STEELY DAN – The Misery Of Those Early Tours, Part 2

Another extract from Steely Dan: Reelin’ In The Years, by Brian Sweet. 

Steely Dan’s live set at this point included certain songs – ‘Megashine City’, ‘Take My Money’ and ‘Hellbound Train’ – that had been written specifically as vehicles for David Palmer and which would never make it onto a Steely Dan studio album. Becker, Fagen and Katz especially did not want to be reminded of Palmer’s brief and inapt contribution to the band.

         Becker and Fagen had also written a tasty live guitar segue from ‘Megashine City’ into ‘Dirty Work’. These segues and bridges eventually became the norm at Steely Dan concerts in order to give Fagen a break from singing. “Our shows,” he recalled in his normal deadpan fashion, “were a constant din from beginning to end.”

         Steely Dan were great musicians but they were far from the most photogenic band in the land. Fagen had a slight stoop, Becker’s long straight hair almost always looked in need of a trim and a vigorous shampoo, and their dress sense – or lack of it – in what was anyway a bizarre period fashionwise was risible. Critics were quick to lambast Steely Dan for their lack of “visual style”. After one of their early gigs at the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles, one reviewer referred to them as “the ugliest band in the world”. Of course, Becker and Fagen couldn’t care less: they were in rock’n’roll for the music, not the showbiz; they sought to emulate their jazz heroes, musicians who gave no thought whatsoever to what they wore on stage. Image was unimportant in jazz. “We were used to seeing a musician kicking over his bottle of beer,” said Becker, who would have been happy to turn his back to the audience for an entire set if he could get away with it.

         The spectacle and theatricality that had crept into big-time rock – smoke bombs, face masks, ostentatious light shows, outrageous glam-rock clothes and platform shoes – revolted Steely Dan, although Jeff Baxter was perpetually amused by the stage clothes worn by some bands. Denny Dias once said that he was amazed that Elton John could play the piano at all while wearing six-inch heels. Of far more immediate concern to Fagen and Becker, and Gary Katz, was David Palmer’s vocal interpretation of their songs. Despite his reluctance to sing live, Fagen soon realised that he was the best person to accurately convey the attitude of their songs and that he would somehow have to overcome his fear of fronting the band. He was going to have to learn to talk to an audience and even crack a few jokes. “It was very difficult to convince me to get up in front of people and sing,” he told one interviewer. “But I finally got enough courage to do it and I’ve been getting into it slowly. Now it’s come together pretty well.”

         Another drawback with lead singer David Palmer was his propensity to wear very tight trousers, and each time he bent over or stretched he ran the risk of splitting them. At one gig at a small club in Philadelphia, Palmer had met with friends before the show and drunk more liquor than was wise. With Palmer in a stupor, Steely Dan took the stage, but the singer was way beyond recall. Not only did he sing the entire set a half-tone flat, but he also split his tight pants right up the middle. The stage was just three feet above the floor and those seated directly in front were given a close-up view of Palmer’s sweaty crotch. To make matters worse, he wasn’t wearing underwear. On another occasion at the Whisky in LA, Palmer’s split trousers were repaired with gaffer tape. The Philadelphia incident didn’t help David Palmer’s cause. Neither did another disastrous occasion when he missed his mouth and poured a can of beer over himself at an important press reception.

         Fagen was steeling himself to face the fact that he was going to have to be the lead singer, but he was reluctant to over indulge in pre-show intoxicants. David Palmer was a nice guy and everyone in the band liked him, but artistic considerations outweighed social niceties. In April of 1973, Palmer’s four-month reign as Steely Dan vocalist came to an end.

         Fagen was backed into a corner; there was now no denying that his voice was the sound of Steely Dan. Occasionally, only half seriously, they would discuss getting someone else in to do the job. One voice that Becker and Fagen liked was Elliot Lurie, the singer from Looking Glass, who had a US number one hit with ‘Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)’ in 1972. Another vocalist Becker and Fagen thought would work well in Steely Dan was Gerry Rafferty, singer on Stealers Wheel’s 1973 hit, ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’.

         But Gary Katz had no such doubts about Fagen’s ability as a vocalist. At an open air gig in the Balboa Stadium in San Diego, when Steely Dan opened for Elton John before a crowd of 30,000, Katz stood alongside Warren Wallace, who commented how he loved to hear Fagen sing. “From the first time I heard Fagen sing, everything else in my life became secondary,” Katz told Wallace.

         “If we had known about Dave [Palmer] earlier, we could have incorporated him more fully into the Steely Dan sound,” Fagen said, almost by way of apology. “He was a good singer for us early on, but he almost didn’t really have the attitude to put the songs over. So I started doing it didn’t myself, much to my chagrin. It seems to have worked out.”

STEELY DAN - The Misery Of Those Early Tours, Part 1

This is an extract from Steely Dan: Reelin’ In The Years, by Brian Sweet, first published by Omnibus in 1994. This week I have been working on an updated edition of the book due out early next year. 

The accepted wisdom of the music industry in 1972 was that to translate success on the singles chart into album sales an act must tour extensively. To this end ABC appointed Joel Cohen, a partner in a company called Kudo III, to manage Steely Dan. Cohen’s previous experience was as tour manager for Three Dog Night, a band for whom the road was their second home.

         Although they were totally unprepared for the first tour, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen felt obliged to bow to corporate demands since ABC had given them their full support before and during the recording of Can’t Buy A Thrill. Cohen promptly put the tour theory into practice with a vengeance, managing to secure Steely Dan as opening act for some very big names – and some very surprising names too. “The manager that we had, [he] used to road manage Three Dog Night... that was basically his concept of how things should be done. Constant touring... and singles,” said Fagen. “We weren’t well rehearsed at all. And the tours weren’t well organised. We were always shuttling back and forth from the west to the east coast. He felt we owed it to our singles audience.”

         That singles audience had bought over a million copies of ‘Do It Again’. “We had a million-selling single, but an album – that’s where the gold is,” Denny Dias told one journalist. “All the members of this band want to keep on making good records, do bigger tours and get that million-selling album.” Quite whether Becker and Fagen wanted to “do bigger tours” is a matter of conjecture.

         In December 1972, Steely Dan were booked to open for The Kinks. They then went on to open for Elton John, The Beach Boys, Uriah Heep, The James Gang, The Guess Who, Black Oak Arkansas, Focus and, most surprisingly of all, British good-time glam-rockers Slade, who were attempting to translate their UK success Stateside.

         Fagen, never the most robust of physical specimens, later admitted that opening for heavy metal acts was “very stressful” and that he was “very frightened of the personnel”. He had light-heartedly mentioned in a press biography that he didn’t talk to anyone over five feet eight inches tall, a throwaway comment that soon took on an altogether more ominous meaning.

         The point was vividly illustrated on March 30, 1973, when Steely Dan shared a bill with Black Oak Arkansas and Dutch instrumentalists Focus at the Hollywood Palladium. Black Oak were a bunch of good-natured, rowdy, beer-swilling Southerners whose biker-style audience consumed vast quantities of alcohol and other stimulants while bouncers carried unconscious bodies out of the gig by the truckload. The aesthete in Donald Fagen was offended; the scene left him feeling distinctly uneasy.

         An incident in South Dakota seemed to encapsulate the reasons why Becker and Fagen loathed road life. Steely Dan were headlining a gig and were in the process of changing over the equipment between soundchecks, when someone stole Jeff Baxter’s guitar amplifier. They knew who the thief was, but couldn’t prove it. It caused much consternation in the Steely Dan camp and Fagen could be seen behind the stage leaning against a power pole with a look of sad resignation on his face.

             On another occasion Steely Dan were due to open for The Eagles at an open air concert in the Midwest when a severe electrical storm hit the area in the afternoon. The winds whipped beneath the stage with such force that it buckled upwards with the equipment on top. One piano leg actually pierced the flimsily constructed plywood stage. The storm passed eventually and Steely Dan’s crew checked the weather forecast, only to be told more storms were on the way. Most of the Steely Dan entourage – including Becker and Fagen – thought it was far too risky to contemplate going ahead with the show, but by the time the soundchecks were scheduled the weather had turned clear and sunny. Tour manager Gary McPike was furious, but Steely Dan refused to budge and didn’t play.

         Fagen once talked about a gig, where, on taking the stage, he somehow managed to plunge a speaker screw about three inches into his head and bled throughout the set. “It did give a Grand Guignol effect,” he said.

         The worst aspect of touring for Becker and Fagen was waking up in a different hotel room each day, and in Becker’s case a particular dislike of being jostled awake much earlier than he preferred in order to travel to their next destination. Fagen hated riding in rental cars, but by the same token he would have nothing to do with the rock’n’roll image of riding in long black Cadillac limousines. Becker and Fagen weren’t seeking money, groupies or adulation; they thought of themselves as working musicians and songwriters, nothing more, nothing less. It was an attitude that most of their hedonistic peers in the rock world did not share.                                                              
Steely Dan enjoyed an excellent relationship with their road crew, who took a great deal of pride in their work. But Becker and Fagen couldn’t understand why roadies would willingly subject themselves to a gruelling tour and then come back for more. One day Fagen asked Englishman Jimmy Lewis why he did it. “Our job is to create an environment in which you can create,” he said. The reply stopped Fagen in his tracks and instilled in him a respect for road crews would never waver.

STEELY DAN, Part 3

In the final part of my 1974 MM story about Steely Dan, Becker and Fagen talk about other bands, not always admiringly... 

It was The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones who shifted Fagen’s and Becker’s allegiance to rock and roll. They admit to being heavily influenced by The Beatles, and approve of the ongoing nostalgia for the music of the sixties, a period they consider to be the most creative in rock music.

          “It was exciting and it was new, but the funny thing is it wasn’t really new, it was just a different approach,” says Becker. “The Rolling Stones... they were all derived from rhythm and blues which came from black America. It was fun and that was most important.”

          Both admit to being ardent Dylan fans too, but they were disappointed with Planet Waves and neither particularly wanted to see Dylan on his recent US tour. “That album pales compared to Highway 61. It’s like a joke,” says Fagen. “It’s probably better than other people’s albums, but it’s not what a Bob Dylan album used to be. I could count on buying a Dylan album and wearing it out. There was a good year’s worth of introspective thinking involved with a new Dylan release, but now...”

          They have equally forthright views on today’s rock scene which they consider to be based totally on commercialism. “It always has been, but never more so than now,” says Fagen. “It just happened that in the sixties there were bands that came up one after the other with original ideas, but now everyone seems to be copying each other. I never seem to hear anything new.

          “The last thing I heard that was really and truly new was the first Band album. The second was good too but after that you could chuck them out of the window.”

          Their explanation for the success of British bands in America is simple: “The American people love to hear an English accent.”

          “In addition to that the English bands seem to have a flair for a certain type of presentation that was exciting when it first came out.” says Becker. “Groups like The Who put on the kind of show that American bands would never do.”

          “But it is true that the American people are inexplicably attracted by the English accent,” says Fagen. “It’s alien and it’s exotic and they never seem to get used to it. Even I think that. There’s a lot of English acts could fill, say, Madison Square Garden, but there’s very few of them I would go and see. It’s ironic that an English band will come out playing the blues and the blues started in America.”

          “I will begrudgingly admit that English bands are more polished performers. Their recordings are more carefully made and even the bad ones sound kinda good to me somehow. They’re better than their American counterparts and I can’t understand how that is,” says Becker.

          The conversation turned to a general discussion on which groups they did and didn’t like. In general they dislike rock groups, especially the “new wave” of bands that slot into the glitter category. Their most hated group of all appears to be Slade.  “How they ever managed to get enough money together to come here and tour is a miracle,” says Becker.

          Uriah Heep is another band whose popularity amazes them, along with Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. “Black Oak Arkansas is an American band who imitate that kind of music and they’re absolute trash,” says Fagen. “I can’t listen to them. Even if I might enjoy the visual thing, I couldn’t possibly stay in a room and listen.”

          “I like Johnny Dankworth,” says Becker, “and Tubby Hayes. That’s where it’s at for us. We like all jazz.”

          “The more complex groups like Yes, or Jethro Tull or Emerson Lake & Palmer are more interesting, but I’ve yet to hear one of those groups that seemed to have developed into anything more than quick changes and super niceties.

          “Yes is a very polished group, but I don’t particularly like their music,” says Fagen. “Their music doesn’t seem to hold together. We might be prejudiced because we like short songs and they like long songs. It has a sort of artificial sound, though, like it was put together deliberately to appear complicated.

          “A lot of those groups seem to me as if they picked up on Frank Zappa many years ago. Zappa puts a lot of complex things together which probably don’t make much sense but he looks at it with such a comical eye and the English bands don’t think it’s funny. They take it very seriously.

          “We don’t consider ourselves too serious about the music. We enjoy ourselves. I’ve been to see about five rock concerts in the last five years and most of them have been Frank Zappa concerts. I’d go to see the Gil Evans Big Band or Thelonious Monk. We’re really out of it as far as rock is concerned. It’s too loud. I’d go to see Joni Mitchell. She uses interesting chords.”

          “You wouldn’t go see Joni Mitchell,” snapped Becker.

          “Ok. I might not go see her live, but I have bought Joni Mitchell records,” Fagen corrected. “Her voice terrifies me.”

STEELY DAN, Part 2

The second part of my long Steely Dan interview from 1974. Final part tomorrow.

Steely Dan augments itself with additional musicians to go on the road. Their present strength is eight: the initial five plus Roy Jones on extra percussion and vocals, Jeff Porcaro on drums and Mike McDonald on keyboards and vocals. But these three are subject to change any time depending on their and the band’s commitments.

          Fagen and Becker write everything together, both music and lyrics. One of them usually gets an idea, but they develop the idea together. They say they are not as prolific now as they used to be, mainly because Steely Dan’s success takes up a lot of their time. Unlike many musicians they don’t write on the road.

          “We used to have nothing but time so we could write songs ad infinitum,” says Becker. “Nowadays we can’t do that. We can’t write in hotel rooms. When we get off a tour we spend a month or so writing material for the next album.”

          “This band is in hibernation for certain parts of the year,” says Fagen. “Jeff Baxter goes and does some studio gigs or goes on tour with Linda Ronstadt, and the others do the same while we are writing. Then we all get back together again and make a record.

          “Everyone is committed to Steely Dan before everything else, but while we’re writing the others have nothing to do. It takes a while to write an album’s worth of material, to I guess it gets boring for them just hanging around.”

          “I like to think that we don’t have to be limited by the concept of the group,” says Becker. “If one of our people wants to play with someone else and there’s time to do it, then it’s fine with us.”

          “If Jeff or Jimmy go off with another band, they’re touch more interesting musicians when they come back,” says Fagen. “They’re fresher with the experience of playing different kinds of music.”

          “We keep hearing the others are writing songs for the band but they never show them to us,” says Becker. “For all I know they might take over. The only thing we’ve ever done which wasn’t an original was the Duke Ellington piece on the last album. It’s a great piece of music and we figured we’d revive it”

          Both Fagen and Becker consider it was a mistake for Steely Dan to go out on the road immediately after recording their first album. Their early concerts, they say, were pretty disastrous due to under rehearsal.

          “When we made the album,” says Becker, “it was really just a bunch of studio musicians getting together to record our songs. We really hadn’t played together and we were just getting to know each other properly during those first sessions. Right after it was done, there were offers of gigs so we just put the band together as best we could.

          “Jeff and Jim had some experience on the type of circuit we were playing. All we knew about were the gigs backing up Jay and the Americans, which was a totally different trip.”

          “Actually, Walter and I were complete novices as far as actual live touring was concerned,” says Fagen. “It took a while to find out what really happens at live shows.

“We’d been playing oldie shows, so for all our experience in theory, we didn’t know much about the actual practice. We weren’t show orientated because we were jazz fans and were used to seeing musicians kicking over their bottle of beer while they were playing a solo. As far as we were concerned the show was watching a guy play and that was it, strictly for enthusiasts.

“It was a new thing for us to be playing on a bill supporting Elton John. We’re still not a show band. We try to arrange the show so that it’s dramatic musically rather than visually.”

          The group have yet to visit Europe, although there are plans for them to come across sometime this summer. There were rumours of a tour early this year, but it was never really on. Statements that the “cancellation” was due to the energy crisis were put out, but this was a cover up for the fact that they were too occupied with work in the States.

          Nevertheless, they do want to come over, especially as their new album is doing well in the British charts. “It’s something we’ve been trying to do for a long time, but it’s been tough for us for a lot of reasons,” says Fagen. “There have been other commitments with other people in our band, and economically it hasn’t been feasible. An American band doesn’t make any money in England, unlike English groups coming over here and making a lot of bread to split back with. It’s a prestige thing to go over to England.

          “I have a feeling, though, that European audiences would be more appreciative of our music. American audiences are fantastic but I don’t know what they appreciate.”

          “You can’t tell what they’re into at all,” says Becker. “From the stage, you see people at the front and they’re obviously into volume, a self abuse trip. As for the rest of the audience we don’t know. We hope it’s the music.”

          “People who take their clothes off are into rhythm and we’re into that,” says Fagen in all seriousness.

          It seems the pair were taken by surprise with the success of their first album. They are also unanimous in their praises of ABC Dunhill for the way they promoted the record. “They were obviously keen to get a group like us on their label, though we’re not quite sure what they think we are even now,” says Becker. “They know we’re not the grass roots type of rock band.

          “I guess we were pretty original and the album did well as a result. We played for six weeks constantly after it was put out, which must have helped. We were doing big gigs, stadiums, supporting other acts like Elton, the Kinks, Uriah Heep and the James Gang.”

          Nowadays they prefer to play in concert halls and usually top the bill. Their visit to New York was for a show at the Avery Fisher Hall, not unlike London’s Festival Hall. Actually they were supporting the Electric Light Orchestra – but more of that later.

New York is the band’s slowest market, even though they all hail from the area. Evidently New Yorkers consider Steely Dan to have deserted them by going to California and are still not prepared to forget. Out West Steely Dan always top the bill, but they say they play “urban rock and roll” with an East Coast sound.

          Certainly their music is more complex than the usual free sounding LA band. And this derives from their jazz backgrounds. “I’d been listening to jazz since I was a little kid. I always tuned into the jazz stations in New York when all the rest of the kids listened to rock and roll,” says Fagen. “When we met, we both realised we listened to late night jazz shows and be-bop music. I hated rock and roll.

          “I thought I was the only person in the world who was into this little secret about jazz. As far as I was concerned Sonny Rollins was mine. John Coltrane was mine. Miles Davis was mine. No one else ever knew or cared.”

          “Then we met and discovered we listened to the same disc-jockeys and had the same records,” says Becker. “That was a very strong bond. We do try to put some jazz into Steely Dan, but try to do it in such a way that people won’t notice.”

          “The way you can hear it is in the harmonic progression, which is unlike any other band because they don’t use that many jazz chords,” says Fagen. “The solos we do are not the usual rock and roll blues solos using the six notes on the scale that any kid can do. Our solos are a little more sophisticated.”

STEELY DAN - My 1974 Interview with Becker & Fagen

At work this week I’m dealing with an updated edition of Steely Dan: Reelin’ In The Years by Brian Sweet, the only decent biography of the group ever published. To say that Brian is an aficionado of SD would be an understatement. When I first commissioned this book back in 1994 he turned up in my offices with scrapbooks full of cuttings about them and, knowing that SD didn’t exactly extend themselves when it came to self-promotion, I realised I had the right man for a difficult job. That the book has never been out of print reflects not only its attention to detail but the ongoing affection that SD continues to enjoy among lovers of classy pop music.

         As for me, I remember when Can’t Buy A Thrill landed in the Melody Maker office in early 1973. We played the hell out of it, not really knowing who Steely Dan were, only that it was a great album with some great tunes.    
        In April 1974 I interviewed Donald Fagen and Walter Becker in a hotel suite in New York. They were clever bastards, a bit down on rock and pop generally, huge jazz fans and not the easiest of interviewees. They were more interested in discussing chess than talking to me. I saw them play at the Avery Fisher Hall in NY around the same time too, supporting the Electric Light Orchestra which can’t have been much fun for them. Their set was a disaster, marred by sound problems that – as I discovered later – were the fault of ELO’s sound crew who declined to permit SD to do a sound check. Such incidents put Becker and Fagen off touring and probably explain why they retired from touring in the mid-seventies, not to return to the stage until 1993 when the potential remuneration was too good to turn down.

         Here’s the first bit of my 1974 MM interview.

Although it’s quite incidental to the story that follows, let’s begin by explaining the meaning of the term Steely Dan. It has nothing to do with music, and was never intended as a pun associated with the English folk band Steeleye Span.

         For those of you aching to be enlightened, a Steely Dan is an artificial penis. The term was adopted by author William Burroughs in his novel Naked Lunch, in which a young lady called Mary christened her three dildos Steely Dan I, II and III.

         Frank Zappa, for one, would be proud of a band who shamelessly took on such a moniker. It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that the two principal members of Steely Dan are fervent supporters of Zappa, intent on closing the gap between pop and jazz in much the same way he has tried to do.

         The Steely Dan story began in a New York College several years ago, when the two principal members, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met and discovered a mutual interest in jazz music while the rest of the students were jiving to rock and roll.

         Today Fagen and Becker write all of Steely Dan’s material, play piano and bass respectively, arrange the music and generally share the seat of power in the five-man outfit. Fagen also takes care of the lead vocals and – again not unlike Zappa – acts as a kind of conductor when the group play live.

         Fagen and Becker began composing together at the college. Both had a formal musical education and quit to become part of Jay & The Americans, a period of their lives which they tend to skip over today. That introduced them to various influential people in the music industry and they landed a job as house writers for ABC Dunhill in Los Angeles.

         They wrote material for other artists but gradually came to the conclusion they’d do better forming a band of their own. Encouraged by their producer Gary Katz, who brought them to ABC Dunhill in the first place, they formed Steely Dan and surprised many people by having a hit with their first album. It’s been getting better ever since.

         Fagen is a tall, thin fellow with a slight hunch, probably caused through leaning over a piano for much of his life. He’s a serious musician who isn’t afraid to voice his opinions on current rock giants, for whom he has little respect. His partner Becker is pretty much the same, except that he’s short and tubby. Both would sooner spend an evening in a jazz club that at any rock concert you’d care to name.

         “Yeah, we were staff writers for ABC Dunhill, churning out songs,” says Fagen.

         “But nobody was picking them up,” says Becker.

         “We decided that being as our songs were of a conceptual nature, we needed a band, so we, er, found one,” says Fagen, who’s not a man to dwell on his past too much.

         They found Jeff Baxter, who plays guitar and pedal steel guitar, Jim Hodder, who sings and plays drums, and Dennis Dias, a second guitarist. All three are also from the East Coast, and all three had gone west to work on sessions.

         “We immediately went into the studio and did an album, simply because we didn’t have anything better to do. We weren’t doing so well as staff writers,” says Fagen. “And the record was a hit so we started going on the road. Our first few shows were pretty horrible but we’re pretty good now.”

         Becker bursts out laughing. Modesty is not one of their assets.

         “I learned music theory and harmony at music college but didn’t get as far as harsh discipline in music,” says Fagen. “I studied some orchestration and composition and definitely knew that I was going for a career in music of some kind, even though I ended up with a degree in literature. My mother was a small time night club singer.”

         “Not only that, but her married name was the same as Billie Holiday’s maiden name and that’s the kind of thing that launches a thousand careers,” chipped in Becker.

         Hits eluded Fagen and Becker at ABC, though their songs were recorded by Barbra Streisand, Jose Feliciano and John Kay. Several of their songs from the first Steely Dan album were covered, a fact that Becker explains through the album providing the best opportunity to hear what their songs sounded like in the finished version. “Deodato did a version of one song and Herbie Mann did a version of the same one,” offered Becker.

         “Yeah, we seem to be big with the lightweight jazz crowd for some reason. We didn’t write it with that kind of band in mind, just that that particular song lent itself to that kind of treatment,” says Fagen.