out of their music, or it’s the point where a fundamentally satirical musical project—dark songs about human appetite and longing wedded to self-consciously slick music—finally reaches its antiseptic apotheosis. I’m in the latter camp; whether it needed those 278 mixes, “Babylon Sisters” is an oppressive marvel—a hot, still room of a song, as dense with foreboding as it is with tricky harmony. A long piano intro leaves footprints on a deserted beach; then Mr. Steely Dan is driving West on Sunset, en route to a seaside threesome, full of dead-man-walking dread, feeling his age and losing his nerve. The live version on the 1995 album Alive in America, recorded on a hot August night in St. Petersburg, Florida, steers the song even further into noir. The tempo is more relaxed, music for island airports, but Donald bites off his lines like a gangster on the run, looking over his shoulder, spitting out “To the sea” as a single word. In both versions, he could be telling us all this posthumously, while floating face-down in a pool. A decade or so later, Mike Doughty and Soul Coughing will distill the feeling of “Babylon Sisters” (plus a touch of “The Nightfly,” Donald’s ode to ancient-mariner disc jocks) into a song called “Screenwriter’s Blues,” where Doughty impersonates the voice of doom shouting through your apartment intercom, saying things like “You are going to Reseda to make love to a woman whose real name you do not know,” and then later the kicker: “We are all, in one way or another, going to Reseda, someday, to die.” For years I pictured Mr. Steely Dan in this song as a guy in a car talking to two women, the Babylon Sisters, but then I saw it described as one side of a conversation between two men, one painting a picture for the other of the good time they are going to have when they get to wherever the Babylon Sisters are, and that makes as much sense if not more. Either way, by the second and third verse, the narrator is alone with his thoughts, the knowledge of who he is and what he’s about, which is a harsh kind of alone to be. His friends tell him “Don’t go for that cotton candy,” a line the internet hears as a reference to drugs or too-young girls—neither is ever a bad guess when it comes to Steely Dan, but maybe the point is just that it’s a bad idea to chase pleasures that dissolve the second they hit your tongue. The guitar in the left speaker—probably Steve Khan—plays chicka-chick Quan t um C r im inal s  |   194

upstrokes, making this another Dan song with a foot in reggae. So maybe it’s “Babylon” in the Rasta sense, the “Rivers of Babylon” sense—a nod to Donald and Walter’s semi-reluctant sojourn on the West Coast, when captivity required of them these songs. And it’s also “Babylon” as in Freddie McGregor’s “Jogging,” where the rich folks slip on their Adidas and Pumas to go running “on the sand, inna Babylon land.” Of course Babylon was an actual historical city, which fell to the Persian army in 539 BC; in the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian king Belshazzar is busy chugging wine from sacred vessels when a literal ghost-hand materializes and writes on the wall that he’s going to die that night. In Revelation, the Whore of Babylon is an actual woman, the Mother of Harlots, who rides in on a seven-headed beast, but also a metaphorical stand-in for some “great city, which reigns over the kings of the Earth,” which in Biblical times probably meant Rome. In every story, Babylon is a city that’s destined to fall and also deserves to fall. Modern-day LA has been telling similar stories about its own destiny for decades. “The city burning,” Joan Didion wrote, “is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself.” Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear traces destruction-of-Los-Angeles stories from the 1900s—when Homer Lea’s The Valor of Ignorance imagined Japanese troops conquering LA in a single day after making landfall at Santa Monica, establishing the enduring myth of a “Yellow Peril” striking at the United States from across the Pacific—all the way to Independence Day, pausing along the way to go deep on works like Myron Brinig’s 1933 novel Flutter of an Eyelid, which skewers Aimee Semple MacPherson and the SoCal avant-gardists of the ’30s before showing us California literally tumbling into the sea: “Los Angeles tobogganed with almost one continuous movement into the water, the shore cities going first, followed by the inland communities; the business streets, the buildings, the motion picture studios in Hollywood where actors become stark and pallid under their mustard-colored makeup.” “Babylon Sisters” is not necessarily building to a literal apocalypse; the destruction that waits for Mr. Steely Dan in the space between two possibly underage women reclining expectant on a waterbed might be more personal, the death of the better man he’d like to believe himself to be. His life is approaching a terminus of unsustainability; he may be chasing the distant lights from across the bay, but spiritually he is going to Reseda.

Sometimes—whenever the heat-dome clamps down on the city or a forest fire paints the skies red—LA can feel apocalyptic in a way that mirrors whatever internal apocalypse you may be struggling with. The guy in “Babylon Th e Babylon S ist er s  |  195

Sisters” feels doom blowing in on the Santa Ana winds, a reference that grounds the song in a long tradition of LA literature about meteorological unease. The Santa Anas blow in from the Great Basin whenever pressure drops over the Pacific Ocean. Funneled through mountain passes, they pick up speed as they approach the coast, carrying pathogens and malaise-inducing positive ions in from the Southwest, exacerbating wildfire conditions, roiling the seas, and stoking a specific strain of anxiety and rage in Los Angeles’s collective psyche. When the Santa Anas are blowing, Raymond Chandler wrote, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.” No one can resist quoting that one, including Joan Didion, who described LA weather in Slouching Towards Bethlehem as “the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse . . . Just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds show us how close to the edge we are.” “Babylon Sisters” feels like the Santa Anas are in it, stirring spooked tension under the mix’s placid surface. There’s a sound on this track that I’ve never heard anyone talk about, an unexplained noise I can hear the way people claim they can hear screams in “Love Rollercoaster.” It’s Donald’s voice, but he’s singing a line that appears on no lyric sheet I’ve ever seen— it sounds like Baaaaaad newwwwwws, sung as if in imitation of the wind. Picture one of those big cheek-puffed angry-baby heads that personify the four winds on old maps, except instead of an angry baby it’s Donald Fagen. And then later, after the second time Donald sings, “So fine, so young” and the backing vocalists chime in “Tell me I’m the only one,” there’s a scream buried in the mix just slightly left of the center of the stereo field. An inward scream—or the sound of someone falling off a cliff, nearly drowned out by the ocean. These are not mistakes; everything in this mix is precisely positioned and here for a reason. I think a lot about why they are there. I think we’re supposed to hear it as the narrator’s subconscious breaking through, rupturing the mood. I think it’s a reminder that even sonically flawless records are still made by people whose bodies respond to changes in the weather and sometimes these people get uptight and put down their sterilized instruments and let out a scream.

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Hoops McCann/ The Dread Moray Eel (Glamour Profession) Sometime in the 1970s, or so the story goes, a cocaine dealer they call the Count is driving his car way over the speed limit. When his passenger, Glenn Frey of the Eagles, nervously points this out, the Count just smiles at Frey and says, “Life in the fast lane.” It’s an instant hit-song title in search of the wild-eyed Joe Walsh guitar riff that will hammer it into history in 1976. One year before “Life in the Fast Lane” turns up on Hotel California, Neil Young releases “Tired Eyes,” about a cocaine deal gone wrong and a dealer who’s either become a casualty or a killer or both. The song takes place after the fact. We hear only Neil’s side of the conversation—Neil asking questions, trying to understand, halting and elliptical, CSI: Topanga with another sideburned Doc Sportello unraveling the case. I mean, was he a heavy doper, or—What do you mean, he had bullet holes in his mirrors? “Tired Eyes” was also based on a true story; Neil has said he knew the shooter. In both songs the dealer is the singer’s connection figuratively as well as literally, an inside man whose outlaw allure stems from his familiarity with a world of license and violence far removed from rock stardom. But both tales wind up cautionary. Frey’s song is more fun on the surface, but its protagonists’ lives still end up like Ferraris wrapped around trees. Neil’s version is more openly seamy and bleak and tragic, a frayed extension of “Tonight’s the Night,” the music dragging itself along as if gut-shot at the bottom of the driveway. 197

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By the end of the ’70s the counterculture is a leisure class with its own aristocracy, and cocaine is that club’s secret handshake. “Life in the Fast Lane” and “Tired Eyes” both look down at that reality from a mansion on the hill. Steely Dan’s “Glamour Profession” is also about rich California people spending too much money on cocaine, but it’s told from the perspective of the guy who makes it snow, a dealer who’s come to think of himself as a peer to his big-baller clientele. The backup singers warn everyone involved that “living hard will take its toll,” but the narrator doesn’t seem to be listening. “[He] finds himself getting some kind of power by selling drugs to celebrities and hanging around with them, being in their scene,” Donald told Ben Sidran. “The idea of it is the kind of power that I think someone like that feels. The only way that someone on that level can have power is by being associated with power.” Quan t um C r im inal s  |   198

“J U N GL E J I M ”

THE BACKUP S IN GE RS

Gaucho as a whole is sort of a concept album about power, with songs about people throwing it around, clinging to it desperately, or feeling it slip away, from the Dandy of Gamma Chi mourning his fading virility in “Hey Nineteen” to the Gaucho disrupting the power dynamics of a relationship to the main guy in “Third World Man,” a mind-blown drug casualty going through the motions of colonial conquest. But it’s also a record about people selling themselves the dream of a good time, convincing themselves that a one-night stand is a real occasion; its characters are too caught up in the lifestyle to view it from any critical distance. The narrator of “Glamour Profession” seems to understand that the whole California dreamlife is a powder-powered illusion—“Hollywood, I know your middle name / Who inspires your fabled fools? / That’s my claim to fame”—and that his access to it is purely transactional. But he’s also high on his own supply, moving from Hoops’s entourage to a Barbados-bound yacht to a late-night business dinner at the Beverly Hills institution Mr. Chow as if he really belongs in all these places, name-dropping “Jive Miguel,” his man in Bogata, like an industry schmoozer making if-you-know-you-know references to “Brad” and “George.” He tells one client, “When it’s all over, we’ll make some calls from my car,” then adds “We’re a star,” saying the quiet part out loud. “Carola suggests that by now they realize they’ll never get out of El Lay, so they’ve elected to sing in their chains like the sea,” Robert Christgau wrote of Aja, quoting critic Carola Dibbell, his wife. It’s one of the best Quan t um C r im inal s  |   200

things anyone’s ever said about that album, but it applies even more to Gaucho, the Steely Dan album where the line between Donald and Walter and the Hollywood types they’re singing about mostly disappears, at least lyrically. “Glamour Profession” is about how drugs can turn an outsider into an insider; there’s an implication that if not for his trade, the dealer/narrator would still be one of the “local boys” who “spend a quarter / Just to shine the silver bowl.” In real life, although Donald and Walter had moved back to New York by the time they made Gaucho, they couldn’t pretend anymore that fast-lane LA was alien to them, and they couldn’t write about its temptations from the perspective of impartial observers. Walter in particular had joined the ranks of the fabled fools; when he stepped away from music after Gaucho, it was partly to get a handle on his own substance-abuse issues.

J I V E MI G U E L

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He’s a ghost on Gaucho, playing nothing on three out of seven songs, and his absence might be one of the factors that gives the record its chill. Walter falling prey to addiction is a coincidence—there’s no telling who it’ll happen to, the Red Death doesn’t care if you’re famous for writing songs about drugs or not. But it’s an artistically validating coincidence. Gaucho is the Steely Dan record whose stories feel the most like fiction, but the parallels render it personal. They were not standing outside the party anymore. For guys like Neil and Glenn, writing about dope dealers—and hanging out with them—is a not-necessarily-harmful way to flirt with outlaw chic. But for the dealer in this song, keys open doors to a world of near-Continental sophistication and luxury like the ones that people discover when they tag along with money in Highsmith or Fitzgerald. The parts about cocaine in the NBA are ahead-of-the-game realistic. A report published by the Washington Post two months before Gaucho comes out will suggest that anywhere from 40 percent to 75 percent of NBA players are using powdered or rock cocaine; one former player quoted anonymously in the story says coke is the NBA’s substance of choice because it’s “the drug of the money culture.” In 2020, in the documentary series The Last Dance, Michael Jordan will laugh knowingly when the Chicago Bulls squad he joined in 1984 is referred to as a “traveling cocaine circus.” But after the narrator leaves Hoops McCann, “Glamour Profession” becomes literal yacht rock, an almost satirically overthe-top fantasy of frictionless classiness, of rolling with the showbiz kids as they hop around exotic ports. The music drives that home—it’s self-consciously fancy-sounding, a song with gold fixtures and a rose stem in its teeth, disco the way Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band’s “I’ll Play the Fool” was disco, but filtered through elevator speakers and the air of a very clean supermarket. Technically the drummer on the track is Steve Gadd, of “Aja” fame, but the music’s pace is set by WENDEL, a primitive 12-bit sampler developed by Steely Dan’s longtime producer/ engineer Roger Nichols. Although by this point Donald and Walter were working exclusively with high-end session players like Gadd, who earned their triple-scale checks by delivering flawless takes on command, they yearned for WENDEL more control over milliseconds of timing and micronuances of groove. “One of us said something like ‘It’s too bad that we can’t get a machine to play the beat we want, with full-frequency drum sounds, and to be able Quan t um C r im inal s  |   202

TH E D RE A D MORAY E E L

to move the snare drum and kick drum around independently,’” Donald said. “Roger replied ‘I can do that’ . . . and six weeks later he came in with this machine.” New machines create new ideals to struggle toward, and new sauce to get lost in. WENDEL allowed Donald and Walter to loop a perfect take’s most perfect bar or build one themselves from snippets of a live drummer’s performance. Long before the price of a programmable drum machine dropped below $1,000, decades before ProTools transformed modern record-making, Donald and Walter were building the beats for Gaucho like rap producers working an SP-1200—sort of. “This was in the days when digital was still very primitive,” Donald said. “Roger’s machine did not even have any switches, it only had a regular computer keyboard, and he had to type all these bytes out, huge lists of numbers, which took him 20 minutes, and at the end he would hit Return, and we heard this one snare [per] beat.” Hoop s McCa n n/The Dr e ad Mor ay E el  |  203

Nichols’s work on Gaucho won him another Grammy in the Best Engineer, Non-Classical category—he’d won for Aja three years earlier—and WENDEL was eventually awarded a platinum-album plaque for “his” contributions to the record. By the end of the ’80s, the introduction of more affordable and easier-to-use sampling machines like E-Mu’s SP-1200 would transform modern music and render WENDEL obsolete, but not before Nichols’s invention was deployed on another hit album, actor Bruce Willis’s The Return of Bruno, certified gold in 1987. Donald and WENDEL’s collaboration continued past the end of Steely Dan. He used a later, 16-bit model to tighten the grooves on The Nightfly, but he has said it was never his favorite way of working: “I used to call it the Desperation Machine.”

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The Dandy of Gamma Chi/Aretha Franklin (Hey Nineteen) The Dandy makes one of the great entrances in the Steely Dan canon. Guitarist Hugh McCracken—veteran of “Killing Me Softly” and “Brown Eyed Girl” and Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” not to mention Katy Lied, The Royal Scam, Everything Must Go, and Fagen’s Morph the Cat—bends a string for the length of a Pall Mall exhale, and then the Dandy appears, as if parting fern-bar fronds, sidling up to tell a sad story to some sweet young thing. “What the automobile is to Detroit, the twenty-year-old woman is to L.A.,” a character suggests in Leonard Michaels’s story “A Normal Evening With Audrey.” The protagonist of Michaels’s story is in from out of town and staying at the Chateau Marmont, “where Stravinsky once lived and John Belushi died of an overdose.” (The juxtaposition feels Steely Danappropriate; what were the Dan if not the exact midpoint between “Rite of Spring” and Animal House?) In “Hey Nineteen,” all the age-appropriate sweet things from Boston have grown up and gone off to marry Scarsdale guys, leaving Mr. Steely Dan betwixt and bewildered and making this the most East Coast-ish song on Gaucho, otherwise Steely Dan’s most indelibly “Los Angeles” album even though they made it in New York. When “Hey Nineteen” is released as a single in 1981 and becomes their first top-ten hit since “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” six years earlier, Walter is only thirty and Fagen is thirty-two. But they’d identified as old 205

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before their time, more or less since bebop slipped out of style, and they viewed the dawn of the ’80s from the Dandy’s side of an alienating interpersonal gulf. “We were in our thirties,” Fagen recalled years later, “and still saddled with these enormous sex drives and faced with the problem that you can no longer talk to a 19-year-old girl because the culture has changed.” He said this at fifty-eight, in 2006, a few years before the culture changed in ways that would among other things change the meaning of a phrase like “the culture has changed.” In “Hey Nineteen” the issue is not that old guys can’t talk to young girls for fear of seeming predatory; they literally can’t have a conversation because they share so few points of reference. This song is typically filed alongside “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a less popular but more sinister Donald and Walter song about old men pursuing the far-too-young. But like so much of Gaucho, “Hey Nineteen” is really about the decay of human bonds. The Dandy gets older and the nineteen-year-olds who captivate him stay the Th e Da n dy of Gam ma Chi   |  207

same age, a time-honored dynamic. But in this song, the nineteen-year-old’s innocence—she’s never heard of Aretha Franklin—just slaps the narrator in the face with the fact of his own senescence. The first line of this song is “Way back when, in ’67” which puts the narrator’s collegiate glory years only thirteen years behind him. If this song took place in 2023, the Dandy would be misty for 2010: “Hey nineteen—that’s Katy Perry.” Thirteen years is an eternity in nineteen-year-old time, though. The minute the Dandy name-drops his frat, he might as well be working this room in a raccoon coat and straw boater, like Mr. Burns just back from the Harvard-Yale game, the ghost of a dead context. He’s just that guy who stayed at the party too long. You know this guy. You have encountered him, or you’ve told yourself you aren’t him. In “Hey Nineteen,” he shows up and talks about what it feels like to slip into irrelevance, but then he stops talking. There’s a long solo followed by a chorus followed by another long solo. The thing about Gaucho is that after “Babylon Sisters,”

THE S OU L S U RV I VORS

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the rest of Side 1 is bright and up-tempo. It’s electronic dance music. You can almost hear Nineteen skating circles around the Dandy, laughing and eager, while he duck-walks in his boat shoes, begging Skate a little lower now, sounding almost innocent. It’s maybe the peppiest song ever written about feeling like your body is turning to mummy dust as you slide on down into your thirties. The music on “Hey Nineteen” is mixed desert-dry, each sound resting on its own pillow of premium studio vacuum. The exception is Fagen’s vocal, which is doubled and/or harshly reverbed. When he sings, I’m just growwwwwwing old, the call is coming from inside a casket. “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian / make tonight a wonderful thing,” the backing vocalists sing. Fagen-as-theDandy begs, “Say it again,” as if he’s the one who needs to be convinced that he’s having a good time. “I remembered Audrey collecting papers; men from whom she walked away,” Michaels writes. “Her glory. Being desired, walking away. We lost her at the party.” At the end of the story the protagonist’s friend Ben drives him home along Mulholland Drive while reciting “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the Wallace Stevens poem about the girl who outsings the dark voice of the sea. Michaels tells us that Ben spent his glory days behind enemy lines as a fearsome jungle-combat specialist: “I’d heard he could take a man’s head off, in the middle of a sentence, so quickly the head went on speaking, unaware it was dead.”

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The Gaucho (Gaucho)

Gaucho is practically a concept album about the Doomed Triangle. The front cover is an illustration based on an old Argentinian woodcut of two people dancing the tango—a dance it famously takes two to do—but the content on the record is all about how three’s a crowd. Mr. Steely Dan admits in “Babylon Sisters” that he “should know by now” that “love’s not a game for three,” even though the song begins with him going to see the Babylon Sisters for something he insists is a “real occasion.” Gaucho also has “My Rival,” where the narrator watches from the shadows, metaphorizing infidelity as a parking problem: “The milk truck squeezed into my space.” Most importantly there’s “Gaucho” itself, which I’ve always heard as a triangle involving three men—the Gaucho, a flamboyant presence in elevator shoes and spangled leather, the narrator, and the guy who’s brought the Gaucho home. The Gaucho’s mere presence is a problem; in the narrator’s opinion, he presents some kind of a threat to whatever arrangement the narrator and his friend have going with the “heavy rollers.” He alternates between shock and disgust at his friend’s behavior (“Look at you / Holding hands with the man from Rio”) and insisting that they get rid of this interloper (“I’ll drop him near the freeway”) before the Gaucho ruins everything. “Gaucho” has its own inconvenient third—the pianist and composer Keith Jarrett. The song’s opening is the passage in Steely Dan’s catalog that most evokes the waving-goodbye vamps traditionally played by the Saturday 210

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Night Live band as another episode limps toward the afterparty, but it also closely resembles the head of a Jarrett piece called “Long as You Know You’re Living Yours.” Donald will later admit that the resemblance made him nervous; as he puts it to Leo Sidran years later, “I don’t want to be a repeater pencil, as Lester Young used to say.” When the song proves difficult to capture in the studio, he’s a little relieved to give up on it. But one night after everyone else has clocked out, Steely Dan’s engineer Roger Nichols finishes the track, and “Gaucho” ends up being the title song on the album they’re making. “Gaucho” and “Long as You Know You’re Living Yours” end very differently, but for about forty seconds, Steely Dan’s song is enough like Jarrett’s that Donald and Walter have to acknowledge the similarities when cornered on the subject by Musician magazine. Walter says he loves the Jarrett song, and when interviewer David Breskin suggests there’s some “borrowing” going on, Donald replies, “Hell, we steal. We’re the robber barons of rock-’n’-roll.” They are joking around about ripping off the work of someone who takes his work extremely seriously. A child piano prodigy of Scots-Irish and Hungarian descent, Jarrett wore a carefully manicured Afro and was often mistaken for Black as he rose to prominence in jazz, first as a sideman to Art Blakey and Charles Lloyd, then as part of the double-keyboard band that backed Miles Davis on Miles Davis at Fillmore and Live/Evil. He began playing fully improvised solo piano concerts in 1973. He performed deeply cerebral music in a way that physicalized the agonies of its creation, grimacing and headbanging his way through each concert, writhing as if beset at the bench by fire ants. The New York Times once said he looked like a man “giving birth to a square baby.” Jarrett might be Steely Dan’s true nemesis, a mirror in which they’d hate to see themselves reflected. He played at a level of total extemporaneity that Donald and Walter could not abide, but like them he was a perfectionist, and like them he struggled with man’s inherent inability to control the environment in a live-concert setting. Donald and Walter solved their problems with touring by quitting the road; Jarrett passed out cough drops to his audiences, so as not to be affronted by their expulsions while performing. Fighting a never-ending battle against chronic fatigue and poor concert-hall acoustics, able to be yanked out of his trance and into seething rage by a single errant noise from the cheap seats, he was the John McEnroe of jazz, leaving it all on the court without a trace of self-awareness. He did his best work in terrible conditions: his masterpiece is probably The Koln Concert, which he recorded live in 1975 at the Cologne Opera while sick and sleep-deprived and in a back brace, working around the limitations of a busted-ass piano that had been placed onstage by mistake. The music Jarrett made that day is by turns Quan t um C r im inal s  |   212

surging and emotional and cheesy and solitary and hermetic; listening to it is like watching time-lapse footage of a crystal cathedral being erected inside Kandor, the miniaturized Kryptonian city Superman kept in a bottle in his arctic Fortress of Solitude. Not unlike Gaucho it’s a paradoxical testament to the way an exhausting and debilitating attention to detail—by people who are themselves exhausted—can sometimes produce art that is literally transcendent. Jarrett responded to the Musician interview by suing Donald and Walter, successfully, for cowriting credit; “Gaucho” is officially now a Becker/ Fagen/Jarrett composition, a shotgun love triangle made official in the eyes of ASCAP. But I hear a different triangle in “Gaucho” that has nothing to do with Jarrett or copyright law. Gaucho, the album, is notoriously the one where Walter’s extracurricular travails, particularly his drug addiction, became an issue for the band. In January 1980, during the mixing of Gaucho, Walter was hit by a taxicab during a late-night walk. “We were quantum criminals,” he would say years later. “The car and I were attempting to occupy the same space at the same time.” One month after the accident, Walter’s girlfriend, Karen Stanley, died after overdosing in Walter’s New York apartment. With Walter sidelined, Donald was left to finish mixing the album by himself, a process the writer Robert Palmer depicted as unmitigated torture for Donald in a 1981 story for Rolling Stone: “Fagen looked glumly at the clock; they’d been working on fifty seconds of music for four hours. ‘This,’ he deadpanned, ‘is the happiest night of my life.’” At least some of the sense of disappointment and exhaustion that pervades Gaucho must have to do with the temporary unraveling of Donald and Walter’s creative partnership. “Gaucho” itself is about a relationship and some kind of enterprise that’s been put at risk by a partner acting out, by extracurricular desire. After I found out about Walter’s circumstances around Gaucho, I’ve never been able to hear the song as anything except Donald singing to Walter, reminding him of what they had and what they stood to lose, trying to call him back from some cliff’s edge. “Just when I think, boy, we can’t miss / We are golden / Then you do this.” No other interpretation makes “Gaucho” seem so straightforward and comprehensible, which means it’s probably the most off-base interpretation in this book, but it’s also the one that I have the hardest time letting go of.

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A Jolly Roger (My Rival)

Whether it’s the root of their rivalry or merely an escalation of it beyond the pale, Jolly Roger has seduced the narrator’s girl, incurring unspecified but certain payback. Or so it is alleged, by the narrator. “The milk truck slid into my space,” is how he puts it; this song could be the dark interior monologue of the wronged husband in a Playboy “party joke,” and you know how milkmen are, in jokes. Another Gaucho number about how three can only tango for so long, “My Rival” is Steely Dan’s most florid depiction of male sexual jealousy—the unsettling domestic-abuse scenario from “Everything You Did” restaged as weird farce, with soap-opera organs, a cock-of-thewalk David Bowie “Fame” type beat, and some of Donald’s campiest-ever line readings (e.g., his implication-damp first-verse delivery of the phrase “Prickly pearrrrr”). Being cuckolded has turned the narrator absurd, even sinister, but it’s also filled him with perverse zest. Whatever he’s got planned for his rival and/or his girl, he almost can’t wait to do it. This is the paradox of Gaucho, as a listening experience—how cheerful so much of it is, despite what the people in the songs are up to. The narrator sings with mustache-twirling glee about the detectives he’s hired, the stomping he’s going to do once he gets his hands on this guy. To hate one’s rival this much is to love them a little, if only for the clarity of purpose they’ve gifted you. The narrator’s rival has a scar across his face like the pirate he is; once, when asked why they had also given the guy a hearing aid, Walter answered, “Because ‘tiny withered dick’ doesn’t rhyme with charade. Nor does it scan. Or does it?” 214

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THIR D WORL D MA N

Third World Man (Third World Man)

The pivotal Steely Dan song from the Gaucho sessions does not make it onto Gaucho. As much as the album feels like a sprawling conceptual statement about California in the late ’70s as a dark portent of the fast-approaching ’80s, it also feels like half a statement—seven songs, completed slowly and under duress, with Walter basically out of the picture. A lot of material gets abandoned when it proves impossible to capture satisfactorily, even with WENDEL on hand to smooth things out; for a while even the song that will become the title track is marked for deletion. The best of the lost songs is “The Second Arrangement,” a wry piece of mutant disco in the “Glamour Profession” vein, sung in the voice of a two-timing hipster sliding frictionlessly between assignations, dirty laundry in the back of his yellow Jaguar. It might have been the first single; instead, it’s the Gaucho song with the most tragic backstory. One night a junior engineer who’s been asked to prepare “The Second Arrangement” for playback accidentally erases about three-quarters of the master tape instead. Donald and Walter spend considerable time (and reportedly tens of thousands of dollars) trying to re-create what they had, but eventually they scrap the song entirely. In the twenty-first century you can hear numerous versions of it online, but even the high-quality bootlegs remixed and phase-corrected by diligent fans still have a wobbly, watery quality, like a transmission picked up at the far end of the radio dial. They’re 217

mirages in the shape of the song. (The lost version supposedly had horns, for one thing.) “The Second Arrangement” is a crucial part of the Gaucho picture because it’s the sound that got away; it represents the ideal they were striving toward, the music that refused to stay recorded. To replace it, Donald and Walter pull an even older song from the vault—“Third World Man,” which began its life as a demo called “Were You Blind That Day.” Donald has called it an Aja outtake, although there’s a counter-consensus among Dan fans that pegs it to the Royal Scam sessions. It would have fit right in on that album, among other songs of individual madness; here at the end of Gaucho it confirms the rest of the album’s creeping sense of defeat. The whole band sounds like it’s crawling away from an accident; Donald tells us about a bad scene in the suburbs, some guy’s war with his own mind spilling onto the front lawn. As always in Steely Dan, only death waits in the suburbs. The opening image of an adult in a sandbox conjures the shattered post-Smile Brian Wilson, another studio obsessive haunted by masterpieces he never realized, receiving visitors in a prison of his own making. Eventually a house catches fire and Larry Carlton’s solo paints a picture of it in black and red. “The Second Arrangement” would probably have been a hit, whereas “Third World Man” represents a compromise. But its exhaustion feels cumulative. What’s coming to an end at the end of Gaucho is the whole Steely Dan project, at least temporarily, and “Third World Man” sounds T H E S E C ON D A RRA N G E M E N T the way Donald and Walter must have felt, while reaching their breaking points as performers, collaborators and humans—beaten down and dispirited and unable to fully articulate what they were going through. It might not be a California song, but it feels like one. The charged stillness between the notes is like the emptiness in photographer John Divola’s Zuma series, pictures made toward the end of Steely Dan’s LA period, not far from where Donald and Walter lived in Malibu. In each of the Zuma pictures, the interior of an abandoned house—its walls graffitied by Divola and others and repeatedly scorched in fire-department training exercises—frames an open window, a rectangle of calm ocean and sunrise or sunset sky. The sea and the sky are cyclical, constantly renewed; all human activity is ultimately doomed to decay and failure. The best you can hope for is to document the wreckage of your best intentions while keeping some sliver of beauty in the frame. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   218

Abbie/ Dupree (Gaslighting Abbie/ Cousin Dupree

Imagine young Donald, tearing through Science Fiction Book Club selections in his boyhood home, imagining the year 2000: Gleaming dome-cities where everyone speaks in numbers? Radioactive dust storms and gangs of mutants roaming the wasteland? People leaving Earth en masse to chase humanity’s destiny among the stars? Nothing so sci-fi has come to pass by the first year of the twenty-first century, when Steely Dan release Two Against Nature, their first album in two decades, although something like World War III is arguably right around the corner. The year’s biggest technological breakthrough is probably the Playstation 2, which will one day allow gamers to chimp their way through “Do It Again,” “Kid Charlemagne,” and “Bodhisattva” in Guitar Hero World Tour. George W. Bush is the president of the United States, Al-Qaeda is determined to attack inside the United States, and A.E. van Vogt has just died of Alzheimer’s disease at his home in Los Angeles, aged eighty-seven. The pop landscape that greets Donald and Walter is shaped by song-doctors from Stockholm, stage-parented showbiz kids fresh from the celebrity obedience schools of Greater Disneyworld, and Carson Daly. In the liner notes to the band’s 1993 box set Citizen Steely Dan, Chris Willman posited Donald and Walter as having been the band of the ’90s all the way back in the ’70s, ironists far out ahead of the irony boom—back when David Letterman was still a local weatherman. But that ’90s, the ironic ’90s, was over by 1997 at the absolute latest, so Steely Dan 219

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seem not so much ahead of their time as tangential to it. The year 2000 is the year of NSYNC’s first number-one album and the Backstreet Boys’ second, of “Who Let the Dogs Out,” “American Badass,” “She Bangs,” “Back that Azz Up,” and “Thong Song.” When Two Against Nature drops in February of that year, it might as well be chamber music for laudanum parties. Nobody in 2000 is playing tight-lipped electric guitar against plastic funk bass the way this music does—nobody popular or cool, anyway, except maybe Prince, whose purchase on the zeitgeist has also ebbed to a historic low as the century turns. Quan t um C r im inal s  |   220

C OU S I N D U P RE E

Donald and Walter—ironic pervs since the days of “Hey Nineteen”—have emerged from career cryosleep into a cultural moment defined by unironic and predatory teensploitation. Naughty-schoolgirl iconography has gone basic-cable mainstream, laundered by some pretty dubious ideas about postfeminist agency. Two Against Nature drops a few months before Britney Spears’s second album Oops! . . . I Did It Again and a few months after Spears makes the cover of Rolling Stone for the first time. Photographer David LaChapelle shoots her lolling on a bed in an open pajama top and a black bra, clutching a stuffed Teletubby. “I said to her, ‘You don’t want to be buttoned up, like Debbie Gibson,’” LaChapelle said in 2011. “I said, ‘Let’s push it further and do this whole Lolita thing.’ She got it. She knew it would get people talking and excited.” The director of Spears’s late-1999 video “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” is Gregory Dark, who also makes videos around this time for pop acts like LFO and Mandy Moore but cut his teeth in the ’80s auteuring adult films like New Wave Hookers, starring the infamously underage Traci Lords. And the hottest fashion photographer of the moment is Terry Richardson, a modern-day Mr. LaPage who will help shape the influential aesthetics of Vice magazine and the American Apparel clothing brand in between graphically gross photo shoots with hipster models, some of whom were under 18; in the ensuing years many of Richardson’s models will accuse the photographer, who liked to be called “Uncle Terry,” of inappropriate behavior up to and including sexual assault, but he continues to shoot for high-profile clients like Condé Nast and Valentino until 2016. The year 2000 is also when Eminem drops his third studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP. His 1999 breakthrough The Slim Shady LP was the kind of rap record that the protagonist of Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” might have made after hooking up with Dr. Dre, a virtuosic splatter-comedy album designed to fry the moral compasses of critics and hip-hop purists alike. But on his semi-self-titled follow-up, Eminem reemerges as the bad conscience of the TRL era, a toxic avenger rising out of the sludge of an exploitive, misogynistic pop epoch, spewing nyeah-nyeah critique of a fast-pornifying culture’s pretensions to propriety, claiming Britney, Christina Aguilera, Fred Durst, and MTV’s Carson Daly as his implicit peers as if daring the establishment to draw a line he knew it never would—at least not MTV, where it was as cool for Britney to vamp around in prepubescent pigtails and a schoolgirl skirt as it was for Tom Green to hump a dead moose. Outside its original context, Marshall Mathers is kind of a chore to revisit today. Its much-discussed homophobic lyrics (like the verse where Em vows to “stab you in the head, whether you’re a fag or lez”) feel too empty of genuine animus to register as more than cringey provocations today, but it’s hard to say the same about “Kim,” a shrieking six-minute-plus spousal-murder Quan t um C r im inal s  |   222

fantasy that isn’t funny because it isn’t trying to be. But if Marshall Mathers isn’t really one of the year’s best records, it’s at least the record 2000 most deserves. At the forty-third annual Grammy Awards the following February, it’s up for Album of the Year; outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles the night of the ceremony, there’s a protest organized by GLAAD, whose executive director Joan McGarry suggests to MTV News that Eminem’s use of the other F-word raises “the issue of corporate responsibility for marketing this kind of product.” That night at Staples, Eminem performs his hit “Stan” as a sheepish duet with Elton John, and then the Album of the Year Grammy everyone assumes is Eminem’s to lose does not go to him, or to fellow Gen-Xers Beck and Radiohead, or to Paul Simon, an industry lifer who’s been nominated in this category in each of the preceding four decades. Instead, the third time is the charm for Steely Dan, past Album of the Year also-rans in 1978 (when Aja lost to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours) and 1980 (when Gaucho lost to Double Fantasy by Yoko Ono and the late John Lennon). It’s not an upset on par with Jethro Tull swiping Best Metal Album from Metallica or a rerecorded Frank Sinatra retrospective beating out the Beatles’ Revolver in 1966, but when it happens it’s received as further proof of the geriatric cluelessness of the Grammy voting pool. Nobody can understand why Eminem’s damn Grammy went to Steely Dan instead of the man who wrote “Stan” and said he’d jump in front of a minivan! But the ironies here are rich. Aside from Simon’s You’re the One, the records and artists Two Against Nature beats out in 2001 are actually operating on extremely Steely Dannish wavelengths. Radiohead are a group of white men whose nominated album Kid A tries to stuff the traditional rock-song format with as many avant-garde effects and jazz flourishes as it can hold, and they once made an entire documentary film about how much they hated touring and doing interviews. Beck is a white man nominated for an album of funk-infused music with funnycryptic lyrics about weird sex with Hollywood freaks. And Eminem is a white man performing traditionally Black music with consummate technical skill and using it to depict unspeakable horrors committed by a shifting series of quasi-fictional alter egos. Donald and Walter have been there and done all this. More importantly, the fact that Two Against Nature becomes the safe vote for music-biz elders unwilling to spend enough time with Marshall Mathers to grasp its admittedly rarefied aesthetic nuances (and who presumably heard Kid A as a bunch of pops and buzzes) suggests that those elders also haven’t really engaged with Two Against Nature, an album full of lyrics about drugs, underage sex, psychological torture, and incestuous yearning, featuring not one but two different songs about dysfunctional threesomes. A bbie/Du pr ee  |  223

Backstage after their upset victory, Donald thanks Eminem for “taking the heat.” Once again, Steely Dan have demonstrated just how much you can get away with if you serve up socially unacceptable ideas on a platter shined to perfection by top-drawer session dudes. In the song “Gaslighting Abbie,” two lovers plot psychological warfare on a third as if it’s a kind of foreplay, like Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse conspiring to scare Véra Clouzot to death in Les Diaboliques. The concept of “gaslighting”—a form of abuse in which the abuser undermines their victim’s perception of reality—goes back to Gas Light, a 1938 stage play about a woman driven around the bend by the unexplained dimming of the lights in their home, the mysterious footsteps she hears upstairs at night, and her husband’s insistence that it’s all in her mind. The play becomes a British film in 1940, an American movie by George Cukor in 1944, and an oft-misapplied pop-psychological descriptor by 2020. That year, The Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks, release a comeback album called Gaslighter, named for the most soaringly fuck-you-itive Natalie Maines divorce song it contains. But back in 2000, nobody’s throwing that word around in a pop song, let alone imagining a scenario like this one. Fake blood, sedative-spiked tea, the narrator watching his coconspirator shimmy into one of Ms. Abbie’s miniskirts as Abbie deals a hand of Manchurian Candidate solitaire: isn’t it romantic? Of course not; the only image missing from this song is a shot of the gaslighters gaily cutting a rug in the living room at sunset while a shattered Abbie takes a one-way walk into the sea. But the music remains horny and sprightly, insisting that all is well—that we’re imagining things, that we’re tired, that nothing’s wrong here at all. And that’s just the first song. Later, the narrator of “Janie Runaway” plies a “wonderwaif” fresh off the bus from her hellacious home life in Tampa with “takeout from Dean and DeLuca,” “a hearty gulping wine,” and pickup lines Lana Del Rey might fall for—“You be the showgirl, and I’ll be Sinatra / Way back in ’59.” A stray reference to the “federal case” that might result if they cross state lines to visit a “sugar shack in Pennsylvania” tells you the rest of what you need to know. “Jack of Speed” is about drugs and drug addiction, and so is “Negative Girl,” and maybe “West of Hollywood,” too— I mean, it’s possible “Doctor Warren Kruger” is supposed to be an osteopath, but it’s not likely. And “Cousin Dupree” is a grody little short story about a loser who retreats to his aunt’s couch after flopping as a ska-band keyboardist and big-rig driver, gets turned on watching his hot cousin wax her skis in tight capris, and proposes they get back to fooling around like they did as toddlers, because what’s wrong with a little “down-home family romance?” The cadence of Donald’s vocal recalls Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Quan t um C r im inal s  |   224

JA N I E RU N AWAY

Man” and the song itself could be Chuck doing his take on “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a cover proposition so nightmarish even Eminem might gag. The whole track has the bright and hopeful bounce of customerservice hold music, as if mimicking the newfound pep in Dupree’s step. It’s as poker-faced in its provocation as anything in the Dan’s ’70s catalog, at least until the third verse, when Dupree asks his cousin why she’s resisted his overtures and Donald and Walter give her the chance to speak and cut him dead: “Maybe it’s the skeevy look in your eyes / Or that your mind has turned to applesauce / The dreary architecture of your soul.” It’s either a sign of personal growth on the part of Donald and Walter or a failure of nerve; in their younger, crueler days, they’d have shot the whole scenario from Dupree’s perspective without breaking character and let us wonder where they stood. A bbie/Du pr ee  |  225

F RAN N Y FROM N Y U

Franny from NYU (What a Shame about Me)

In 1983 Donald appears in a print ad for Yamaha keyboards. We’re looking at him through a window. He’s standing at a bank of synthesizers, wearing a suit and tie, regarding the camera suspiciously, as if it’s a hovering, unwelcome drone. The rock star as neighborhood recluse; it’s a perfect image of Donald in the ’80s, which is neither the most public-facing or the most prolific period of his creative life. Donald will say later that he spent much of the ’80s learning the things you don’t learn about the adult world when you’re busy working as a musician—how to pay a mortgage, how to express an emotion. But he doesn’t make much music. He contributes one original song, “Century’s End,” and a cover of Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” to the soundtrack for the Michael J. Fox movie of the same name; it plays over the movie’s last sequence, where a hungover Fox trades his sunglasses for bread and watches dawn break over the river. And he makes two solo albums—The Nightfly, which quietly becomes a platinum hit in 1982, and Kamakiriad, which doesn’t show up until 1993, almost a decade later. These albums—and Walter’s solo debut, 11 Tracks of Whack, from 1994— reveal a lot about the whole murky gestalt of Steely Dan and whose ideas were whose, or at least which of Steely Dan’s preoccupations were actually Donald’s. Donald’s solo stuff is suffused with nostalgia—he’s forever looking backward to some late-season beachfront idyll and whomever he spent it with, or he’s looking forward from his own youth to glittering midcentury227

modern sci-fi futures that we know will not actually come to pass because we’re living in what happened instead. Kamakiriad is a loose concept album about cruising the skyways while vacuum-sealed in a steam-powered futuremobile with a hydroponic garden in the back, picking up the occasional foxy car-crash survivor. One time, right before the Covid-19 pandemic, I drove from Miami to Key West, where the streets turned out to be full of middle-aged swingers in body paint, and then headed back along the causeway at sunset through pink thunderheads spiked with lightning, playing Kamakiriad the whole trip. I heard things in it that day that I’ve never been able to hear before or since; it’ll never sound as good as it did in that very specific context. Walter produces Kamakiriad for Donald and plays guitar and bass on it; they spend three years recording it, and a few months after it comes out, they go back on the road as Steely Dan for the first time since the early ’70s. Around the same time, Donald steps in as producer to help Walter finish 11 Tracks of Whack. At the Steely Dan shows they play in ’93 and ’94, there are solo Donald and Walter songs in the set list, and pretty soon there aren’t as many. After Gaucho, Walter moves to Maui in 1981, gets clean, gets married, has a kid, adopts another one, and resurfaces in 1985, producing British pop sophisticates China Crisis as a favor to Warner Bros. when Brian Eno has a scheduling conflict. When Billboard profiles Walter ahead of the China Crisis record, the story refers to his having “dropped from sight” after Gaucho and doesn’t say anything about why, although any El Supremos reading the trades probably knew the deal already. He comes off humble in the story, a neophyte producer ready to work. His studio mastery with Steely Dan is a line item on a resumé. You know his reputation for playing a good clean game. He gets the China Crisis album done in eight weeks, an interval the Dan might have spent micromanaging a single chorus; it’s called Flaunt the Imperfection. Walter produces albums for a few other artists in the gap between Dancarnations, including Rickie Lee Jones’s Flying Cowboys, but he also starts writing the songs that become 11 Tracks. Donald’s solo albums sort of confirm for us who Donald is, but on 11 Tracks, we’re meeting Walter for the first time as a singing songwriter. The songs can be wordy, but they read more ungainly than they sound. His singing is like speech—like somebody walking in off the street, sitting down, explaining himself. He says things that might strike you as funny or clever or cruel, but he never sounds like he needs you or anybody to notice how funny or clever or cruel he’s being. He sounds like he’s been through a fair amount of shit and come out the other side of it a more major dude for the experience. He also sounds like he spends a lot of time watching television and thinking about what Quan t um C r im inal s  |   228

he’d say to people he knows who have died. His lyrical persona has the same jaded-private-eye affect that Donald is reaching for on “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” but Walter seems to know more than he’s saying about what it feels like to lose and be left. Once you’ve heard the solo albums, Donald and Walter’s individual writing voices become more discernible, or at least that’s how it seems. “What a Shame about Me,” the second song on Two Against Nature, holds sentiment in one hand and resigned clarity in the other in a way that evokes solo Walter. It’s almost the twenty-first century and the narrator is “three weeks out of rehab” when he runs into Franny, his old flame from NYU. She’s become some kind of big-deal entertainer known for “songs and films and CDs,” whereas the narrator—who at one point was “gonna be the next big thing”—is about to abandon his unfinished novel and in the meantime is working a job “stacking cutouts at the Strand.” Which isn’t the most ignominious used-bookstore gig to be had in New York, of course—Patti Smith worked at the Strand, as did Sam Shepard, Lucy Sante, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, and Mary Gaitskill, and if things at the Brill Building had worked out differently or not at all, Donald and Walter could have ended up there too. But the guy in this song isn’t just starting out. He’s working in a bookstore because he’s fallen behind the rest of his and Franny’s old gang from college, the rest of whom have started businesses, won prizes, made piles of money in software. The narrator is staring down the new millennium and coming to grips with his own unrealized potential—“I’m worrying about the future now / Or maybe this is it”—and this feels like Walter, too, or like a thought process Walter might once have gone through, in between nearly blowing it and getting most of it back. Once they’re caught up and about to part ways, Franny suggests they grab a cab back to her hotel and pretend they’re back at their old school. “I said babe, you look delicious,” the narrator tells us, “and you’re standing very close / But, like, this is Lower Broadway, and you’re talking to a ghost.” For me, that “like”—a touch that feels Walterish, more singing that’s like speech—makes the whole song work. He blows her off with exaggerated hipster casualness not because he doesn’t want to tangle the sheets with her one more time but because he does want to, but also knows full well that nothing will happen in that room that won’t make him feel worse about himself and where he’s ended up. When that turn comes, the music on this track—crisp, swaggering VH1 elevator-funk, until now a curious choice of arrangement for a song about getting old and feeling the sting of memory and regret—makes a different kind of sense. He chooses not to go to bed with Franny because it would only confirm what he’s lost, and the guitar part on the outro is him strutting back to work with whatever’s left of his pride. F r a n ny f rom NYU  |   229

Lizzie (Pixeleen)

Donald and Walter began the process of accepting that they were old men when they were barely thirty, which is the smartest way to do it because if you’re efficient about it you can get right with your youth’s impermanence before it actually starts to skate away. In their twenties Donald and Walter wrote lyrics about children who scream and run wild (and wondered “Why do I tremble each time they ride by?”) and near the end of the ’70s they wrote the mordantly funny “Hey Nineteen” about no longer being able to talk to women just a decade younger than them due to cultural differences they perceived as fundamental. On their reunion tours they seemed to relish having finally actually become the leathery, cynical show-business lifers they’d presented themselves as for years, and on their reunion albums they finally sound as old and weird as they’ve always claimed to feel. Everything Must Go has two different songs about protagonists negotiating the increasingly virtual and digitally mediated twenty-first century, where the women who bewitch and befuddle Mr. Steely Dan are now so far out that they don’t even exist, traditionally speaking. “Green Book,” where the prospect of cybersex with an AI vixen just throws the protagonist back into himself, gives way to “Pixeleen,” about a girl with a foot in multiple continuities where she’s both an actual teenage human (“born in the bogs of Jersey”) and a fictional protagonist conjured from electrons (“Penned by a hack in the Palisades. . . . Shot in all digital video for a million and change”). A few years after this, when Walter is dead and an interviewer asks Donald 230

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what he’s working on, Donald will admit that he’s lost confidence in his own songwriting and specifically in his ability to capture the tenor of the times in a lyric. “Walter and I used to sort of pride ourselves on being pretty good psychologists,” he’ll say. “Kind of like playwrights or something, y’know. Being very aware of the way people relate to each other. And that sort of went into the tunes. Now it’s much more mysterious to me. And as far as I can see, much shallower, with exceptions. So it’s harder for me to relate.”

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They were pretty good psychologists right up until the end, though. “Pixeleen” is a sharp and prescient lyrical impression of a young person with internet brain, perpetually semi-engaged with multiple levels of reality. In Pix’s gamer dreamlife she can be peer to Aeon Flux, Lara Croft, Bayonetta, or Gwenpool, but in the song her consciousness yo-yos between that and more workaday teen-scenes, so she’s dodging calls from “her, as if, boyfriend, Randall” and “like, her stupid father” along with hails of tracer bullets. Donald gave all credit for the song’s “knowledge of teenage morés” to Walter, who’d parented two children into the digital age. The “stupid father” line sounds like him. But the part where the narrator glimpses “a flash of spectacular thigh” when Pixeleen pulls a knife from her go-go boot is probably Donald.

The best jokes Steely Dan made about this phase of their dotage are in a goofy video infomercial they shot to promote Everything Must Go. For years on the HBO series Taxicab Confessions, young people flushed with new love or alcohol or other disinhibiting stimuli were goaded into sharing outrageous truths about their lives while riding around Las Vegas and other sleepless American cities in yellow cabs wired with lipstick cameras. The series began airing in 1995 in late-night time slots, guaranteeing it would be seen by touring musicians and other people who keep weird hours, and petered out in 2010, around the time social media normalized putting your private life on public display and eliminated the need for a middleman like the brassy Vegas cabbie Rita Scott, the HBO show’s master elicitor. Steely Dan Confessions, directed by Taxicab creators Joe and Harry Gantz, features Scott behind the wheel of the confession cab, except everybody she picks up finds themselves crowded into the back seat with Donald and Walter having a conversation about Steely Dan. It’s not the most scientific-seeming social experiment. The people Donald and Walter pick up over the course of the night all happen to be conventionally attractive women at least twenty years Donald and Walter’s junior, and even with Rita there to chaperone this makes for some inarguable creepy-uncle optics that Donald and Walter take turns steering into. On the other hand, if you were Donald and Walter, would you want to ride around picking up a bunch of boring dudes who are stoked to meet Steely Dan and ask them questions? Would you want to talk to them and then put these interactions on your DVD? You would not. So they pick up a twentyfive-year-old woman who says she’s unhappily single because men her age are immature (“Men my age are pretty immature, too,” Walter says) and a Quan t um C r im inal s  |   232

British model named Lucy and two other women, also British, who appear to be wearing old-fashioned nightgowns, and Maria, a stage magician with a snake draped around her neck. Maria tells Donald and Walter that the snake’s name is Scooby and that she used to use “East St. Louis Toodle-Loo” in her magic act. They play a CD of “The Last Mall” for the snake. Maria says he likes it. Donald pouts and tells Maria that Scooby actually seems indifferent. (Walter: “But it’s a crisp indifference.”) The key passenger is Lizzie. Lizzie is wearing a denim tube top and she’s stoked when the guys in the back of her cab turn out to be Steely Dan because this means she’s riding in a cab with Steely Dan and her Steely Dan–loving ex-boyfriend from college is not. His name was Rafé and if he knew this was happening, he’d die, she says, in a way that suggests Rafé might deserve it; later she reveals that his real name was “Ralph,” and Donald and Walter just nod, because as devoted chroniclers of American self-delusion they don’t have to be told how often you find a Ralph when you scratch a Rafé. Rafé would probably be beside himself at Lizzie’s sketchy recall of even basic Steely Dan song titles, but she turns out to be at least enough of a Dan fan to know they’re ineffable: “How do you guys make sense,” she asks, “without making sense?” There is no satisfactory answer. They hit a drivethrough. Walter gets coffee, Donald gets a milkshake. Steely Dan’s recent Grammy for Two Against Nature is discussed. The boys self-deprecate. They can’t believe they beat out Eminem either, they say. Lizzie isn’t having it. “You guys have outlived and outdone 90 percent of your contemporaries,” she says. Walter says she’s starting to convince him. Sipping a drive-through soda, Lizzie leans into the role of sage. “I think you guys are used to being you, and you guys, like, see you as you every day,” she says. “But, like, there’s a lot of people you influence on a daily basis that you don’t even see. You know what I mean?” It’s like they’re on a volleyball team together and she’s giving them a pregame pep talk. “I’m thinking of Lizzie as an ideal prototype for our new fans,” Walter says to Donald, and begins free-associating adjectives describing this target demo. “Bright. Original.” As if the burden of his own legend obligates him to make this moment uncomfortable, Donald slurps his milkshake and adds “Pert,” then “Blonde . . .”

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JIL L ST. J OH N

Jill (Green Book)

The Everything Must Go song “Green Book” is more sci-fi Dan—a guy walks into a bar that’s really an ultra-immersive virtual-reality dating simulator where you and a presumably bespoke VR honey can be friends with benefits. Because it’s a Steely Dan song it’s less about the power of technology and more about the limits of self-delusion. Mr. Steely Dan is having an out-of-body experience he knows is neither a one-night stand nor a real occasion and winds up forced to contemplate the uncanny valley of his own desires. A world on a wire shaped by your own perviest wants, the song suggests, would probably be an unsettling experience—the spank bank as black mirror. Although the idea that VR is about to become world-changingly ubiquitous seems to resurface in the culture every decade, the technology was pure ’90s kitsch when “Green Book” was released in 2003, the stuff of horny Aerosmith and Billy Idol videos and high-concept Jolly Rancher commercials. But the future glimpsed in “Green Book” is even more retro; the protagonist crosses a smoke-filled hotel lobby to spend a dissociative evening with a virtual movie queen literally built (“Where’d we sample those legs?”) to look like “Marilyn 4.0.” But, like, of course the holodeck Donald and Walter imagine the Green Book technology assembling from their memories turns out to be mid-century modern, right down to the cashier Mr. Steely Dan passes on the way into the bar, who looks “just like Jill St. John.” 235

A former child star who got her start on radio at age six, Jill Arlyn Oppenheim had a 162 IQ, graduated high school at 14, enrolled at UCLA Extension one year later, and signed a contract with Universal one year after that. As an actress she was pigeonholed, first as an ingenue and then in glamorous arm-candy parts. So—not unlike Donald and Walter—she was an intellectual who found ways of using her intellect ironically and covertly and in contexts that did not necessarily call for it. Her presence burns holes in schlock, whether she’s running from giant spiders and iguanas made up to resemble dinosaurs or dancing the Batusi with a doped-up Adam West. She’s the young Hollywood starlet who comes between Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night and she’s the young Hollywood starlet who competes with aging Vivien Leigh for gigolo Warren Beatty in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. She runs the elevator in Jerry Lewis’s Who’s Minding the Store and holds her own with Sinatra in both Tony Rome and Come Blow Your Horn. The gossip press paired her with Frank, and also Oleg Cassini, Roman Polanski, Sandy Koufax, Peter Lawford, Henry Kissinger, David Frost, and Michael Caine. Sean Connery reportedly sees her and Natalie Wood’s sister Lana concurrently while making Diamonds Are Forever, with St. John as the first American Bond girl, the saucy diamond smuggler Tiffany Case. In Diamonds, Bond continually dodges attempts on his life by a pair of high-camp assassins, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, who are essentially the Steely Dan of the James Bond universe. Character actor Bruce Glover, father of Crispin, plays Wint. Kidd is played by Putter Smith, who not only is balding, mustachioed, and bespectacled in classic Walter Becker fashion but also was by trade a jazz bassist, who met Diamonds director Guy Hamilton at Shelley’s Manne-Hole on Cahuenga Boulevard while backing up Thelonious Monk. In the film’s final action sequence, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd dress as room-service waiters delivering dessert to Bond and Tiffany’s cruise-ship stateroom. Bond makes them as imposters the minute Kidd fails to identify Château Mouton-Rothschild as a claret. Wint comes at 007 with a pair of flaming skewers. Bond douses him in Courvoisier and an immolated Mr. Wint pitches over the railing, choosing a watery death over a fiery one. Tiffany finds the ticking IED in la bombe surprise. Bond ties the bomb to Kidd’s tux tails and hoists him into the drink. Diamonds is subpar Bond—a letdown after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the cold, hard one that George Lazenby made before Sean Connery changed his mind about turning in his Walther PPK. It wouldn’t be the first or anywhere near the last time St. John was better than her material. But like Becker and Fagen, Jill St. John understood the business that she had chosen, the fate of the artist, how hard it can be to control the conditions under Quan t um C r im inal s  |   236

which you’re obligated to work, particularly in a live setting. “Two mortars, planted by the Viet Cong, were aimed at the stage,” she said, recollecting the first date of Bob Hope’s Christmas 1964 USO tour of American positions in South Vietnam. “Demolition experts found them only 30 minutes before showtime. Try singing on key after an introduction like that.”

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Gina (Lunch with Gina)

In the long dark age after Gaucho closed the book on the Steely Dan of the ’70s and before the 2000 release of Two Against Nature, no single creator did more to hold space in mainstream entertainment for a Dan-like spirit of cultural dyspepsia and deliberate anti-charisma than Larry David. Larry is born just seven months after Donald Fagen in 1947 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, but unlike Donald he goes to the University of Maryland and basically bypasses the whole ’60s (“Drugs scared me,” he’ll say in 2004.) After working as a paralegal, a bra salesman, a chauffeur, and a New York City cab driver, he becomes sort of the “early Steely Dan” of standup comics—a recognized genius among other comics and an acquired taste for audiences. The feeling seems to have been mutual; at least once, David supposedly walked onstage at a comedy club, took one look at the audience, and walked back out, a move you can imagine Donald and Walter at least wanting to pull during the opening-for-Black-Oak-Arkansas years. Like Steely Dan in the Brill Building era, Larry David does a couple of stints as a craftsperson of mainstream entertainment product that it turns out not a lot of people actually want, in his case writing sketch comedy first for ABC’s short-lived Saturday Night Live competitor Fridays and then at SNL itself, where his sketches almost never make it to air. He is 41 before NBC offers Larry’s longtime friend Jerry Seinfeld a sitcom pilot, and even if you don’t know what happens after that, you’ve probably seen a version 238

GINA

of it happen to “Jerry Seinfeld” and his friend George Costanza on Seinfeld, the mega-successful sitcom that David went on to write or cowrite more than fifty episodes of. Everything Must Go is the most Seinfeld-Davidesque Steely Dan album— the middle-aged divorced guy who reports “I’m learning how to meditate, so far, so good / I’m building the Andrea Doria out of balsa wood” and seems like the kind of person Larry and Jerry might have invented for TV Jerry and his friends to roll their eyes at, a Tim Watleyan irritant. The most Seiny-Dave Steely Dan song is “Lunch With Gina,” whose setup—Mr. Steely Dan dreads an impending lunch with a pathologically ear-bending dining companion until she actually shows up and he remembers how hot she is in person— echoes a recurring Seinfeld premise (Jerry is seeing an attractive woman who he is also annoyed by) as well as the iconically purgatorial Seinfeld “bottle episodes” like “The Chinese Restaurant” and “The Parking Garage,” both of which David wrote. Like Donald and Walter, Larry was a highly unlikely star who smuggled a pungent and gnarled misanthropy into the national consciousness by couching it inside familiar pop forms (in this case, the half-hour laugh-tracked comedy) and punctuating it with catchy slap-bass riffs. In Seinfeld he found a kindred, peevish spirit, but one who could also act as a friendly-faced front man putting over David’s often bleak perspective on human nature. When Walter died, Paste magazine suggested that he had been the Larry David of Steely Dan, which feels L A RRY DAV I D wrong because it implies Fagen was the Nice One but is probably basically right although maybe what it is is Walter was the Jeff Garlin to Donald’s Larry David—the guy who by comparison does not seem to be doing as much but is probably the key to the whole scene, presence-wise. And like late-’70s Steely Dan, the late seasons of Seinfeld that David worked on before leaving to take a shot at directing movies became somewhat unignorably about despicable characters oblivious to their own despicability. The series finale David returned to write made it explicit that the Seinfeld gang were actually reverse Bubble Boys sickening everyone but themselves. Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine witness a carjacking; Kramer films the whole thing with a video camera but otherwise they do nothing except stand there cracking jokes. They’re arrested and tried for violating Quan t um C r im inal s  |   240

Good Samaritan laws, and in the course of their trial, all these characters from the show’s past seasons take the stand and testify to the many ways Jerry and friends have ruined their lives. The show ends with the four principals incarcerated together, a twist that retroactively lays bare Seinfeld’s true premise: hell was other people all along. David went on to spoof his own cushy post-Seinfeld life in a 1999 HBO mockumentary, Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, which spawned an ongoing series about a more-or-less-unfictionalized “Larry David” negotiating the manifold indignities from which even multimillions in sitcom residuals can’t insulate you. It will stand as the definitive American artwork about complaining.

Gina  |  241

Dave from Acquisitions (Everything Must Go)

The last question asked in the lyrics of a Steely Dan song is in “Everything Must Go,” the last song on what will turn out to be their last studio album: “Does anybody get lucky twice?” Steely Dan did, kind of. They collapsed as a band, and they came back without embarrassing themselves or us. They cut two reunion albums that stand at least nearby if not directly alongside the best work they ever did. They got to shrug their way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a gracious manner while also communicating clearly that they were not about to start respecting things like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame just because they were in it. At the induction ceremony, Walter’s speech begins, “We’ve already gotten to say through our website and other places, pretty much everything we wanted to say about the Hall of Fame,” Walter told the crowd when they were inducted, “so, uh, we thought we’d throw the floor open to questions.” He declines to answer the first question. Later he says, “We’re persuaded it’s a great honor to be here tonight.” They toured throughout the 2000s and seemed gratified to be doing so, a late-breaking chapter in the Steely Dan narrative that won’t really close until Walter dies. But “Everything Must Go” feels like an ending. The whole band breathes out at once, like Coltrane’s quartet at the top of “Stellar Regions (Venus),” as if parting the curtain on the final act. Of course once that elegiac mood is established, it becomes the backdrop for a Playboy cartoon. What’s being 242

DAVE FROM AC QU I S I T I ON S

metaphorized here is the end of a creative or marital partnership, but it’s sung in the voice of a doomed company’s CEO proposing (as the liquidators wheel away the Aerons, I’m imagining) that a “Miss Fugazy” join him for a quick one in the service elevator, so “Dave from Acquisitions” can watch and film it. You know how Dave is. “Fugazy” is pronounced not like the DC punk outfit of a similar-sounding name that’s spelled “Fugazi,” but rather like the last name of William Fugazy—ex–boxing promoter, probable Mafia associate, convicted perjurer, and early luxury-car-service magnate. In Fugazy’s ’80s TV ads—the kind of television ephemera you can easily imagine Donald or Walter smoking cigarettes in front of—a three-piece-suited Ryan O’Neal lookalike, robbed during rush hour of his rightful cab, discovers he can instead “Go Fugazy” in a long, beautiful Lincoln limousine. The pitchman’s voice in these ads belongs to Fugazy associate Bob Hope. Fugazy’s other associates included everyone from Roy Cohn and Cohn’s protege Donald Trump to Rudolph Giuliani, who said at Fugazy’s funeral, “I could not have been mayor without Bill Fugazy.” Giuliani ran New York from 1994 to 2001, as the dot-com bubble started to transform the city, or the city’s sense of itself. In what was briefly called Silicon Alley, a microgeneration of arriviste tech gurus iterated at trifling startups, whiteboarding a new world—better living through oneclick pet-food delivery. This New York was not unlike the ’70s LA mapped in so many Steely Dan songs—allegedly countercultural, superficially utopian, powered by self-delusion and new money. It was already over by the fall of 2001, when Becker and Fagen started working on Everything Must Go in Manhattan. Setting out for the studio one morning in September, they noticed everyone heading uptown with great urgency. By 2004, the tech sector out in California had shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and its New York equivalent became a ghost town overnight. In his 2013 novel Bleeding Edge, set immediately before and after the towers fell, longtime Upper West Sider Thomas Pynchon captures the Left Behind feeling of the city in the tech-bust years, ghosts included—peering into a dead dot-com’s abandoned snail shell of an office, fraud investigator Maxine’s gaze flits across “tarnished metallic surfaces, shaggy gray soundproofing, Steelcase screens and Herman Miller workpods” as the Tetris theme trickles out of somebody’s empty cube. Elsewhere, same book, Maxine walks into a Korean karaoke bar and ends up taking a run at “Dr. Wu”—“Steely Dan’s up-tempo ballad of memory and regret”—and hears “The Fez” at a party on 10/31/01, because the parties don’t stop. Pynchon—born ten years before Donald—seems to have liked Steely Dan more than Steely Dan liked Pynchon (Donald once said Walter read “a couple” of his books), but “Everything Must Go” is in the same Quan t um C r im inal s  |   244

emotional key as Bleeding Edge, a happy-go-lucky last dance in the rubble of obliterated certainties. In the case of Miss Fugazy and her boss, the fiddlers have fled, leaving some C-suite creep to go out in a blaze of HR violations, or just toast his stock options as they evaporate. “Let’s admit the bastards beat us,” the singer says, as the music colors him wise and wistful, maybe even charming, or at least harmless. “I propose we dissolve the corporation in a pool of margaritas.” Whether the Boys intended it or not, it’s a fitting sayonara for the entity DBA Steely Dan—a profitable partnership when all was said and done, and one that paid dividends to its shareholders without ever quite going public.

H OLY M A N

Dav e f rom Acquisit ions   |   245

DA DDY

Daddy (Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More)

The day before Walter dies, I’m in Palm Springs with my family, vacationing in a drier, purer heat you can’t get in Los Angeles. I take a picture of our seven-year-old standing in front of a sweet white Cadillac Eldorado parked on a dealer’s lot and, for the rest of the day, the line from “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More,” about how Daddy no longer drives the Eldorado, loops over and over in my head. Before that day I’d never realized that song is about a dead guy having been a bastard of no account and the hole he leaves in everyone’s life in spite of this, although of course it is. (Daddy is Josie’s opposite number, another larger-than-life neighborhood figure who won’t be back.) In retrospect, the Eldorado was a message—the Daniverse rippling, registering Walter’s passing at its edges before the loss hit for real. There had been other, more tangible signs. Walter had missed two Steely Dan shows in July. Donald told Billboard that his partner was “recovering from a procedure, and hopefully he’ll be fine very soon.” Donald spent August on tour with his new band, the Nightflyers. That Saturday, Donald played live in Texas. His stage setup included a framed photo of the actress Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—the iconic prom portrait that stared out enigmatically from behind the end credits of nearly every episode of the original series. It was positioned on an amplifier, flanked by two lava lamps. In recent years, Donald has played a snippet of Angelo Badalamenti’s 247

Twin Peaks theme song as the intro to “Third World Man,” which creeps at a similar pace. Donald and Walter and David, all boomers of Truman Administration vintage, making work animated by the tension between their fascination with contemporary perversion and violence and their conservative yearning for an idealized past. Sometime that year I’d scribbled a note about that, maybe roping the Eagles into the same thesis, and put it somewhere for later; I was already writing a Steely Dan book. When I went back to look for it, I couldn’t find it, but in my notebooks I came across notes I did not remember taking, phrases that might have been ideas for titles for a Steely Dan book. An altered parking-lot sticker: ORGASM AT YOUR OWN RISK. The name of the format of the first radio station I’d listened to as a kid, its playlist determined by listener call-ins to a pair of smash-or-trash numbers: EXPERIMENTAL ADULT CONTEMPORARY. The last two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return aired on Showtime the night we learned that Walter had died. Lynch’s revival of his ’90s TV show had been strange and riveting; in it the first atomic bomb was an original-sin moment for the century, releasing soot-covered tramps from a parallel universe to hijack a nightfly DJ’s radio broadcast. That night I waited until everyone else in our rented ersatz-Neutra weekend house was asleep and then watched Agent Cooper venture into the show’s own past, not just to re-solve the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death but to stop it from happening. It doesn’t go as planned; the past can be altered but it cannot be fixed. Afterward I stood outside listening to desert-house machine hum—the air conditioner working overtime to keep the house habitable in the hundreddegree night, the filter for the pool. Walter Becker was dead, and David Lynch was 71; there would be no more Steely Dan and probably no more Twin Peaks. The show that defined my youth and the band that defined my early adulthood had ended on the same day. I thought about that, and whether or not it meant something, and whether or not my need for it to mean something meant I was crazy or just growing old. I thought about California as a settled desert, about how these machines enabled us to stay alive in a place we were not meant to inhabit, how the house where my wife and child slept was like a spaceship with a life-support system. I had turned forty years old that spring. I had gotten all I could get from my influences. I looked up at a starless black desert sky. Walter no longer lived in any city. It was up to me to be an artist now. I had no choice. Really, we never do.

Quan t um C r im inal s  |   248

Acknowledgments

J oan Le M ay There has been no more instrumental person in all incarnations of my life’s work than Jessica Hopper, whom I rightly thank first here not only for that but also for her years of friendship, bold support, advocacy, tenacity, and wild vision. This book would not exist without her having seen it as the hybrid being of a Dan art fanzine I had started and Alex’s brilliant and at-the-time nascent Dan text. I do not know what I did to deserve having Hopper in my corner, but I am thankful for her beyond words; the impact she has had on my life is immeasurable. I will never be able to thank Alex Pappademas enough for being game to pair his genius text—the best words you or I will ever read about the Dan— with my work. To say that it is an honor to have gotten to make this thing with him is the understatement of the century. For gently but firmly guiding Alex and me through the creation of this tome, huge thanks go to Casey Kittrell at UT Press. I am also thrilled and grateful to the editorial board, production team, marketing team, and everyone else who touched the book at UTP (Derek George, Christina Vargas, Lynne Ferguson, Linda Ronan, Gianna LaMorte, Cameron Ludwick, Joel Pinckney, Danni Bens, Bailey Morrison, and Uriel Perez) for their enthusiasm, dedication, and unwavering support. You are all major dudes. Lance Scott Walker has been my best friend for more than two decades, and now we are both published authors at the same press. What a twist; 249

what a gift. For being my what-this-process-is-like crystal ball, coach, and font of advice, I thank him. Eternal thanks to hugely inspirational fellow Dan enthusiast Aimee Mann for extending her kind words about the book. For letting me paint them into the shape of these characters, many thanks to top models Brittain Ashford, Torquil Campbell, Jennifer Charles, Rachel Demy, Dave Depper, Casey Dienel, Derek Erdman, Leslie Hiller Sr., Jessica Hopper, Amy Martin, Matt LeMay, Kathleen Tarrant, Lance Scott Walker, Alta White, and Vilbry White. Pontificating about what it is to make art with other artists is crucial to its creation. A profound thanks to Jennifer Charles, Kevin Corrigan, Rachel Demy, Jenny Kroik, Amy Martin, Melissa Messer, and Anja Riebensahm for their continued mirroring and torch-lighting. My love of Steely Dan was primarily inherited from my blood family. So, to Ganny, all my aunts, uncles and cousins, and mom (you’re out there, hookin’ those horns), thank you, and I love y’all. Thanks also to my father, Mark Hiller, for his eternal cheerleading, and to Renee Oeschle for the same. Earnest thanks go to Carol LeMay for her grounded, boundless care, understanding, and encouragement. Finally, thank you to Matt LeMay for everything, always.

A l ex Pa ppade mas Thank you to Joan “The Hitmaker” LeMay for agreeing to do this thing with me, and to the following heavy rollers for vital assistance, inspiration, and support: Jessica Hopper, Quinn Heraty, Casey Kittrell and all at UT Press, Jon Dolan, Sean Howe, Chuck Klosterman, Greg Milner, Wesley Morris, Simon Vozick-Levinson, Yasi Salek, Ben Lambert, Jon Natchez, Greg Tate, and Jenn Romolini.

Ac know l edgmen t s |   250

Notes

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stinko: “Interview with Fagen and Becker on CompuServe,” Steely Dan Reader, June 13, 2020, http://steelydanreader.com/1995/10/20/interview -with-fagen-and-becker-on-compuserve/. in 1978 Donnie and Marie Osmond and a line of ice dancers: “Donny & Marie Osmond—‘Reelin’ in the Years,’” YouTube video, Dave’s Osmond Videos, July 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW8rWRBmABA. $1,500 a day on cocaine: Robert Hilburn, “Waylon Jennings Ready for His Second Chance,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1986, https://www.latimes.com /archives/la-xpm-1986-08-23-ca-16012-story.html#:~:text=It%20wasn’t%20 long%20before,%241%2C500%20a%20day%20on%20cocaine. Oh, far out, a new Santana single: Danny Sugerman, “Steely Dan,” Door, February 8, 1973.

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I don’t want to go to the sound check: Jeff Burger, “Steely Dan Madness: Walking the Tightrope in Star City,” April 14, 2022, https://byjeffburger.com /1974/05/23/steely-dan-madness-walking-the-tightrope-in-star-city-1974/. Mr. Becker makes his debut as a music lover: “Press Release from Walter Becker’s 11 Tracks of Whack,” Steely Dan Reader, August 5, 2013, http:// steelydanreader.com/1994/10/01/press-release-from-walter-beckers-11-tracks -of-whack/. Details about Walter’s early life: Harvey Kubernik, “Steely Dan and Walter Becker Interviews,” Cave Hollywood, May 25, 2021, https://cavehollywood .com/steely-dan-and-walter-becker-interviews/. Also David Browne, “Steely

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Dan’s Quiet Hero: Inside Walter Becker’s Troubled Life, Wry Genius,” Rolling Stone, September 22, 2017, and Alec Wilkinson, “Steely Dan: Return of the Dark Brothers,” Rolling Stone, March 30, 2000. In 1997, a man named Randy California: “Guitarist Randy California Feared Drowned,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1997, https://www.latimes.com /archives/la-xpm-1997-01-09-me-16985-story.html. another guy in the band is Randy Texas: https://www.loudersound.com /features/california-dreaming. He lives next door to Walter: Andy Gill, “The Return of Steely Dan,” Steely Dan Internet Archive, reprinted from Mojo, October 1995, http://sdarchive.com /mojo.html. He finishes the things: Ron Hart, “‘An All-Around Musician’: Steely Dan Guitarists Share Their Experiences of Working With Walter Becker,” Billboard, September 19, 2017. a grim surprise and without ceremony or memorial: Statement of Delia Becker, quoted in “Walter Becker’s Widow Details Steely Dan Co-Founder’s Swift Illness, Death,” Rolling Stone, November 15, 2017. cynical about human nature: Statement of Donald Fagen, quoted in Mitchell Peters, “Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen Remembers Walter Becker in Thoughtful Note,” Billboard, September 3, 2017, https://www.billboard.com/music/rock /steely-dan-donald-fagen-walter-becker-death-statement-7950043/. artist’s artist: Ahmir Thompson, Instagram post, September 3, 2017. one-half of the team: Mark Ronson, Twitter post, 8:45 a.m., September 3, 2017. rock-’n’-roll hero: Gary Graff, “Beck Pays Tribute to Steely Dan’s Walter Becker at Detroit Concert,” Billboard, September 5, 2017, https://www.billboard.com /music/music-news/beck-tribute-steely-dan-walter-becker-detroit-7950075/. spent much of the following year: John Darnielle, “The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle Pens Tribute to Walter Becker and Steely Dan’s Music,” EW.com, September 6, 2017, https://ew.com/music/2017/09/06/steely-dan -walter-becker-john-darnielle-tribute/. If you are a die-hard Steely Dan fan: Brent DiCrescenzo, “Steely Dan: Two Against Nature,” Pitchfork, February 29, 2000, https://pitchfork.com/reviews /albums/7486-two-against-nature/. With Pretzel Logic and the hopes and dreams of the rock tradition as handed down from Presley: John Swenson and Dave Marsh, The Rolling Stone Record Guide: Reviews and Ratings of Almost 10.000 Currently Available Rock, Pop, Soul, Country, Blues, Jazz, and Gospel Albums (New York: Random House, 1979). a dissent against ’60s rock: Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks, Spin Alternative Record Guide (New York: Vintage, 1995). I have played no band more often: Judd Apatow, Twitter post, 9:39 a.m., September 3, 2017. Who could trust him? Judd Apatow, Twitter post, 8:34 a.m., February 9, 2015. Donald told jazz scion: Leo Sidran, “The Third Story Podcast: Donald Fagen,” YouTube video, October 6, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= cwl4TYIm-M8.

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seeing somebody discover Steely Dan: @LouBegaVEVO, Twitter post, 8:22 a.m., January 29, 2021. 15–16 listening to “do it again”: Hank Shteamer, “‘Good Steely Dan Takes’: A Chat with the Man behind the Funniest Rock Fan Account on Twitter,” Rolling Stone, October 16, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features /good-steely-dan-takes-twitter-interview-1073754/. 16 It’s like when you get a letter: Amrit Singh, “Michael McDonald on Yachts, Rock,” Stereogum, February 28, 2008, https://www.stereogum.com/8261 /michael_mcdonald_on_yachts_rock/news/. 17 weird sex and heroin: Matt Fraction, “Issue #46: Matt Travels Home for Christmas and Pays Tribute to Joe Strummer of ‘The Clash,’” CBR.com, December 26, 2002, https://www.cbr.com/issue-46-4/.

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a post-World War II tract development: Jerry Cheslow, “If You’re Thinking of Living in: South Brunswick,” New York Times, November 22, 1992. Steven Spielberg makes movies: Fred Schruers, “Donald Fagen Revisits an Era of Innocence,” Musician, January 1983. He has a cool cousin named Barbara: Eugene Holley, “The Insider,” Wax Poetics, October 8, 2021, https://www.waxpoetics.com/article/reluctant-steely -dan-front-man-donald-fagen. real jazz snob and encouraged the players: David Browne, “The Last Word: Donald Fagen on Right-Wing Paranoia, Steely Dan’s Future,” Rolling Stone, June 13, 2016. constellation of enthusiasms: Dylan Jones, “Icon: Donald Fagen,” GQ UK, February 12, 2012, http://steelydanreader.com/2014/02/12/icon-donald-fagen/. Influences on Donald Fagen: Ben Williams, “Influences: Donald Fagen,” New York Magazine, March 16, 2006. That kind of marriage: Charles Perry, “Steely Dan Comes Up Swinging: Number Five With a Dildo,” Rolling Stone, August 15, 1974. the death of chromatic harmony and I thought that it was becoming a political music: David Yaffe, “An Interview with Donald Fagen of Steely Dan: A Band Named after a Sex Toy Still Gives Pleasure,” Tablet, October 16, 2012, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/shanah-tova-from -donald-fagen. after the religious and political saxophoning: David Breskin, “Steely Dan,” Musician, March 1981. everything real is happening elsewhere: Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). In his first Rolling Stone cover story: Rob Sheffield, “The Eternal Sunshine of Harry Styles,” Rolling Stone, August 26, 2019. a good example of a song that sets a mood: “Meaning of Lyrics, in Their Own Words,” Metal Leg 9, Steely Dan Reader, April 13, 2014, http://steelydanreader .com/1989/04/01/metal-leg-9/. about as close to autobiography: “Steely Dan—Aja,” the second episode in the fifth season of the British documentary series Classic Albums, 2000.

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a period where the Village: Thessaly La Force, “Terry Southern in Full,” Paris Review, June 7, 2010, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/06/07/terry -southern-in-full/. every Negro jazz musician: Terry Southern, Red-Dirt Marijuana (New York: New American Library, 1967). a distance I could keep: Sidran, “The Third Story Podcast: Donald Fagen.” I would sit at the keyboard: Richard B. Woodward, “Television: When ‘Blue Velvet’ Meets ‘Hill Street Blues,’” New York Times, April 8, 1990.

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We can sense that happening here: Gill, “The Return of Steely Dan.”

L ady Bayside 33 33 33

33

Bayside had a particular character: Michael Watts, “Art For Art’s Sake,” Melody Maker, June 19, 1976. like death, only less interesting: “Andrea Peyser: Biography.” CNN war slut: Andrea Peyser, “America-Bashing U.N. Should Get Lost,” New York Post, September 21, 2001, https://nypost.com/2001/09/21/america -bashing-u-n-should-get-lost/. a soulless collection: Andrea Peyser, “‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Can’t Shake Queens Roots,” New York Post, January 6, 2014, https://nypost.com/2013/12/09 /wolf-of-wall-street-cant-shake-queens-roots/.

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They seemed to really be obsessed: Rickie Lee Jones, “Read Rickie Lee Jones’ Poignant Tribute to Steely Dan’s Walter Becker,” Rolling Stone, September 3, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/read-rickie-lee-jones -poignant-tribute-to-steely-dans-walter-becker-116592/. Lonnie Younge detail: Rob Brunner, “The Origins of Steely Dan,” EW.com, March 17, 2006, https://ew.com/article/2006/03/17/origins-steely-dan/. Duchess County sheriff’s deputies rolled up: Cay Parker Jones, “44 Students Are Arrested in Drug Raid at Bard College,” Poughkeepsie Journal, April 6, 1968. a barber administered institutional buzzcuts: Rob Brunner, “The Origins of Steely Dan,” EW.com, March 17, 2006, https://ew.com/article/2006/03/17 /origins-steely-dan/. both on the list of detainees: Marion Swerdlow, “Bust Impressions.” Bard Observer, May 15, 1969, https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/observer/105/15. Bard’s administration posted bail and Donald skipping graduation: Rob, Brunner, “The Origins of Steely Dan.” EW.com, March 17, 2006, https:// ew.com/article/2006/03/17/origins-steely-dan/. an extremely corny cop: Michael Watts, “Art For Art’s Sake,” Melody Maker, June 19, 1976. Liddy had directed a no-knock raid on Millbrook: James Feron, “Poughkeepsie Recalls Liddy: Gung-Ho Deputy Prosecutor,” New York Times, July 13, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/07/13/archives/poughkeepsie-recalls -liddy-gungho-deputy-prosecutor-a-secret-kept.html.

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after losing their position at Harvard University: Nathaniel J. Hiatt, “A Trip down Memory Lane: LSD at Harvard,” Harvard Crimson, May 23, 2016, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/5/23/trip-down-memory-lane/. you’ll never guess what them hippies are watching: G. Gordon Liddy, quoted in Edward Jay Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America (London: Verso, 1990). See also G. Gordon Liddy, Will: The Auto­ biography of G. Gordon Liddy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), for the rest of the exchange, which goes like this: “A What?” “A waterfall for crissake! It’d just a movie of a goddamn waterfall. It goes on and on and nothing ever happens but the water. I kept watching, you know? I figured there’d be, you know, broads jumpin’ in and out of the water or something.” “No broads?” “Nothing! Nothing but water! Them people are crazy!”

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Law and Order, not weak-kneed sociology . . . bought off with a job in the Nixon White House: J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). strange and strong . . . beyond the pale: Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter, The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). the Wild Bill Hickok of the judiciary: Michael Watts, “Art For Art’s Sake,” Melody Maker, June 19, 1976. Skunk Baxter had built with his own hands: Brian Sweet, Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years (London: Omnibus, 2018).

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The Brill Building chapter: Bob Stanley, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé (New York: Norton, 2015). Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who met: Mark Chilla, “Burt Bacharach and the Brill Building,” Afterglow, Indiana Public Media, May 27, 2016, https:// indianapublicmedia.org/afterglow/burt-bacharach-brill-building.php. down the street at 1650 Broadway: The Brill Building Sound, December 28, 2020, https://www.history-of-rock.com/kirshner.htm. During the late ’60s: Gill, “The Return of Steely Dan.” yish gdall, yish gdosh, baruch atah Adonoi: Breskin, “Steely Dan.” They looked like insects: Sweet, Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years. the second guy to sing with the Americans: Daniel Kreps, “Jay Black, Jay and the Americans Singer, Dead at 82,” Rolling Stone, October 23, 2021, https:// www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/jay-black-jay-and-the-americans -singer-dead-obit-1247111/. paying them $50 for every song: Jon Blistein, “Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen Talks Lessons in Sleaze and a Rabbi with a Fastball,” Rolling Stone, October 6, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/steely-dan-donald -fagen-interview-1236665/.

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We were in the band and there were four guys: ”Steely Dan—1981 Interview with Mary Turner. R.I.P. Walter Becker,” YouTube video, September 4, 2017, https://youtu.be/SptXsgI2Y7w. genial put-down of the Establishment and Donald Fagin: A. H. Weiler, “‘You’ve Got to Walk It . . . ,’ Genial Put-down of Establishment,” New York Times, September 20, 1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/09/20/archives /youve-got-to-walk-it-genial-putdown-of-establishment.html.

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had yet to become the Hipster Heaven: Donald Fagen, Eminent Hipsters (London: Vintage, 2014). a 1969 New York Magazine cover story: Pete Hamill, “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” New York Magazine, May 14, 2008, https://nymag.com/news /features/46992/. They found their separate ways: Pete Hamill, “Brooklyn Revisited,” New York Magazine, September 22, 2008, https://nymag.com/anniversary/40th /50654/.

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Sunbathe, and I drive: “Igor Stravinsky Home, Los Angeles,” Russian Culture in Landmarks, August 28, 2015, https://russianlandmarks.wordpress.com/2015 /08/28/. offering them $125 a week: Gill, “The Return of Steely Dan.” Encino . . . built sometime in the previous two weeks: George Varga, “Walter Becker, Dead at 67, and Donald Fagen Talked Steely Dan in Candid, In-Depth Interview,” Baltimore Sun, September 3, 2017, https://www .baltimoresun.com/sd-et-music-steely-dan-interview-20170903-story.html. Gary had a certain type of mustache: “Steely Dan—1981 Interview with Mary Turner. R.I.P. Walter Becker,” YouTube video, September 4, 2017, https:// youtu.be/SptXsgI2Y7w. Donald doesn’t have a driver’s license: Varga, “Walter Becker, Dead at 67, and Donald Fagen Talked Steely Dan.” We really had to go out of our way: Jeff Burger, “Steely Dan Madness: Walking the Tightrope in Star City,” April 14, 2022, https://byjeffburger.com/1974 /05/23/steely-dan-madness-walking-the-tightrope-in-star-city-1974/#:~: text=%E2%80%9CWe%20really%20had%20to%20go,cheesy%20that%20 they%20were%20laughable. If we had to come up with some good music that might have had a chance at radio: Varga, “Walter Becker, Dead at 67, and Donald Fagen Talked Steely Dan.” I hated clicks, pops and ticks on records: Frannie Kelley, “Steely Dan Engineer Roger Nichols Dies at Age 66,” NPR, April 18, 2011, https://www.npr.org /sections/therecord/2011/04/18/135516976/steely-dan-engineer-roger-nichols -dies-at-age-66. It wasn’t a drag for me to do things over and over: Ben, Sisario, “Roger Nichols, Artist among Sound Engineers, Dies at 66,” New York Times, April 17,

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2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/arts/music/roger-nichols-artist -among-sound-engineers-dies-at-66.html. and by the time we were finished, we had moved back to New York: “Steely Dan—Aja,” in the documentary series Classic Albums. does give you a creative vacuum: Sylvie Simmons, “Steely Dan Dare to Give a More-Open-Than-Usual Interview,” Sounds, October 22, 1977. a little toddler that died of an illness and The “fearsome excavation on Magnolia Boulevard” was a 15-foot deep and wide hole: “Steely Dan— The Boston Rag Lyrics,” SongMeanings, accessed May 7, 2022, https:// songmeanings.com/songs/view/140466/. Years later, in a column for Premiere: Donald Fagen, “Tell Blondie To Break Out The Ice,” Steely Dan Internet Archive, reprinted from Premiere, December 1988, http://sdarchive.com/premiere.html.

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The Choise of Valentines Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo: John Coulthart, “The Choise of Valentines, or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo,” Feuilleton: A journal by artist and designer John Colthart, February 14, 2011, http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2011/02/14/the-choise-of -valentines-or-the-merie-ballad-of-nash-his-dildo/. Further dildo context via Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), and Brian M. Watson, “A Brief History of Dildos,” Bloggings & Musings, June 20, 2018, https://musings.brimwats.com/blog/2018 -06-20.dildo-history/. Wilmot personifies the dildo: Harold Love, “A Restoration Lampoon in Transmission and Revision: Rochester’s ‘Signior Dildo,’” Studies in Bibliography 46 (1993): 250–262, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40371979. Steely Dan III from Yokohama, torn in two by a bull dyke: William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Penguin, 2016). There always used to be a Beatnik Corner in the bookstore and shouldn’t be read too literally: Charles Perry, “Steely Dan Comes Up Swinging: Number Five With a Dildo,” Rolling Stone, August 15, 1974. also a favorite of David Bowie’s: Casey June Rae, “What David Bowie Borrowed from William Burroughs,” Literary Hub, June 1, 2021, https://lithub .com/what-david-bowie-borrowed-from-william-burroughs/. The street kids of Tangier: Brad Gooch, “Shock Appeal/Who Are These Writers, and Why Do They Want to Hurt Us? William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles, Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1993, https://www .latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-08-01-bk-21467-story.html. I am forced to the appalling conclusion: William S. Burroughs, Queer (London: Penguin Books, 2010). The junkie on the street in Burroughs’s cosmology: Marianne Faithfull and David Dalton, Faithfull: An Autobiography (New York: Cooper Square, 2000). These people are too fancy: Arthur Lubow, “Fancy Dan: Nobody’s Making Better Music Than an Unlikely Duo Named after a Dildo,” New Times Magazine, February 18, 1977.

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Their biggest claim to something like fame: Bart Balmear, “A Mysterious Army of Angry Velvet Underground Fans Respond to Negative Review of First VU Show, 1965,” Dangerous Minds, February 9, 2018, https://dangerousminds .net/comments/a_mysterious_army_of_angry_velvet_underground_fans _respond_to_negative_revi. Rick Philp’s move to Boston and death: Ryan H. Walsh, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 (Penguin, 2019). working in a plastics factory: Peter Kurtz, “The Mystery Man of Steely Dan: An Interview with Singer David Palmer,” longitudes, June 14, 2019, https:// peterkurtz.com/2016/06/26/the-mystery-man-of-steely-dan-an-interview -with-singer-david-palmer/. He drives across the country: Bob DiCorcia, “David Palmer: Q & A,” Steely Dan Reader, December 31, 2013, http://steelydanreader.com/1997/01/01 /david-palmer-q-and-a/. Donald and Walter write a few more songs: Sweet, Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years. In one YouTube clip it’s 1972: bwana-ma-coo-bah, “Steely Dan Reelin’ in the Years Old Grey Whistle Test,” YouTube video, June 19, 2021, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=KYEOJbWwSZ8. Palmer is mostly working as a photographer: “David Palmer Images,” 2016, https://www.davidpalmerimages.com/about-the-artist. screwing him: Eriq Gardner, “Steely Dan Sued by Former Singer David Palmer over Digital Royalties,” Billboard, March 1, 2014, https://www.billboard .com/music/music-news/steely-dan-sued-by-former-singer-david-palmer-over -5923015/.

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In 1972, in his column in the Pasadena Star-News: Geoff Kelly, “John Fahey: An Original Voice,” Pasadena Star-News, September 21, 1972. How many Cadillacs: Alton Blakeslee, “Junkies Could Live a Jet Set Life on Cost of Habit,” Pasadena Star-News, September 21, 1972. Dick Clark introduces them: Amanda Petrusich, “Postscript: Walter Becker, of Steely Dan,” New Yorker, September 3, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com /culture/culture-desk/postscript-walter-becker-of-steely-dan. in November, they come back: BetaGems Lost Media, “Steely Dan 1973 TV Performance,” YouTube video, February 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=6HTueJ__5EQ&. My mother was a natural singer: Fagen, Eminent Hipsters. Donald favors a preshow Valium: Per Jim Hodder, quoted in Mark Blake, “How Steely Dan Made Their Classic Album Pretzel Logic,” Louder, April 27, 2017, https://www.loudersound.com/features/how-steely-dan-made-their -classic-album-pretzel-logic. My voice would give out after two weeks on the road: Eugene Holley, “The Insider,” Wax Poetics, October 8, 2021, https://www.waxpoetics.com /article/reluctant-steely-dan-front-man-donald-fagen.

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photos with the guys from the record company: Michael Ochs Archives, “Gold Record Presentation to Rock Band Steely Dan for the Song ‘Can’t Buy a Thrill’ at ABC/Dunhill Records in 1973 . . . News Photo,” Getty Images, accessed May 7, 2022, https://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/image?family =editorial&phrase=steely+dan+gold+. 72 There was an astonishing gap: Barney Hoskyns, “The Backpages Interview,” Steely Dan Reader, reprinted from Rock’s Backpages, December 13, 2013, http:// steelydanreader.com/2003/06/01/backpages-interview/. 73 themed suites: Lucian K. Truscott, “Inside the Hotel California,” New Times, August 5, 1977. In Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974–2001), Don Felder refers to “sleeping over in the S&M Room at the Record Plant” during a period of drug-abetted marital strife. 72–73 they play a gig at the record plant: “Steely Dan—Live at the Record Plant (Los Angeles, March 20, 1974),” YouTube video, October 23, 2017, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=c8DoIC5tJw0. Also bootlegged, as This All Too Mobile Home (Scorpio Records, 1991). 73 This is a song about livin’ in Los Angeles: Ancient Media, “Steely Dan, J. J.’s, San Diego, California, March 23, 1974,” YouTube video, December 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9yGqXZbQiA&t=67s&. 74 We had to fire him: Charles Perry, “Steely Dan Comes Up Swinging: Number Five With a Dildo,” Rolling Stone, August 15, 1974.

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in jackets and ties: Laura Zattra, “Collaboration at the Studio Di Fonologia Della Rai in Milan (1955–1983),” September 11, 2017, https://lazattra.wordpress .com/2017/09/11/collaboration-at-the-studio-di-fonologia-della-rai-in-milan -1955-1983/. or white lab coats: “The Rai Musical Phonology Studio in Milan—Google Arts & Culture,” accessed May 7, 2022, https://artsandculture.google.com /story/the-rai-musical-phonology-studio-in-milan-castello-sforzesco /AgWxdVkfsfbuJQ?hl=en. the Tenth Oscillator: David Osmond-Smith, “The Tenth Oscillator: The Work of Cathy Berberian 1958–1966,” Tempo, January 2004. In a 1970 letter: Quoted in Kate Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice: Cathy Berberian as Collaborator, Composer and Creator,” PhD dissertation, Washington University, 2011. she feels herself falling down a rabbit hole: Cathy Berberian, “With all my love: Cathy Berberian (1925–1983) describes her life with music,” Classical Music Daily, accessed May 7, 2022, http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2002 /07/cathyb.htm. an accompanist so she can put herself on tape: Carrie de Swaan, dir., Music Is the Air I Breathe (VRBO, 1994). Berio invites John Cage: Stefano Pocci, “Cage in Italy: Lascia o Raddoppia?,” accessed May 7, 2022, http://www.johncage.it/en/1959-lascia-o-raddoppia.html. named for his Milanese landlady: John Cage Complete Works, accessed May 7, 2022, https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=79.

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In Cathy’s version . . . dark blue means: Quoted in Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice.” I was like an instrument locked in a box: Quoted in Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice.” John Cage throws the I Ching: James Pritchett, “John Cage: Song Books,” Yellow Barn, accessed May 7, 2022, https://www.yellowbarn.org/page/john -cage-song-books. Using toothpicks and Kleenex: Quoted in John Cage, Song Books (Henmar, 1970). In a photo . . . Cathy stands over a bemused Cage: Jennifer Paull, “The Philosophy of Absence: Jennifer Paull investigates four releases of Cage’s Number Pieces,” Classical Music Daily, August 26, 2009, http://www.mvdaily.com /articles/2009/08/cage.htm. In one filmed interview: de Swaan, Music is the Air I Breathe. One man’s kitsch: Quoted in Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice.”

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Many years later Jones will write: Rickie Lee Jones, Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of a Troubadour (London: Grove, 2022). In 1996, they build a song around a sample of Donald: David Owens, “The True Story behind Super Furry Animals ‘The Man Don’t Give A f*Ck,’” Nation.Cymru, December 2, 2021, https://nation.cymru/culture/the-true -story-behind-super-furry-animals-the-man-dont-give-a-fck/. ninety-five percent of the royalties: Danny Wright, “Super Furry Animals: 10 of the Best,” Guardian, March 4, 2015.

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The first four words of the official band bio: “SteelyDan.com: Bio,” 2022, https://www.steelydan.com/#!/bio. Typical devastation: Wayne Robins, “Walking Slow, Drinking Alone and Moving Swiftly Through the Night,” New Musical Express, February 23, 1974.

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She is also pregnant: Dave Goldiner, “Meet Springsteen’s Rosalita and Rock Muses Rikki and Sharona, Too,” New York Daily News, April 19, 2008. didn’t think Chevy Chase was much of a drummer: Chris McDaniel, “‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’: Subject of Steely Dan Song Accomplished Artist, Painter,” Port Townsend Leader, June 5, 2019. Dave Hickey once wrote: “The Little Church of Perry Mason,” in Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Art Issues Press, 1997). We wanted their first thoughts: Mike Levine, “Steely Dan’s Producer Talks Recording, Mixing, and More,” Audiofanzine, June 1, 2015, https://en .audiofanzine.com/recording-mixing/editorial/articles/gary-katz-on -producing.html. good sports . . . to the extent that they didn’t quit: Gill, “The Return of Steely Dan.”

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self-taught expert on missile defense: Sarah Polus, “Doobie Brother Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter on How He Became a Missile-Defence Expert,” Washington Post, December 12, 2018. had recently been drinking to excess and was taking a prescription medication: “Short Takes: Ex-Steely Dan Drummer Dies,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1990. the Social Security Administration’s list of the top 1,000 baby names: Michelle Napierski-Prancl, “Brandy, You’re a Fine Name: Popular Music and the Naming of Infant Girls from 1965–1985,” Studies in Popular Culture 38 (2): 41–53, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44259598. Often it would happen at moments of feeling really lost: McDaniel, “‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’” Doc had known it to happen: Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (New York: Penguin, 2009).

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the meaning of a certain enigmatic question: Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (New York: Villard, 1995). coined by the rock critic Robert Christgau: Robert Christgau, “Robert Christgau: CG: DNA,” Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics, accessed May 7, 2022, https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php ?name=DNA. Jorge Luis Borges . . . files the squonk: Jorge Luis and Margarita Guerrero, Book of Imaginary Beings: By Jorge Luis Borges, with Margarita Guerrero (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969). may even dissolve itself in tears: William T. Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (La Vergne, TN: Antiquarius, 2020).

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He relays this to Leo Sidran on a podcast . . . the perfect music: Sidran, “The Third Story Podcast: Donald Fagen.” They never heard of him and care less: Quoted in Robert George Reisner, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (New York: Citadel, 1962). Since the soul of Charlie Parker: Thomas Pynchon, V (London: Vintage, 2007). His greatest significance: Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995).

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The less said about that one, the better: “Becker Comments on Various Songs,” Steely Dan Reader, April 13, 2014, http://steelydanreader.com/1990/10 /15/metal-leg-14/#5. the Grateful Dead of bad vibes: Robert Christgau, “What Kind of a Best Rock and Roll Band in the World Is This?,” Village Voice, April 21, 1975.

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a teleportation platform: “Meaning of Lyrics, in Their Own Words,” Steely

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Dan Reader, April 13, 2014, http://steelydanreader.com/1989/04/01/metal -leg-9/. Science fiction and nostalgia are the same thing: T. Bone Burnett, quoted in Ken Tucker, “LA Eccentricity in the 1970s: Thomas Jefferson Kaye, Hirth Martinez, and Moon Martin,” International Association for the Study of Popular Music—US Branch, Journal of Popular Music Studies, March 2013, http:// iaspm-us.net/jpms-online-popiaspm-us-sounds-of-the-city-issue-ken-tucker-2/.

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We had our radical super hi-fi monitor system: Denny Dias, “Katy and the Gremlin,” Steely Dan Internet Archive, accessed May 7, 2022, https://sdarchive .com/dennys3.html. 121 which was supposed to give us a better signal to noise ratio than Dolby and a desperate attempt to produce: Dias, “Katy and the Gremlin.” 121–122 No matter how many times we punched in. . . . This was to haunt us: Dr. G. Eric Page (presumably Becker/Fagen), liner notes to Countdown to Ecstasy (MCA, 1998), via “Countdown to Ecstasy,” Steely Dan Interzone, https://broberg.se/sd_ecstasy.htm. 122 an investigation by the New York Times reveals: Jody Rosen, “The Day the Music Burned,” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2019. 123 Steely Dan issue a shrugging statement: Jem Aswad, “Nirvana, R.E.M., Roots Did Not Know Warehouse Fire Destroyed Their Recordings,” Variety, June 12, 2019.

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avowed Steely Dan fan Elmore Leonard: Fletcher Roberts, “Novels Are Nice, But Oh, to Be A Rock Star,” New York Times, March 14, 1999. He’d say my words were too much like Steely Dan: Alex Scordelis, “An Interview with Mike Watt,” Believer, September 1, 2017. That was another goof: Michael T. Fournier, “Mike Watt Talks w/Michael T. Fournier about ‘Double Nickels on the Dime,’” Mike Watt’s Hoot Page, from an interview conducted on January 3, 2006, http://www.hootpage.com/hoot_watt -fournier06intrvw.html.

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became the legal guardian of his sixteen-year-old girlfriend: Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Steven Tyler’s Abortion Drama Deepens,” Salon.com, September 25, 2011, https://www.salon.com/2011/05/24/steven_tyler_abortion_story/. what it might feel like to affirm it: Tom Syverson, Reality Squared: On Reality TV and Left Politics (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2021).

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General Owsley background: Robert Greenfield, “Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD,” Rolling Stone, October 6, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/feature /owsley-stanley-the-king-of-lsd-82181/. Also Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure (New York: Pocket, 1999).

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Donald Fagen’s friend Pete comes home: Fagen, Eminent Hipsters. A cocky little guy, short, with dark hair: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (London: Vintage, 2018). the prince of inefficiency: Michael Lydon, “Good Old Grateful Dead,” Rolling Stone, August 23, 1969.

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I will prick new punch-holes in the tape: From “Electric Ant,” in Philip K. Dick, Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). It’s about individual madness rather than political situations: Steve Clarke, “The Walter Becker & Donald Fagen Laugh-In,” New Musical Express, June 12, 1976. I do not really understand myself these days: David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” Atlantic, August 1, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine /archive/2011/07/the-brain-on-trial/308520/. all these weird ideations about these songs: Breskin, “Steely Dan.” It is my plan to assassinate by pistol and various Bremer diary extracts: Arthur H. Bremer, An Assassin’s Diary (New York, Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973). the period of psychotic action: Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” Film Comment 8:1 (1972). Those weird people on the street: Breskin, “Steely Dan.”

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the most hideous album cover of the seventies: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, liner notes to The Royal Scam (MCA, 1999), via the Steely Dan Interzone, accessed May 7, 2022, https://broberg.se/royalscm.htm. lyrical bravery . . . willingness to go out there: Cameron Crowe, liner notes to Eagles: The Very Best of (Warner Strategic Marketing, 2003), via The Uncool—The Official Site for Everything Cameron Crowe, 2003, https://www .theuncool.com/journalism/the-very-best-of-the-eagles/. a little Post-it back to Steely Dan: Glenn Frey, History of the Eagles, dir. Alison Ellwood (Showtime, 2013). the white Drifters: “Metal Leg 1—April 1987,” Steely Dan Reader, April 6, 2014, http://steelydanreader.com/1987/04/01/metal-leg-1/. We thought of the Eagles as the rock and roll Camaro: Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce (New York: Times Books, 1997). taste for the jugular: Cameron Crowe, “The Second Coming of Steely Dan: Their Sixth Album, ‘Aja,’ Is One of the Year’s Hottest Records,” Rolling Stone, December 29, 1977. In 1976’s All the President’s Men, when Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) asks reporter Sally Aiken (Penny Fuller) why she held back a piece of information, she replies, “I guess I don’t have the taste for the jugular you guys have.” We’re not as negative as the Eagles and probably one of the funniest of

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the 50 states: Sylvie Simmons, “Steely Dan Dare to Give a More-Open-Than -Usual Interview,” Sounds, October 22, 1977.

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The average wife who hates her average husband: “Domestic Relations: The Perils of Mexican Divorce,” Time, December 27, 1963. where Bacharach first hears Dionne Warwick: Peter Dunbavan, An Avid’s Guide to Sixties Songwriters (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2017). If you can say “incompatibility of character” in French: “Metal Leg 9— April 1989,” Steely Dan Reader, April 13, 2014, http://steelydanreader.com /1989/04/01/metal-leg-9/. Because it’s often said: Greg Tate, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York: Harlem Moon/Broadway, 2003). Steely Dan is mythologizing the tragic lives: Britt Robson, “Pretzel Logic: Vernon Reid’s Group Will Twist up Steely Dan’s Music at the Walker,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, April 18, 2014.

The O l d Ma n 149

Becker mentions the King James Bible: Michael Watts, “Art For Art’s Sake,” Melody Maker, June 19, 1976. 149–150 Thomas Merton’s description: Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

Pe p e 152

the rapid flow of life in the city: Ben Williams, “Influences: Donald Fagen,” New York, March 16, 2006. 152–154 As Ben Reich glided down the east ramp: Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man (London: Millennium, 2001). 154 to protect themselves from the perplexity: Jack Vance, The Star King (Walnut, CA: Spatterlight, 2005). 154 Readers of each generation will contribute meaning: R. Reginald and Jeffrey M. Elliot, “A. E. Van Vogt: A Writer with a Winning Formula—Interview by Jeffrey M. Elliot, 1979,” The Weird Worlds of A. E. van Vogt, accessed May 7, 2022, http://www.icshi.net/worlds/jeff.htm. 154–155 hip, almost subversive science fiction aesthetic: Rogier van Bakel, “Remembering Johnny,” Wired, July 1995. 155 I see her far out on the edge: William Gibson, Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1987).

A Woolly Man w ithou t a Face 156 158 159

a story about the loss of innocence: “BBC Chat: 3/4/00,” Steely Dan Internet Archive, accessed May 7, 2022, https://sdarchive.com/bbc.html. a pretty straightforward story: “BBC Chat: 3/4/00,” Steely Dan Internet Archive, accessed May 7, 2022, https://sdarchive.com/bbc.html. Then suddenly Don Marcelino saw: Hans Baumann, The Caves of the Great Hunters (New York: Pantheon, 1954).

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Pe g 161 162

that patented Steely Dan studio wax: William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor (London: Penguin, 2014). Classic Albums: Steely Dan—Aja: “Steely Dan—Aja,” in the documentary series Classic Albums.

Sayoko 166

168 169

Yamaguchi background: Chisako Koizumi, “Shiseido Museum #04 Shiseido Solid Perfume ‘Mai’: Shiseido Museum,” Hanatsubaki Magazine, April 20, 2021, https://hanatsubaki.shiseido.com/en/museum/12206/. Also Ushijima Bifue, “The Fair Face of Japanese Beauty,” nippon.com, June 9, 2020, https://www .nippon.com/en/views/b02602/. may as well have been drifting through a landscape of boomerangs and parallelograms: Fagen, Eminent Hipsters. It’s traditional in Western literature: Austin Scaggs, “Q&A: Donald Fagen,” Rolling Stone, April 6, 2006.

Pe t er/Tariq Dani el 173 175

176

176

176 177

177 178

179

He bobs his head a little, then starts rapping: “Steely Dan—Aja,” in the documentary series Classic Albums. People are under the impression and background on “Deja Vu”: DJ Vlad, “Peter Gunz on Giving up 100% Publishing: We Got Stuck-up!,” YouTube video, April 3, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaEIC-2wybQ. In Kaylan’s memoir: Howard Kaylan and Jeff Tamarkin, Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, Etc. (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat, 2013). Kaylan and Volman responded by suing: Frank Owen, “Bite This: Our 1989 Feature on Sampling,” Spin, November 1989, https://www.spin.com/2021/05 /bite-this-1989-sampling-feature/. Tommy Boy had brokered deals: Owen, “Bite This.” https://www.spin.com /2021/05/bite-this-1989-sampling-feature/. Walter and I listened: Ross Scarano, “Interview: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen Talks New Album, Reclaiming the Ghetto, and Getting a Letter from Kanye,” Complex, October 16, 2012, https://www.complex.com/music/2012/10 /interview-donald-fagen-talks-sunken-condos-reclaiming-ghetto-kanye-west. They would not even give us writing credit: Gunz, quoted in DJ Vlad, “Peter Gunz on Giving up 100% Publishing.” One night in December 1994: UrbanUAE, “DJ Stretch & Bobbito, December 15, 1994, Pt. 2,” YouTube video, November 29, 2019, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=E3UFk7TS9WE&ab_channel=UrbanUAE. he’d allude to periods of near homelessness: Author interview, 2004. Further Doom background from Justin Sayles, “MF DOOM and the Mask That Left Hip-Hop Forever Changed,” Ringer, January 1, 2021, https://www.theringer .com/2021/1/1/22209728/mf-doom-daniel-dumile-obituary. Also Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Mask of Metal Face Doom,” New Yorker, September 14, 2009, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/21/the-mask-of-doom.

Not es |   265

The E x pandi ng Man 183 184

184 184

Think of the biggest American supergroups: Crowe, “The Second Coming of Steely Dan.” I sold a lot of dog food: Mike Bell, “From The Tonight Show Band to Steely Dan, Veteran Sax Player Pete Christlieb Has Had a Varied Career,” Calgary Herald, June 5, 2015. I was gone in a half-hour: Marc Myers, Anatomy of a Song: The inside Story behind 45 Iconic Hits (New York: Grove, 2017). The protagonist is not a musician: “Steely Dan—Aja,” in the documentary series Classic Albums.

B roa dway Du che ss 188

I went, “Am I having a psychotic breakdown?”: Matt Wardlaw, “Michael McDonald Was ‘So Stoned’ While Watching ‘SCTV’ Sketch about Himself,” Ultimate Classic Rock, April 16, 2018, https://ultimateclassicrock.com/michael -mcdonald-sctv-sketch/.

Josie 190

There’s a lot of that stuff in it: “Steely Dan—Aja,” in the documentary series Classic Albums.

The Ba bylo n S isters 193 193 194 195 195

196 196

As we started to run down the tunes: Breskin, “Steely Dan.” We had 4,000 dollars worth of musicians: Breskin, “Steely Dan.” In some ways, the early, rougher ones sound better: Gill, “The Return of Steely Dan.” The city burning: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, 2000). Los Angeles tobogganed with almost one continuous movement: Myron Brinig, Flutter of an Eyelid, quoted in Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear (London: Picador, 1999). every booze party ends in a fight: Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business and Other Short Stories (London: Penguin, 1950). the weather of catastrophe: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

H oo ps Mc Cann /The Dread Moral Eel 197 198

200 202 203

“Life in the fast lane” story: Frey, in History of the Eagles. some kind of power: “Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan) Interview on NPR— September 20, 1988,” YouTube video, September 15, 2017, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=Gadclj2F3V8&t=7s&ab_channel=reginaldmaplethorp. Carola suggests that by now: Christgau, “Robert Christgau: Album: Steely Dan: Aja.” A report published by the Washington Post: Chris Cobbs, “Widespread Cocaine Use by Players Alarms NBA,” Washington Post, August 20, 1980. six weeks later he came in with this machine: Paul Tingen, “Donald Fagen:

No te s  |   266

203 204

Recording Morph the Cat,” Sound On Sound, May 1, 2022, https://www .soundonsound.com/people/donald-fagen. This was in the days when digital was still very primitive: Tingen, “Donald Fagen: Recording Morph the Cat.” I used to call it the Desperation Machine: Sidran, “The Third Story Podcast: Donald Fagen.”

The Dan dy of Gamma C hi/ARETHA FRANKLIN 205

209

What the automobile is to Detroit and where Stravinsky once lived: Leonard Michaels, David Reid, and Raquel L. Scherr, West of the West: Imagining California: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). I’d heard he could take a man’s head off: Michaels, Reid, and Scherr, West of the West.

Th e Gauch o 212 212 212 213

213

I don’t want to be a repeater pencil: Sidran, “The Third Story Podcast: Donald Fagen.” We’re the robber barons of rock-’n’-roll: Breskin, “Steely Dan.” giving birth to a square baby: Andrew Solomon, “The Jazz Martyr,” New York Times, February 9, 1997. We were quantum criminals: Giles Smith, “A Big Hello from Hawaii: Seeking to Recover after Steely Dan, Walter Becker Hid Out on an Island in the Sun—From Where He Granted Giles Smith a Rare Interview,” Independent, January 27, 1994. Fagen looked glumly at the clock: Robert Palmer, “Disaster and Triumph in the Custerdome,” Rolling Stone, February 5, 1981. Also contains Walter’s first on-the-record use of the phrase “quantum criminals,” again describing his and the taxicab’s ill-fated attempt at superposition.

A Jol ly R og er 214

Because “tiny withered dick” doesn’t rhyme: “Fan Questions,” Steely Dan Reader, December 11, 2013, http://steelydanreader.com/2000/05/21/fan -questions/.

Abb ie /Du p ree 219 222

223

far out ahead of the irony boom: Chris Willman, liner notes to Citizen Steely Dan box set (MCA, 1993). You don’t want to be buttoned up, like Debbie Gibson: David LaChapelle, quoted in Jann S. Wenner, Rolling Stone: 50 Years of Covers (New York: Abrams, 2018). the issue of corporate responsibility: Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, “Gay Activist Group Plans Pre-Grammy Eminem Protest,” MTV News, February 1, 2001, https://www.mtv.com/news/1438949/gay-activist-group-plans-pre -grammy-eminem-protest/.

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F ranny from NYU 228

dropped from sight: Sam Sutherland, “Becker Puts Himself in a ‘Crisis’ Situation,” Billboard, August 17, 1985.

L izzie 231 231 232

pretty good psychologists: Sidran, “The Third Story Podcast: Donald Fagen.” knowledge of teenage morés: Gavin Martin, “Steely Dan: Dual Purpose,” Independent, June 6, 2003. a goofy video infomercial: Frankie Gorilla Glue lover, “Steely Dan Confessions (Everything Must Go DVD Bonus),” YouTube video, August 30, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXhUoP9tJGU.

Jill 237

Two mortars, planted by the Viet Cong: Associated Press, “Near Death Is Revealed By Actress,” January 5, 1965.

Gina 238

Drugs scared me and general L.D. background: James Kaplan, “Angry Middle-Aged Man: Is Larry David Funnier than Everyone Else, or Just More Annoying?,” New Yorker, January 19, 2004.

Dave fro m Acqui si tion s 242

244

244

244

At the induction ceremony, Walter’s speech: “Steely Dan Accepts Award Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions 2001,” YouTube video, December 7, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK7QO9Hx3xM&ab_channel =Rock%26RollHallofFame. In Fugazy’s ’80s TV ads: robatsea2009, “Go Fugazy 1980 TV Commercial,” YouTube video, July 1, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErWKoE07 f VE&ab_channel=robatsea2009. I could not have been mayor without Bill Fugazy: Emily Smith, “Friends Honor Late Limousine and Travel Tycoon Bill Fugazy,” Page Six, March 10, 2016, https://pagesix.com/2016/03/09/friends-honor-late-limousine-and -travel-tycoon-bill-fugazy/. Steelcase screens and Herman Miller workpods: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin, 2013).

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