The EM Poll

Everything Must Groove

Jan 10, 2008 3:51 PM, By Ken Micallef

           

Interview with Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen

Interviewing Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen is a lot like playing a verbal pinball machine: their answers change direction with a comic, if disorienting, suddenness — deflecting the thrust of a question and bouncing up against an array of societal, historical, and musical references. For instance, when I asked them whether their latest album, Everything Must Go, reflects their impressions of the end of the world or is instead the big sayonara — the end of their career — they said:

Fagen: “Of course, as always, it's all in the listener's mind.”

Becker: “Certainly, the characters in the title song are celebrating the end of the old thing and perhaps the beginning of the new. That kind of, ‘End of the world office party.’ I think of it basically as a party record.”

Fagen: “The last office party.”

Becker: “Secretaries jumping up on the office copy machine.”

Fagen: “Did you see that movie, Secretary, by the way?”

Becker: “I missed that.”

Fagen: “It was called Secretary. It came out last year. It was on a pay channel. Kind of a bondage-and-discipline movie. Usually I don't go for that stuff, but this was kind of interesting.”

In conversation, Becker and Fagen act more like a pair of comedians than the fearsome pop composers they are. The musicians who worked with them to create such classic Steely Dan albums as Royal Scam, Aja, and Gaucho know how serious they can be. Becker and Fagen are two perfectionist, astute musical geniuses who never met a studio player they couldn't cut down to size.

Their pickiness is well known. Legend has it that during their heyday in the '70s and '80s, Becker and Fagen would record an entire album, become dissatisfied, scrap it, and start over. Drummer Rick Marotta tells of Fagen micromanaging his performance in “Peg,” finding the infinitesimal instances within a bar where the seasoned drummer would rush or drag.

Gear also came under severe scrutiny. For example, rather than merely tweaking the EQ for a better snare-drum sound, they were known to record as many as 52 different snare drums for a single song. As for guitar solos, they'd sometimes go through 20 guitarists before finding the magical combination of melodic judgment and instrumental burn that they required. Steely Dan albums such as Royal Scam and Pretzel Logic were marathon torture tests in which studio musicians were taken to their limits, only to be asked to give even more. Working with SD was a badge of honor and a brand of ultimate respect. Getting a recording credit on a Steely Dan album would elevate a player into an elite coterie of musicians. Your stock rose. Your name was gold.

Steely Dan's perfectionist impulses in the studio carried over into live performance. Becker and Fagen's contempt for the road eventually caused them to abandon touring; the band was never well suited to opening for bubblegum bands or mangy hard rockers. But when the group did tour, they approached it as an art, striving for the same sort of flawlessness onstage as in the studio. Such perfection was of course unattainable, but it didn't prevent them from trying. For a while in the '70s, they even toured with an elaborate high-fidelity P.A. rig devised by Dinky Dawson.

All in all, however, the road was a nightmare for Fagen and Becker. Fagen loathed rental cars. Becker disliked waking early in the morning in order to get to the next gig. They hated touring, and it showed; a Los Angeles newspaper once described them as “the ugliest band in the world.” For Steely Dan, touring was about music and not about smoke bombs, theatrics, adulation, or groupies.

But now, with 30 years of playing professionally under their belts (and millions of albums sold), things have changed — both onstage and in the studio for Steely Dan '03.

For one thing, endless fussing about what their sidemen play is out. “They are not very dictatorial, and they don't tell you what to play,” says SD road and session keyboardist Ted Baker. “If it isn't working, they might give you some suggestions. But it's never a directive. You're free to work out your place. They're all about where to lay your part into that groove matrix. It takes a lot of concentration to play with them night after night. I have to be at my sharpest. I know that they're listening and that they hear everything. They have x-ray vision — this greater sense of being able to hear all this stuff in the midst of everything else. It's incredible.”

As always, the musician's respect for SD remains. “Donald will sit down at sound checks and play standards,” says Baker. “He sounds incredible. Donald puts his body into it, and he is so attuned to the feel. He lays it way back into the beat, and you think it will sound too far behind. But it never does. That attention to feel is what makes him an incredible musician.”

“I found that Donald and Walter were not difficult to please,” adds longtime guitarist Jon Herington. “If anything, they understand that I am difficult to please.”

Everything Must Go is the follow-up to SD's 2000 Grammy Award-winning Album of the Year, Two Against Nature. Once more, Becker and Fagen break new ground. Instead of the elaborate digital recording systems they used in the past, 90 percent of this album was tracked on analog gear. The album also features a single band, not a collection of session players waiting for the axe to drop. That old-fashioned approach helps Everything Must Go sound more natural than most digitally tracked CDs that are released today.

Nevertheless, the chiseled Steely Dan style remains. The cutting humor, the grandly down-on-their-luck characters, the losers parading their “mighty hidey-ho faces,” and “God-whackers” quartering punishment are the new stuff of Steely Dan legend. Fagen plays glowing Rhodes piano throughout, and Becker's bluesy guitar bites and spits with consummate grace and taste.

Has Steely Dan mellowed? After many successful tours in the '90s, is the road now a place that they can call home? I sat down with the pair in a room at the plush Santa Monica Fairmount Miramar Hotel.