FEATURE:
Do It Again
IN THIS PHOTO: Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan
Why We Need a New Steely Dan Documentary Out in the World
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WHILST a new Steely Dan album…
is not going to happen, I am perplexed by the lack of Steely Dan documentaries and podcasts out in the world. The fact that one of Steely Dan’s founders, Walter Becker, died in 2017 means the recording days of the group are over. Its other founder, Donald Fagen, is still touring the music, and he can always release another solo album. I am not sure whether there are any unearthed Steely Dan songs or demos that will come out but, considering what perfectionists Fagen and Becker were in the studio, it seems unlikely. Although the music of Steely Dan is in the past, I think there is a whole new generation that would be fascinated to know about the start of this duo – Steely Dan are Walter Becker and Donald but have been joined by a host of musicians through the years -, and how their incredible music came together. I know many people who are passionate about Steely Dan and we can all recite a couple of their hits. I do think they are very underplayed on radio, and when does hear a song of theirs, it is normally one of the better-known hits – Do It Again, Reelin’ in the Years and Dirty Work, for example. Like so many classic acts, there is a lot more to Steely Dan than the big hits. In fact, their albums are so well honed and performed, they demand serious passion and study. There are never any throwaway songs; instead, each number is beautiful and full. I have been searching online, and I cannot see anything in the way of a career-spanning documentary dedicated to Steely Dan.
The only thing I can find is the documentary where the guys discussed the classic album, Aja. That was back in 1999 so, twenty years later, do we need to revisit this musical force of nature? We still make documentaries about artists like David Bowie, despite the fact he died three years ago. Whilst Steely Dan are not played as much as artists like Bowie, their music is still wowing people and turning critical heads. Recently, Pitchfork reviewed five classic Steely Dan albums, and it was good to see these albums seen through new eyes; re-evaluated decades after their release. Their 1980 album, Gaucho, turns thirty next year, and it was the last album Steely Dan recorded before going on a hiatus; they would return to the scene with 2000’s Two Against Nature. Steely Dan’s music is complex and is full of feel, musicianship and craft. On the other hand, many of their songs are breezy and easily accessible. They are a Jazz Rock group/duo, but not one reserved to those who know the genre. Many people call Steely Dan Yacht Rock, because it incorporates elements of Smooth Jazz and Funk. I think there is this assumption that Steely Dan are these intellectuals who have written songs confined to those of a certain age of preference. On the contrary, Steely Dan’s music has resonated through the ages and can be understood by all.
I know people who listen to all kinds of music, but they can all agree that Steely Dan are seriously cool and great! The fact that they pretty much put out an album a year amazes me, considering the sheer amount of work that goes into their albums! Steely Dan put out their debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, in 1972, and I don’t think any band like them has come sense. That blend of the cutting, witty and incredibly uplifting…try and name any act who has the same vibe and qualities as Steely Dan! Maybe, to celebrate that album’s fiftieth, there should be a documentary put out in 2022. I think that would be a great way to celebrate an incredible act. There are going to be many modern musicians who have taken inspiration from Steely Dan; musicians who worked with them who want to tell their story. Although Becker is departed, I think there is a chance Donald Fagen could be involved. It would not matter too much whether it was a T.V. or radio documentary, as Steely Dan rarely toured, and they didn’t release music videos. Steely Dan put out nine studio albums, and I think each is very different. One can hear a duo looking to form a group and find a sound on the debut; a step up on Countdown to Ecstasy (1973) and the perfection of 1974’s Pretzel Logic. 1975’s Katy Lied is a bit more of a struggle.
This is how Pitchfork surveyed it in their recent review:
“The irony of the note on the back of Katy Lied, and possibly the inspiration for its inclusion, is that the album’s sound was, according to the band, deeply flawed. While Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were recording it with producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols, they employed a then-new technology called dbx, which expanded the dynamic range beyond the conventional limit of analog tape. The system worked by compressing the incoming signal and then expanding it on playback, with some filtering in there to reduce noise. It was more complicated than Dolby, boosting and then lowering a wider array of frequencies, and also, potentially, more effective”.
Evan Steely Dan’s more ‘flawed’ works are full of incredible moments. Katy Lied has Black Friday and Any World (That I'm Welcome To) on it. 1976’s The Royal Scam is a little darker than previous releases and another shift of sound and themes. By 1977’s Aja, again, Becker and Fagen had changed their skin and created what is arguably, their finest album. Maybe 1980’s Gaucho is a little uneven, but there are still some career-best songs on there – including Hey Nineteen and Babylon Sisters. Even if Gaucho was Steely Dan nearing the end (for two decades, anyway), there is still a lot to recommend – as Pitchfork explain in their review:
“Good times! Is it any wonder Gaucho—the seventh Steely Dan album, and the last one Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would make together until the year 2000—is the one even some hardcore Danimals find it tough to fully cozy up to? The almost pathologically overdetermined production is elegant, arid, a little forbidding, and every last tinkling chime sounds like it took 12 days to mix, because chances are it did. And underneath that compulsive craftsmanship, that marble-slick surface, there’s decay, disillusionment, a gnawing sadness. But that’s what’s great about Gaucho. It takes the animating artistic tension of Steely Dan—their need to make flawless-sounding records lionizing inveterately human fuckups—to its logical endpoint.
It’s their most obviously L.A. record, so of course they made it in New York, after spending years out West making music so steeped in New York iconography it practically sweated hot-dog-cart water. And it’s also the most end-of-the-’70s record ever made, 38 minutes of immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music by which to greet the cold dawn of the Reagan era. The characters in these songs have taken an era of self-expression and self-indulgence as far as they can. They’re free to do and be whatever and whoever they want, but all that severance of obligation has done is isolate them from other people”.
I don’t think Steely Dan ever made a bad record. They set such a high standard early in their career which meant an album like Gaucho might have seemed a little lacking. People are seeing these wonderful albums years later and tackling them from a different angle. I think Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s songwriting could act as a guide to others and give them impetus – there are artists who cite Steely Dan as influences, but I feel there are so many others who could benefit from their wisdom. Maybe Donald Fagen would be reticent to talk about Steely Dan without Walker Becker, but there is a lot of music and material that could go into a fantastic documentary. Certainly, there are fans from different generations who could contribute; broadcasters and fans who have their own favourite albums and different reasons for loving Steely Dan.
I do not think they are a niche act that has been overlooked because few people are into them. There are a few podcasts connected to Steely Dan, and there has been the odd special here and there. It is strange that there has not been anything in the way of a multi-part radio documentary or a T.V. feature that celebrates the work of Fagen, Becker and their wonderful musicians. There are YouTube videos that extol the virtues of Steely Dan, but nothing – that I have seen – that examines all their albums and really digs deep. It could be a hit on Netflix or a BBC radio documentary; maybe a new podcast that focuses on different aspects of Steely Dan. They are in the Rock & Rock Hall of Fame, and I think the power and importance of their music will reverberate for decades more. I want to end with exerts from an interview Walter Becker gave to Time Out New York in 2008 (it is quoted in a Time Out article from 2017). He was asked about the make-up of Steely Dan and the idea of Steely Dan being Yacht Rock:
“Can you give a nutshell breakdown of the division of labor in Steely Dan? It’s hard for an outsider to know who’s responsible for what.
Yeah, I think that with most partnerships that run for a certain amount of time—and ours has run for a pretty long time—the division of labor is very ad hoc. So whatever needs to be done, sometimes I’ve got something to start with, sometimes Donald’s got something to start with. Sometimes we really work very closely, collaboratively on every little silly millimeter on the writing of the song and certainly of the records, and sometimes less so. And so over the course of the partnership, I think we’ve done all sorts of different things different ways, and probably that still is changing in a way, because if I can speculate on Donald’s behalf, I think there is a level of perfection, polish, sophistication, and abundance of detail and structural stuff that he wants to hear in his music that I sort of ran out of patience to do.
My attention span is not that good anymore, and I sort of believe—and maybe the lyrics somewhere say this—that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And one of the real dangers of doing the kind of thing that we do, where people let you do whatever you want and you have money, is burnout. You go too far; there’s no one there to stop you; you keep going; you keep working on things. So I have to learn, and even sort of create artificial boundaries so that doesn’t happen. And nowadays because of computers, because of a variety of things, there’s an unlimited palette of techniques that you can use. And if you don’t rule certain things in and certain things out—put it this way, it’s helpful for me. I tried to think back to what we did in the ’70s with what we had available, and why in some ways that was an optimum sort of setup. So there’s something, for example, about the fact that either you get a track that day with your band, or everybody goes home with their dick in the dirt, that helps you get tracks. It helps for musicians to know that it’s either going to happen there and they’re going to know about it and be on the record, or not. And not that they’re going to play some stuff and you’re going to take it home and fiddle with it and fool around with it. I like to get as much as I can in the tracking session. If I had the resources and the time and the fixed cast of characters and a bunch of other things, I would try to record everything live. If I could sing well enough, especially. But with other people too, I just think that ultimately that’s something I aspire to, because it’s the most joyous experience in music-making, when everybody’s playing together.
So I’m pretty positive you guys are familiar with this whole Yacht Rock thing…
Yeah! [Laughs]
I wanted to ask you about it because I think it’s kind of strange and interesting that you guys are involved with that. There’s this whole idea of smooth music, with the Doobie Brothers and Kenny Loggins and people like that. What is your feeling about being lumped in with that, and do you feel it’s accurate?
That’s just basically a gag, and I see why we would be lumped in with it. There are a lot of reasons why we would be lumped in with it, and yet there are a lot of—I mean, for example, to take someone who’s probably the furthest from where we are, like Christopher Cross, okay, who’s just doing these very simple songs; he was doing them I’m sure with some of the same musicians that we used, in some of the same studios with some of the same sonic goals in mind: a very smooth or shall we say polished product. And we ended up doing that—or maybe I should say we started out doing that, because it was our perception that if you were going to use jazz harmonies, it had to sound tight, professional; nothing sounds worse than sloppy—than kids playing jazz, you know what I mean? And so we sort of felt obliged to do that because of the kind of music we were doing. And so I think it’s great. I think it’s very amusing, the idea that all of these people knew each other, and I suppose, you know, we certainly knew Mike [McDonald], we worked with Mike, and we knew the Eagles, not as well, and the idea that we were sort of battling with each other in various types of feuds and situations, I think it’s pretty funny. I think it’s great”.
I think there are far fewer music documentaries out there than there should be. We have a lot of podcasts, but I feel music documentaries on T.V. and radio are harder to come by than they were years ago. Maybe it is the cost and effort involved that means podcasts are more economical and popular. Most of the greats of music have had a documentary dedicated to them or some form of celebration. When it comes to Steely Dan, there is a gap and that lingering question: When are we going to see them given their (overdue) moment in the spotlight? One can easily and happily investigate each of their albums, or they could look at Steely Dan in the context of music in the 1970s. Their music was featured in Katie Puckrik’s excellent documentary, I Can Go for That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock. In 2019, I can hear elements of Steely Dan in other artists. Whether it is the rich musical palette or the lyrical style, they are definitely still with us. With so many podcasts and different ways of talking about music and great artists, I do feel like it is the moment we need to examine the stunning music of Steely Dan. I am not sure what it is exactly, but there is a rare feeling one experiences when they listen to Steely Dan’s music. It can make you laugh and smile; you are dropped to the knees by the audacity of the musicianship and the genius of the lyrics. Whether it is a radio series or a one off T.V. documentary, I, and so many other people, would love to…
SEE it come to fruition.