STEELY DAN WAV SERIES

When their friend Gary Katz became a staff producer at ABC Records, he brought Becker and Fagen in as staff songwriters but quickly realized that the material they were writing was too complex for other ABC artists and convinced them to form their own band.

Leaving college, the misanthropic, fantastically unkempt duo moved to Brooklyn and became songwriters for anyone that would have them, as well as part of the touring band for the cheesy Jay and the Americans, earning the nickname “the Manson and Starkweather of rock and roll” (the mass murderers de jour of 1969). Playing in local bands and writing songs together, the two formed a bond that would evolve into one of the great musical partnerships, up there with Rodgers and Hart, Lennon and McCartney, and Jagger-Richards. It wasn’t until later that the two discovered a common love for, not only classic jazz and soul music, but cigarettes and weed too. Outcasts Becker and Fagen met at Bard College in upstate New York in 1967 when Fagen heard Becker practicing his guitar and immediately asked him to join a band. Like the Eagles, it’s this obsessive perfectionism that can make Steely Dan hard to take, and I get it, but I have always found a highly subversive element or two in their songs that work to undercut the gloss. Steely Dan, the brainchild of Walter Becker (guitar, bass) and Donald Fagen (keyboards, lead vocals) launched in 1972, releasing six albums in six consecutive years, each one more refined and ambitious than the previous, culminating with their earnest shot at record-making perfection, the breathtaking Aja album in 1977. I consider those formative years for me, the first half of the 70s, to be a golden age of pop and it just didn’t get any better for me than my first taste of “the Dan.” “Rikki” could be called smooth, I guess, but to my young ear, it was just catchy music. The best AM station one could hope for in a great era for AM radio, CKLW was a vanguard radio station, the 7th most listened to in North America, with a rotation of 80 to 100 songs instead of the standard Top 40. This was back when listening to AM radio was still a good source for music, before the higher fidelity FM option became the only choice for true music lovers.Ĭoming of age in a border town - Detroit in the early 70s, I was fortunate to be a CKLW listener (broadcast out of Windsor, Canada). I’ve loved Steely Dan for almost as long I’ve loved the Beatles (a copy of 1974’s Pretzel Logic was in my first Columbia Records Club shipment when I was an AM-radio obsessed kid just barely into double digits - “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” caught my ear, I guess).

Or the most cutting criticism of all, “smooth jazz.” If you’re a Steely Dan fan, you’ve heard the complaints.

STEELY DAN WAV SERIES

Here’s a series that isn’t here to change minds but only to share what tips the scales for me personally in these ongoing musical disputes. Doesn’t mean we can’t get a few things off our chests. There’s no accounting for taste and it’s pointless to argue about what we like.

Steely dan wav