The Dude Ranch Above the Sea

As a teenager, growing up in New Jersey during the 1960s, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to hear his jazz heroes in the flesh. The ecstatic improvisational rough-and-tumble of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Willie “The Lion” Smith stayed hardwired inside his brain, and soon Fagen landed at Bard College, where one day in 1967 he overheard a fellow student, Walter Becker from Queens, playing the blues on his guitar in a campus coffee shop. Fagen introduced himself and told Becker how impressed he was by his clean-cut technique. The pair struck up an immediate friendship, then five years later founded Steely Dan, a band that would become one of the defining rock groups of the 1970s.

In albums like Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972), Pretzel Logic (1974), and Aja (1977), they cultivated a sleek, polished pop that was marinated in jazz, blues, Latin, and rock and roll. Their songs had both a melodic, high-fidelity sheen—a gift to radio airplay—and a level of compositional integrity and instrumental elan that left aficionados agog. Lyrically, they developed a fixation—naysayers considered it an affectation—with pairing waspish observations about social outsiders, the venality of pop culture, and men riding out their midlife crises with relentlessly feel-good music, the harmonies never smudging in sympathy with the deranged words. At a time when potent presences like David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Al Green, and Diana Ross—as well as prog-rock groups like Kansas and Emerson, Lake & Palmer—were all remaking pop, Steely Dan’s tics and obsessions positioned them distinctively: the subjects of their songs could be relatable, but their fanatical studio perfectionism seemed like it was governed by a secret formula. The deeper you listened, the harder it was to pin down.

Working in the studio retrained Fagen and Becker’s attitude toward music and sound. For some of their contemporaries, like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, studio recording offered ways to manufacture sonic illusions, like musical collage and stuttering non-sequitur structures, unachievable either live or through acoustic means. Instead Steely Dan rethought already established studio techniques such as overlaying tracks, mechanically looping rhythms, and playing with the placement of microphones. By harnessing the apparently infinite possibilities of studio recording they were able to conjure up an orderly, pristine realism, staged as carefully as the water splashing out of a David Hockney swimming pool.

But Fagen also remained emotionally attached to the spontaneity of jazz. The group often adapted material lifted from classic jazz albums and recruited starry jazz musicians like Wayne Shorter, Phil Woods, and Steve Gadd to make cameo appearances on their records. Dropping prerecorded, improvised solos into carefully worked-out backdrops was, in theory, a supreme creative balance of control and spontaneity. And yet in practice it made the Steely Dan project internally contradictory. The improvisers improvised, and Fagen and Becker aimed to retain the aura of first-take freshness even if, at times, they spliced aspects of multiple takes together. Some critics frowned upon that habit, suspicious that it all amounted to simply creaming off the heat and energy of great improvisation without ever risking the spontaneous changeability that jazz improvisers would inevitably have brought to performing those same songs live on stage.

Steely Dan studio sessions became notorious for their obsessive quality control, for obliging session musicians to play as many as fifty or more takes before Becker and Fagen felt satisfied. Their experiments with tech were no less exacting. In the 1970s they looped tape through an idler wheel to give their recordings a kind of mechanical rhythmic precision. When sample-based drum machines went on the market in the early 1980s, they were enthusiastic early pioneers, using the technology to sample their drummers and underpin their tracks with still more rhythmic consistency.

The apogee of their approach to the studio was perhaps “Josie,” the last track on their landmark record Aja, the story of a girl—a “live wire…with her eyes on fire”—returning to a small town, seemingly after serving a prison sentence, and setting the sexual antennae of the local male population aquiver. Fagen and Becker packed their song with far-flung jazz chords and deftly arranged saxophone choruses—then played the studio with equal attention to detail. To make the track’s opening riff throb forcefully, Becker funneled the guitar parts through the state-of-the-art JC-120 amplifier, which thrust the sound forward in the mix and artificially thickened its texture. The guitarist Dean Parks recorded two separate parts, which were later superimposed atop of one another, so that the sound projected like blaring neon light. The band’s sonic sensibility become a kind of aural trompe l’oeil.

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By the time they had left college, Becker and Fagen knew they wanted to write songs together. They quickly set up office in Manhattan’s Brill Building, near Times Square, from where they scored some low-key successes in 1971, composing the soundtrack for the entirely forgettable Richard Pryor movie You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat and basking in the reflected glory of Barbra Streisand after she included their song “I Mean To Shine” on her album Barbra Joan Streisand. Then a producer, Gary Katz, heard their potential; an offer arrived to sign as house songwriters for ABC Records, to provide their artists with a constant supply of fresh material, and relocate to Los Angeles.

The prospect of a group of their own emerged after they arrived in LA and it became clear, to Becker and Fagen as well as to Katz, that their songs, complex and peculiar, lost something in the telling when handed to other singers who couldn’t convey their sardonic, world-weary quality. For the first two years of their existence, they were a band as we understand the term: Becker and Fagen added Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (guitars), Jim Hodder (drums), and David Palmer (vocals); Katz would remain on board as producer of their albums for the entire first run of their career.

The group’s early sound, breathe-easy soft-rock—as heard on their 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, and its follow-up Countdown to Ecstasy—contained their obsessions in embryo. Their third record, Pretzel Logic, built on these first albums but cast a wider net. Its opening track, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” bounced over the top of a riff borrowed from the hard-bop pianist Horace Silver’s classic 1965 Blue Note track “Song For My Father.” The album also presented a note-for-note remake of Duke Ellington’s 1926 composition “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” now reimagined for rock band instrumentation, with Baxter’s guitar expertly imitating the trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton’s signature plunger mute distortions. The precision of the audio shows both what a well-tuned ear the band had for instrumental sonority and how deftly they could use the studio to color and shade.

But by the time they recorded Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan was at war. Schisms within rock groups were nothing unusual, but this split was existential. Becker and Fagen loathed touring, both the logistics and the inescapable fact that their music never sounded as good piped through venue sound systems as it did on record. As Fagen explained in 2012, “my voice would give out after two weeks on the road. And that in turn would give me anxiety and stage fright.” He felt that he’d ended up as the lead singer of a rock band by default, which had never been his intention. Paying their musicians to tour was also hugely expensive. The musicians wanted to continue playing live so they could pay their bills, but Fagen and Becker prevailed, and the band gave its last live performance in Santa Monica on July 4, 1974, as the final lap of their summer tour.

Album number four, Katy Lied, was conceived, performed, and recorded entirely at the ABC Studio in Los Angeles at the end of 1974. The alto saxophonist Phil Woods dropped a neat paraphrase of “Doctor Wu” into the song, and the band’s usual balance of jazz, rock, and soul tilted toward soul inflections in the vocal harmonies. A warning for the future came when Fagen and Becker realized, to their horror, that their experiments with DBX noise reduction—meant to minimize tape hiss and raise the quieter sounds in the mix—had resulted in a lack of dynamic range; the high frequencies of guitars and cymbals felt compressed and muffled, a glitch they aimed to fix in subsequent reissues. There was no tour in support of the album: Steely Dan was now exclusively a studio band, with little pretense that they were trying to create a sound that could be meaningfully replicated live.

Dias opted to stay, but the other musicians drifted away, and Steely Dan became Becker and Fagen alongside an ever-changing cast of session musicians chosen for their rock or jazz prowess. The duo secured cameo appearances from major jazz instrumentalists like Woods and the British keyboard player Victor Feldman, briefly a sideman with Miles Davis, who contributed nimble keyboard solos to Pretzel Logic and played again on Katy Lied. They also enlisted musicians involved variously in fusion music and rock: Larry Carlton, Bernard Purdie, and Mark Knopfler—a rich recipe of influences they cooked to perfection.

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Steely Dan’s music provoked undeniable pleasure, but its methods were synthetic and clinical, and their decision to name themselves after the high-tech dildo from William S. Burroughs’s 1959 novel Naked Lunch felt especially apt. After Bing Crosby’s faultlessly enunciated vocal on “White Christmas,” recorded in 1942, became the highest-selling single to date (a record it still holds), the pop industry worked out that capturing signature sounds as faithfully as possible was a sure-fire way to sell records. Live rock albums of the period—such as the Grateful Dead’s Live/Dead, the Who’s Live at Leeds, and Bob Dylan and the Band’s Before the Flood—had an immediacy and urgency. But music produced in studios was guaranteed to sound the same each time—that was the whole point. Steely Dan carried that pop truism to a particular extreme.

Their follow-up to Katy Lied, 1976’s The Royal Scam, demonstrated that Becker and Fagen remained open to incorporating fresh sounds and rhythmic grooves. As ever the record was grounded in their negotiations between jazz and rock, although now it had a harder, funk-tilted core. Larry Carlton’s biting electric guitar lent the opening riff of “Don’t Take Me Alive” the itch of agitation; a beat rooted in reggae was sent dancing behind “Haitian Divorce.” The Royal Scam—which has just been reissued in a remastered vinyl edition from Interscope—is perhaps the group’s bleakest album. Several songs tell tales of crime and drugs, while the title track explores the feelings of Puerto Rican migrants arriving in New York and having to test their dream of the city against the reality of prejudice and exploitation.

The album’s refinement of language set up the band for their next record, Aja, widely considered their masterpiece. So staged had their aesthetic become that the sleeve note for Aja was attributed to a journalist named Michael Phalen, who, although the band never confirmed it, is widely accepted to have been an alias for Fagen and Becker themselves. Describing the album’s opening track, “Black Cow,” as “catchy disco-funk” with “bitterly sarcastic lyrics…underpinned by cloying jazz-crossover harmonies,” an already tempting brew “propelled by an infectious, trendy beat,” the so-called Phalen flipped the script, twisting the invective a non-believing critic might use to damn the “trendy” and “catchy” Steely Dan into a sequence of glowing positives. As Fagen and Becker took total control in the studio, they also snatched back control of their reception.

Aja’s eight-minute title track, Phalen snarked, was a “Latin-tinged pop song…inexplicably expanded into some sort of sonata or suite.” That word “inexplicably” was undoubtedly taunting the supposed pretensions of 1970s prog-rock groups (King Crimson might be an example) that produced multi-sectional compositions in which the time signatures never stood still. “Aja,” in contrast, went to tremendous effort not to draw attention to its construction. Its lyrics served to embed geographical distance into the song. A man living “up on the hill” where “people never stare/they just don’t care” runs toward Aja, who, depending on how you hear it, could be either a woman or an ideal of nirvana. The keyboard player Joe Sample measures the distance between the man’s real and dream life by massaging extended harmonies into the ensemble ether, chords chosen carefully to push gently against the grounding of the prevailing tonality—a beckoning from afar, an aural illusion helped along by the spatial clarity of the recording.

Inviting Wayne Shorter, the tenor and soprano sax linchpin of Miles Davis’s groups from the mid-1960s, to solo on the song was a genius move. Shorter had played on Davis’s gesturally bare-bones 1969 jazz-rock album In a Silent Way, and you feel “Aja” to be indebted. His exquisite solo has a characteristically shamanic, ritualistic quality, probing the scalic patterns that underpin the song and molding the dynamic between the narrator and Aja into an explicitly musical dialogue. The lyrics reference “Chinese music under banyan trees/here at the dude ranch above the sea.” Shorter’s solo teased the ambiguity: Is Aja a person or a philosophical truth?

This sort of parallel reality was par for the course for Steely Dan. The sleeve notes Becker and Fagen didn’t want anyone to know they’d written themselves singled out Victor Feldman’s “coy pianistics” on “I Got The News,” although it was a tremendous pity, they said, that his efforts had been “undermined by Walter Becker’s odd, Djangoesque guitar and pointlessly obscene lyric.” Tics and fixations reappeared in lyrics between albums in different guises. In “The Boston Rag,” from Countdown to Ecstasy, the narrator thinks that the idealism of his younger self has now withered into bitterness, and the bleakness of his present life makes him leave town. “My Old School,” from the same album, recounts a drug bust at Bard as the narrator thinks back to a period of carefree rebellion. “Sign in Stranger,” from The Royal Scam, references a short story by the sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein exploring the “bootstrap paradox”—a quirk of time travel in which people who are sent back in time cause their own existence. Steely Dan songs trapped people in time, at a fixed point far from where they usually wanted to be—somewhere, or indeed someone, else.

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By the completion of Gaucho, which appeared in 1980 as the follow-up to Aja, Steely Dan had entered troubled times. Before a note had even been sounded, Becker and Fagen were unsettled by a contractual spat: MCA Records had recently acquired their label, ABC; MCA reckoned the new Steely Dan album was theirs for the taking and, after a legal dispute with the band, ultimately prevailed. During the long process of recording, the band’s manager and Becker’s girlfriend, Karen Roberta Stanley, died in his apartment from a drug overdose. The emotional trauma was heightened when Stanley’s mother, thinking Becker was responsible for introducing her daughter to drugs, attempted to sue him for more than seventeen million dollars; Becker countersued, demonstrating that in fact he had attempted to help his girlfriend, paying for medical care and rehab. A few months later Becker collided with a taxi while walking in Central Park, his leg injuries leading to a long hospital stay and putting him in a cast for seven months while he recovered. Further proof that this latest project was apparently jinxed came after the album’s release, when Keith Jarrett sued for infringement of copyright over Gaucho’s title track, which had a suspicious resemblance, he claimed, to “Long as You Know You’re Living Yours” from his album Belonging. (Becker and Fagen settled by agreeing to add Jarrett’s name to the composer credit.)

Typically, Gaucho featured a rolling cast of premium jazz musicians, including the trumpeter Randy Brecker and the saxophonist David Sanborn, but the presence of the Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler on “Time Out of Mind” signified that the palette of this album was softer and more ambiently impressionistic. Knopfler played an understated solo that ended up being integrated deep into the ensemble texture around it, an experience he later said he found frustrating. 

None of this turbulence around the production of Gaucho could be discerned in the Ming-vase precision of the record itself. Allowing genuine trauma, such as the death of a loved one, to color the music directly would have run against the Steely Dan grain. Gaucho’s sense of detachment was both its great strength and weakness. Becker and Fagen perhaps felt they were entitled to a Keith Jarrett song because every character on their album—and what a horrible rogues gallery it is—feels entitled to something. At least the coke dealer on “Glamour Profession”—making business calls from a basketball star’s car phone, downing Szechuan dumplings, and boasting about having “illegal fun under the sun”—is honest about his dishonesty. Otherwise Gaucho is populated by pudgy middle-aged guys who can’t understand why their advances are being rejected by younger women.

Drugs are never far behind sex in rock and roll, and in “Time Out of Mind” a man hoping his heroin high will transform Los Angeles into a utopia is quickly disillusioned. Lou Reed’s song “Heroin,” as heard on the Velvet Underground’s debut album in 1967, laid out the awe and the terror of addiction by taking listeners inside a user’s state of mind. But in Steely Dan’s hands heroin might as well be bubble gum: it’s a casual plot device, as real as the cliff edge over which cartoon characters defy gravity. Whether chasing sex or euphoria, characters on the album end up alone. On Gaucho’s title track a man finds the object of his desire holding hands with a cowboy. It’s played for laughs: “Would you care to explain?” he deadpans. Nobody, it seems, can trust anybody.

Becker and Fagen were themselves solitary and aloof. Once the cold, calculating studio became their domain they grew invisible to fans; their images never even appeared on album sleeves. Female artists like Tori Amos and the Pointer Sisters covered their songs, but it was hard to shake the hunch that Steely Dan was ultimately about boys and their toys. That suspicion seemed to be confirmed when Becker told Newsday in 2006 that “Steely Dan is guys without girls. The collective persona that we unintentionally developed is a guy who’s talking to the guys, except once in a while, he breaks down and you get to see that he’s unstable. Kind of like Dick Cheney.” Absurd cartoon characters were also meant to raise a laugh, even as you gag at their awfulness. A group that had named itself after a Beat novel ended up more in the manner of Thomas Pynchon, playing with themes of paranoia, alienation, and the ambiguity of identity.

The affinity was not lost on Pynchon himself, who references Steely Dan in his novel Bleeding Edge; Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another, features “Dirty Work” as the needle drop. The Pynchonesque punchline is that, in 1994, Steely Dan were reborn as a live performing group. The fall-out from Gaucho had led Becker and Fagan to go their own ways, but in 1982 Fagen produced a solo album, The Nightfly, that was keenly received, and the pair reunited in 1993 to promote a sequel, Kamakiriad, as part of the first Steely Dan tour since 1974.

Kamakiriad never equalled the success of The Nightfly, but the opportunity to see the band perform live was a draw nevertheless, and technology had progressed to the point where Steely Dan onstage could actually sound like Steely Dan in the studio. Jazz saxophonists from a younger generation, like Chris Potter and Bob Shepperd, stepped into Shorter’s shoes; the jazz-rock fusion drummers Dennis Chambers and Peter Erskine were called up to play, and solo spots were opened up to improvisation—nobody was expected to recreate the original records onstage.

But the album that was culled from the tour, Alive in America, released in 1995, conformed to type: Becker and Fagen headed back to the studio to create an “ideal” live experience by blending and patching together material from different evenings on their tour. A last pair of studio albums, Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go, appeared in the early 2000s. Steely Dan, however, continued even after Becker’s death in 2017 with Fagen at the helm. He was persuaded that the brand still had commercial clout, even now that it had effectively become a tribute band featuring one original member. Everyone in Steely Dan ends up on their own.