From Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of

Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Donald Fagen
2013

Introduction

You may be thinking, oh no, another rockandroll geezer making a last desperate bid
for mainstream integrity by putting out a book of belles lettres. The fact is, until I
got out of high school, I was pretty sure I’d end up in journalism or teaching English
or working in a bookstore or something along those lines. I had a little piano trio in
high school but, by jazz standards, I was strictly an amateur. Then it was the
summer of ’65 and my friend Pete gave me that psychedelic sugar cube. After the
universe stopped squirming around and the colors dimmed down a bit, I was left
with a new sense of possibility. When I started college that fall, I noticed that guys
who played even worse than I did were all in bands and seemed to be having major
fun. By the time I hooked up with my partner, Walter Becker, a couple of years later,
I’d pretty much given up on a literary career.
In the mideighties, when I was in the midst of a severe episode of creative
torpor, Susan Lyne, who was starting up Premiere magazine, asked if I’d be
interested in writing a film music column. Although I didn’t know that much about
the subject, I’d seen a lot of movies and I thought it might be therapeutic. It turned
out it was, and Susan didn’t seem to mind if the stuff I turned in was a little on the
selfindulgent side. I got a lot of nice mail and kept writing.
From time to time, people have suggested that the pieces I’ve written over
the last thirty years might be arrayed in such a way as to form a kind of arto-
biography—that is, how the stuff I read and heard when I was growing up affected
(stretched, skewed, mangled) my little brain. That’s the organizing principle here.
When my editor, Paul Slovak, agreed that my grouchy tour journal from the summer
of 2012 might be entertaining, we stuffed that in too. Also written especially for this
book: an account of my college days and an essay on the magnificent Boswell
Sisters. I don’t want to be a critic. It’s fun only if I’m writing about creative work
that, as Willie “The Lion” Smith would say, is “what you call . . . real good.”
You’ll find that many chapters in this book are about people and things that
intersected with my life when I was a kid. I apologize up front: I tried to grow up.
Honest. Didn’t quite happen. I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more
real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I’m deeply
underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous
little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first
seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV,
but we’ll see.
 So here it is. Folks around my age might recognize incidental references to
various Cold War and “counterculture” phenomena: Oldsmobiles, fish sticks, nuclear
war, Bosco, psychedelic drugs, HaightAshbury, the “Groovy” murders. My mom, my
dad and my baby sister Susan make occasional cameos. But the main subjects are
the talented musicians, writers and performers from a universe beyond suburban
New Jersey who showed me how to interpret my own world. There are countless
definitions of the word “hipster.” In the title of this book, I’m using it to refer to
artists whose origins lie outside the mainstream or who creatively exploit material
from the margin or who, merely because they live in a freaky space, have enough
distance to see some truth.