MY FAVORITE ROCK BAND, STEELY DAN

Okay, actually the Beatles are my favorite rock band, but they pretty much occupy a class of their own, you know, the Beatles and everybody else. At the top of the "everybody else" category, however, is Steely Dan whom I have loved since I was in the fourth grade. Their two most recent albums have been, admittedly, disappointing, but that's okay. I love them anyway.

From Wikipedia:

Steely Dan is an American jazz rock band centered around the core members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The band's peak of popularity was in the 1970s, when it released six albums that blended jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and pop. Their music is characterized by complex jazz-influenced structures and harmonies, literate lyrics and adroit musicianship.

Fagen and Becker named the band for a steam-powered dildo in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch. The group toured from 1972 to 1974, but from 1975 to 1980 the group became purely a studio-based act. The band was known for using session players such as Michael McDonald on their recordings. Steely Dan was inactive from 1981 through 1992, but Becker and Fagen have since reunited.

And

Lyrically, their songs cover a wide range of topics, but in their basic approach Becker and Fagen's writing can be compared with the observational, novelistic style of Lou Reed, and with songwriters such as Randy Newman, who specialises in creating fictional personas that narrate the song. The duo have said that in retrospect, most of their albums have a 'feel' of either Los Angeles or New York, the two main bases where Becker and Fagen lived and operated (see below). Characters appear in their songs that evoke these cities. Themes of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll appear, but never in a straightforward manner, neither encouraging or discouraging, and many (if not all) of their songs are tinged with an ironic edge.

Click here for the rest; it's a pretty good article.

In addition to the nearly thirty years I've spent enjoying their music, I owe Steely Dan a great deal. Even though many influences over the years eventually led me to my love of jazz, Becker and Fagen are probably the biggest--Wayne Shorter's sax solo on the song "Aja" may very well be the first time I ever heard a Miles Davis alumnus play, and the strange permutations of Larry Carlton's guitar solo on "Kid Charlemagne" served as an excellent introduction for the more complicated stuff I grooved on later in life.

But it's not just Steely Dan's jazz trappings that I adore. Their usually ambiguous lyrics, always suggesting, but never quite telling, some sort of depraved and bittersweet hipster story, continue to transport me to more interesting places than the ones in which I often find myself; they've had a profound effect on my own sense of artistry and personal narrative. Furthermore, Becker and Fagen embraced a sense irony fully two decades before serious rockers and music fans followed suit in the 90s--when the age of irony finally came, Steely Dan had me well prepared.

Topping all that off, I never seem to tire of repeated listenings, and I'm often surprised by some nuance or lyrical phrase I hadn't noticed before. I'm still tickled by my realization in the late 80s that the "guitar" solo on "Do It Again" is, in fact, an electric sitar solo. I also remember the time when I heard a story about a drummer trying, unsuccessfully, to recreate the drum line from "Babylon Sisters," which made me revisit the song, learning that it's way more complicated than I had thought. I had no idea that "Glamour Profession" was about professional basketball players on cocaine until fairly recently. You never quite know what you're in for with Steely Dan.

Like I said, they're my favorite rock band.

Here's a YouTube snippet from a documentary on the album Aja covering the making of the song that first sucked me into their world, "Peg." Here's a link to a page that has links to seven cool Steely Dan clips (scroll down), including the kickass and very modern video for Donald Fagen's 1982 solo tune "New Frontier."


Becker and Fagen back in the day

(Tip of the hat to my old pal and fellow Steely Dan fan Matt for getting me thinking about my favorite rock band again.)

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