WHENEVER SOMEONE ASKS ME who my favorite band of all time is, I hedge my answer. I make a point of making an exception of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones –- who are in a class all their own. There’s no point including them in anyone’s list of all-time favorites; everyone likes them, even those who claim that they don’t. So I come up with a list of three bands whose music I have been listening to for the good part of 30 years, in order of preference: Steely Dan, Dire Straits, The Clash.Although the argument as to whether Steely Dan is a band can be made quite convincingly. Since releasing their debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill in 1972, Steely Dan’s lineup has changed practically from record to record. There are only two constants in Steely Dan –- lead-vocalist keyboardist Donald Fagen and base-guitar player/guitarist Walter Becker.
They met in Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in 1967 and have been together musically since then, except for the years when they broke up their band in 1981 after releasing their seventh studio album, Gaucho. They collaborated sporadically on each other’s solo efforts before deciding to get back together to write songs for their reunion album, Two Against Nature, which won Record of the Year in the 2001Grammy Awards. Many are of the opinion that Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP should have won instead. But it’s hard to go against the choice of The Recording Academy, a good number of its members must be longtime fans of Steely Dan, and were probably merely acting on the dictum that you do your job long enough in show business, and you will eventually be given an award that you don’t deserve to make up for past omissions. Having recorded seven of the most distinctive albums in the last 30 years beforehand without winning any major Grammies, it was Steely Dan’s turn in the limelight. Making up for past mistakes can take a long time.
Steely Dan’s music is in a rarified section of pop music. It is an eccentric brew of jazz and rock, with a dose of the Brill Building Sound. Fagen and Becker hate to be called a rock ‘n’ roll band. Maybe they shouldn’t be. Besides blossoming in the age of rock, they don’t share much with the genre. Cognoscenti love the Dan’s music for its quirky melodic twists and arcane lyrics. It’s like listening to surreal poetry set to melodies birthed in the mind of a jazz obscurist who is also a closet rock ‘n’ roller. Steely Dan’s music is difficult to place in a box, and it shouldn’t be.
Steely Dan are an acquired taste. Not everyone digs them. Some people you’d think would love them, should love them, are actually puzzled by fans’ fondness for a band whose songs include exotic polysyllabic titles like Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me), Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, Throw Back The Little Ones, and one-word handles like Bodhisattva, Aja, Josie, and Gaucho.
This durable duo of dynamic musicians brings to mind another musical pair who wrote most of the songs of the iconic British pop-rock group the Beatles. But where John Lennon and Paul McCartney were basically a team that composed effervescent pop with whimsical lyrics and poignant ballads with hooks that latch on for decades, the Fagen-Becker tandem is deliberately inscrutable and openly disdainful of the obvious sensibilities of most Top 40 fodder. They once told an interviewer that their coded lyrics are nothing like the lyrics of the songs of James Taylor, whom they described as being wont to “singing about his lost underwear.”
Steely Dan and the Beatles are poles apart musically. It is in song craft where similarities are found. Lennon and McCartney were Liverpool lads who found themselves enmeshed in the skiffle music of their generation, part of their growth as serious musicians that led them to create the ultimate product of their musical genius in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the case of Steely Dan, their sixth studio album Aja found them chipping away past patchiness to reach their peak. Their experience has not allowed them to surpass Aja’s achievements, as evinced by the surprisingly sub-par effort on the reunion LPs Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go.
As a testament to Steely Dan’s high level of musicality, Berklee College of Music conferred Honorary Doctor of Music degrees to Fagen and Becker the same year Two Against Nature won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The auteurs were gracious enough to receive their degrees in person.
The late John Lennon is one of the most revered songwriters and political symbols of the 20th century. Together with Paul McCartney, they made up the best pop-songwriting team ever, regardless of what fanatics of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have to say. Hall and Oates fans could throw in their collective hats into the arena and take part in the dispute. “Best of all time” lists will always be tainted with subjectivity, and the proof is in the pudding.
It will be out of character for Fagen and Becker to insist that they be counted as well. But their body of work will stand the test of time, much like the Beatles and the Stones oeuvre will. They might not even mind if some music fans and critics tag them as the Lennon-McCartney of their time. For sure, both Steely Dan stalwarts have one time or another sang or hummed Yesterday and Strawberry Fields Forever.
