Donald Fagen was hipped to jazz at an early age by his singer mom.

He joined
forces with guitarist Walter Becker to form the infamously named Steely Dan
and created a series of albums that were strictly art for art’s sake. Often trapped
in his own head—with notorious stage fright that hindered touring, and clever,
introverted lyrics that oozed with inside jokes and cryptic references—Fagen made a
name for himself as a stickler for detail. The team produced complex, sophisticated,
and polished jazz-rock-pop—with the help of crack session musicians including
a string of funky drummers: Bernard Purdie, Steve Gadd, and Paul Humphrey—
that the musical marketplace of the late ’70s embraced. Though a reluctant front
man, Fagen has emerged as one of the most famous rock voices of all times.

by Eugene Holley Jr.

For four decades, the New Jersey–born pianist, vocalist, and composer Donald Fagen
and collaborator and fellow Bard College alumnus, guitarist/songwriter Walter Becker—
together known as Steely Dan—have been one of the most unlikely icons of modern
music.Their sound was idiosyncratic. Fagen’s grainy vocals had a thick Sopranos-style accent.
They didn’t tour. Their lyrics were laced with nerdy insider references (the duo’s name
comes from a steam-powered marital aid from William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch)
like Homer’s Odyssey (“Home at Last”), suicide (“Deacon Blues”), and reverse-cougarism
(“Hey Nineteen”). And much of their compositional structures were jazz based, especially
on their 1977 masterpiece, Aja. But they disbanded after they released Gaucho in 1980.
From 1982 to 2006, Fagen released three autobiographically themed albums that dealt
with his Cold War–era, suburban childhood: The Nightfly, Kamakiriad, and Morph the Cat,
which yield some hit singles, “I.G.Y.,” “New Frontier,” and “Tomorrow’s Girls.” Fagen and
Becker reunited and released Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go in 2000 and 2003.
Fagen’s latest release, Sunken Condos—composed by Fagen, save for his Ashkenazic
recasting of Isaac Hayes’s “Out of the Ghetto”—has all of the essential musical traits of the
Steely Dan canon: intricate yet succinct jazz-shaped solos; snappy Motown-meets-Muscle-
Shoals horn lines; sassy background vocals; snarky, self-effacing vocals; and an in-the-pocket
rhythm section.

Wax Poetics’ Eugene Holley Jr. talked with Fagen by phone from Fagen’s New York City
home about the metaphysics of his jazz thing, his work with Walter Becker, his off-and-on-
again duel with the road and the stage, and his latest release.

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(previous page) Promo photo from Donald Fagen’s 1982 solo album The Nightfly (Warner Bros.), from promoarchive.com/Photofeatures. 33
You and Walter were not what we would
normally think of as pop-rock stars. How
did you guys survive in the business for
so long?
We always had an art-for-art’s-sake attitude
toward the whole thing. Luckily, there was
a time when our vision of what music we
liked seemed to mesh with a lot of what
people in the population also liked. But
that’s no longer true.
Your music is a very organic and
democratic blend of rock, pop, and
country, but jazz has always been a
prominent and indispensable part
of your sound. How did a suburban
New Jersey boy like you get hooked
into jazz?
Well, my mother was a professional singer
when she was young, from the age of five to
fifteen. She used to sing from a club in the
Catskills. She was a swing singer, although
she didn’t stick with it. She sang around
the house. So I heard a lot of standards as
a kid, which is essentially the life force, the
lingua franca of jazz—aside from original
jazz tunes. So I was familiar with most of
those tunes. And when I started playing
the piano, I picked out those tunes on
the piano.
And then I had a cousin named
Barbara, who was older than I—she was
a good-lookin’ chick! She used to go into
the Village and go to clubs. She actually
became friendly with Miles Davis and
Thelonious Monk, and so on. And she
had a great record collection. When we’d
go over her house, she’d bring us down to
her basement and play those great records:
Thelonious Monk and Johnny Griffin live,
and so on. I was nine or ten. I loved it,
and I listened to a lot of radio broadcasts
out of New York. That’s how I got into
jazz. I became a jazz snob. Then, when the
English/R&B blues people like the early
Rolling Stones started playing that music,
I started getting back into R&B again. By
then, Motown was big… It’s actually kind
of complicated: I liked jazz, blues, R&B,
some Motown, and twentieth-century
classical composers like Stravinsky, and stuff
like that.
Jazz musicians figure prominently in the
Fagen/Steely Dan canon: there’s alto
saxophonist Phil Wood’s serpentine solo
on “Doctor Wu,” from Katy Lied, guitarist
Larry Carlton’s silken improvisations on
“Kid Charlemagne.” And then there’s
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tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s
incredible solo on the title track of the
1977 masterpiece Aja. How did you get
him on the track?
We had this piece, which had this long
modal section. And we thought, “Who
would be the ideal person for the track?”
And we said, “Wayne Shorter.” On the
first try, he said no. But we knew someone
who knew him, and he asked him, because
he didn’t know who we were. So we sent
him the track, and he liked it and decided
to come in. And he nailed it on the first
take. That was one of the best moments
for us.
Today,you’ve come full circle: you’re hiring
jazz musicians like multi-instrumentalist
Michael Leonhart, who grew up on
your music and coproduced your new
recording. What are your criteria for
selecting the right sideman?
I still go out to see jazz. I try to keep up.
And if I hear somebody, I’ll remember it.
For instance, on Sunken Condos, there’s
harmonica player, William Galison, that
guitarist Michael Leonhart introduced me
to.When I heard him play, I said, “That guy
has got a great sense of melody and swing;
we should try him.” He came in and he was
great. But it doesn’t always work out. I’m
not going to tell you about the guitar player
[we worked with] who has a tremendous
reputation, but who didn’t really work out
at all. He came in from another state, but
when faced with what we gave to him—I
don’t know if he was nervous or what—he
just couldn’t come through. And I hate that,
but it happens.
You can hear mixtures of those influences
on Sunken Condos, particularly on the
track “Weather in My Head,” which could
easily segue with the Ray Charles–like
selection “What I Do,” from the your
previous work, Morph the Cat.
I love Ray Charles, yeah! He was really
popular when I was fourteen. I loved
the jazz thing in his [music]. When rock
started, it tended to be simple and country-
like. And there were very few R&B cats
that had lot bebop and jazz stuff in their
music like Ray Charles played, but it really
didn’t catch on. Bobby “Blue” Bland had
an arranger who wrote a lot of boppy
chords for him. Walter and I both liked
that sound.
Coincidently, you and Walter got your
start in the music business working at
ABC-Dunhill Records as staff arrangers
and composers; the same label Ray
Charles was with in the ’60s.
But Ray was long gone before we worked there.
The third Steely Dan LP, Pretzel Logic,
contained your version of the Duke
Ellington classic “East St. Toodle-oo.”
Ellington’s most famous saying is, “It
don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that
swing.” And you’re a master of injecting
the feeling of jazz into the pop idiom—
particularly in the bass line, as evidenced
by the lead-off track on Sunken Condos,
“Slinky Thing,” which is like a sister song
to “Black Cow” from Aja.
It may have been inspired by reggae bass
lines—which don’t always come down on
the downbeat, or have odd, triplet figures in
them. But I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to
get an acoustic player to play the bass line?”
Because it had a kind of reggae/James
Brown bass line with the kind of groove
that I wanted, with that kind of swing.
In contrast to “Slinky Thing,” another
track from Sunken Condos, “I’m Not the
Same Without You,” reminds me of Gloria
Gaynor, a kind of “I Will Survive” for
men.
Well, I was actually doing a parody
of those of songs from the disco era. And
I thought of Gloria Gaynor, specifically.
[laughs] Those were the days of Women’s
Lib, and the disco scene had these songs
where women, instead of being a doormat
in a relationship, would get wings, soldier
on, and have independence from men. I
thought it’d be funny to write that song
from a male’s point of view. And second,
what if the guy goes beyond the point
where he’s just [got] it together and
is evolving into a new species? I kept
thinking, “Maybe he’s really falling apart,
and he’s trying to bully his way through his
own psychic fragmentation?”
Steely Dan developed an infamous
reputation for not touring. Why?
There were multiple factors that forced
us off the road. Because we never found
a singer that we felt was adequate, I was
elected [as lead singer]. Neither Walter nor
I considered ourselves to be good singers.
But when I started doing it—although I
got better at it after some years—I took
some coaching. At that time, I didn’t know
how to sing in a proper way. And my
voice would give out after two weeks on
the road. And that in turn would give me
anxiety and stage fright.
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That’s ironic, because you have one of the
most recognizable voices in pop music.
I love Marvin Gaye, Mose Allison. I like the
way that Dizzy Gillespie sings. He’s got a
way of singing that’s unpretentious—and
Hoagy Carmichael also.
With the exception of “Tomorrow’s Girls”
and “New Frontier,” you hardly ever
produced videos.
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I’ve had some videos done, but I’m
prejudiced against videos. Because I grew
up with the radio, when you hear music,
you have to use your own imagination:
you make a kind of picture in your
head. And I like that better than being
shown pictures.
What was it like writing film music to the
motion picture FM in 1978?
Our manager Irving Azoff was involved
with that movie, and he asked to write a
song for the movie, and that was it. But
the only time I ever scored a movie was
for Bright Lights, Big City [starring Michael
J. Fox, 1988]. My cousin was a producer.
He said, “Do you want to score a film?” I
did it because I was having trouble writing
at that time, so I gave it a try—I hated it!
I love films and film scores. But it wasn’t
for me. The idea of the music supporting
somebody, I’ll never do that again.
You mentioned that you stopped writing
after the release of the 1980 LP Gaucho
because of depression. Is that why
you and Walter broke up Steely Dan?
Walter and I ran out of ideas. We did
what we set out to do. I had an idea for
this autobiographical album called The
Nightfly. But after recording the album, I
became more and more depressed and
uninterested in music. I actually was in
therapy for a couple of years, because, like a
lot of musicians, I was kind of immature. I
wasn’t paying attention to things other than
music, and I had to get myself together. But
by the end of the decade, I was back to
writing music.
You and Walter reunited and released
Two Against Nature and Everything Must
Go. You released your solo projects,
Kamakiriad and Morph the Cat in 1993
and 2006. Steely Dan is heading back in
the studio in 2013. And you were recently
featured on David Letterman. You’re
performing again, and you’re going on
tour. What brought you back to the stage?
I met my wife, Libby Titus, in the late ’80s.
She was producing shows around New
York. And I started doing stuff for her,
playing at the Lone Star Roadhouse…
and I slowly worked my way back into it.
I never played that many gigs before Steely
Dan; we were working for a group, Jay and
the Americans in the late ’60s, mostly as a
piano player; I didn’t sing. But doing this
thing with my wife’s little projects, I got
used to being a front man and all that stuff.
So now, it feels pretty comfortable. .
Eugene Holley Jr. lives in Delaware and contributes to
Ebony.com and Philadelphia Weekly. He interviewed Ahmad
Jamal for Wax Poetics in 2008.
(previous spread) Walter Becker and Donald Fagen
of Steely Dan, 1977. Photo by Chris Walter.
(left) Photo by Danny Clinch. Courtesy of Warner Bros. 37