IT IS 50 years since the world heard the first bittersweet flowerings of one of music’s most innovative, ambitious and unique pairings. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker first met in 1967 as like-minded students at Bard College, a private liberal arts college in upstate New York. Naming their high-concept band after a steam-powered dildo from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, in 1971 they relocated from NYC to LA to work as staff songwriters at ABC and never looked back.
Assisted by producer Gary Katz, jettisoning original band members and performing live in favour of assembling a studio-orientated squad of the greatest session men and women money could buy, between 1972 and 1980 Steely Dan embarked upon one of the hottest – and coolest – creative streaks in music.
From the avant-boogie group aesthetic of Can’t Buy A Thrill, where David Palmer shared lead vocals, they evolved to the far-reaching vistas of Aja, rich with melody, crafted solos and layered musical movements. By Gaucho (1980), painstaking attention to sonic detail and increasingly hedonistic lifestyles inched Steely Dan towards the pursuit of an almost neurotic sonic perfectionism. Yet an unmistakable creative sensibility was evident from the start: consummate musicianship, killer grooves, rhythmic joy, memorable tunes, wry humour and stellar guests, topped off with Fagen’s cryptic, hyper-literate, reliably unreliable narration, doused in sardonic romanticism.
“They’re the American Beatles because they coined a musical genre that hadn’t existed before,” says Aimee Mann, one of the eclectic cast of admirers Uncut has invited to celebrate the band’s body of work. “Yes, it’s sort of a mixture of rock and jazz, but the way in which those two elements were combined was completely unique to them. To have the musical facility to put beautiful melodies on top of unlikely chord changes, with such well-written lyrics about really broken, sad subjects, and to create a whole new sound with a really idiosyncratic vocal – that’s the whole package! They invented a new thing.”
CAN’T BUY A THRILL (ABC, 1972)
The work of a functioning touring band: post-boogie subversion and rhythmically audacious hits with three
