Fagen, Becker and Steely Dan—Oh, Yeah!

My friend Jack Crager is a University of Texas grad, athlete, husband, father, New York City resident and writer. A fair percentage of his stuff pertains to music, and that is why I urged him to assess Steely Dan, the incomparable rock band formed by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. I implored him, I beseeched him, I pleaded with him, and I importuned him. I even told him—as if he didn’t know—that it all began in the late 1960s at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, a liberal arts school from which his own daughter recently graduated.

It’s not false modesty to say that Jack knows music better than I do; he plays guitar and understands the difference between B sharp major and C flat minor. (I am limited to the kazoo and the cowbell.) Rather than continue to bug him, however, I offer to do the job myself. I am not a complete imposter, having written articles on the Beatles (five, with another on Paul McCartney), Leadbelly, Janis Joplin, Michael Jackson, sacred Christmas carols, Karolina Protsenko, the derivation of my high school alma mater, Hank Williams, Antone’s blues club in Austin, K-pop, John Denver, Bessie Smith, Angela Strehli, Johann Sebastian Bach and Armadillo World Headquarters. Furthermore, I have read biographies of Billie Holiday, Bach (two), Ludwig von Beethoven, Jackson, Frederic Chopin (two), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Gershwin, Jimi Hendrix, the Fab Four (at least 10), Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Edith Piaf. I am no Jack Crager, but I will try.

To get my writing jones revved up, I listened to “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” (1974), “Black Friday” (1975), “Show Biz Kids” (1973), “Only a Fool Would Say That” (1972; a put-down of John Lennon for his trite song “Imagine”), “Doctor Wu” (1975), “Gaucho” (1980), “Pretzel Logic” (1974), “Aja” (1977), “Your Gold Teeth II” (1975), “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” (1974; written for the wife of a faculty member at Bard and the biggest hit of Steely Dan’s career), “Josie” (1977), “Babylon Sisters” (1980), “Reelin’ in the Years” (1972; for some reason, Fagen and Becker later came to deprecate this one), “Black Cow” (1977), “Bodhisattva” (1973), “Bad Sneakers” (1975), “Don’t Take Me Alive” (1975), “Do It Again” (1972), “Deacon Blues” (1977); “Kid Charlemagne” (1976; inspired to some degree by the rise and fall of LSD chemist Owsley Stanley) and “Peg” (1977).

They were both New York City–area guys—Fagen (born in 1947) from Passaic and South Brunswick, New Jersey and Becker (1950) from Queens and Scarsdale. Having met at Bard, they began writing songs together. They were in three predecessor bands, one of which featured fellow student Chevy Chase on drums. Fagen and Becker, who took music and themselves quite seriously, are remembered this way by a friend: “They never came out of their room. They stayed up all night. They looked like ghosts—black turtlenecks and skin so white that it looked like yogurt. Absolutely no activity, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes and dope.”  

Fagen graduated from Bard—Becker never did—with a degree in English literature, and they moved to a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn. From there, they knocked on the doors of music companies in the Brill Building at 49th and Broadway. Seeking a toehold in the music biz, they composed the soundtrack for a low-budget comedy starring Richard Pryor, did a commercial for Schlitz beer, had one of their tunes sung by Barbra Streisand and joined the touring band of Jay and the Americans. Fagen and Becker, who had spent many hours listening to and playing the music of such jazz giants as Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Thelonius Monk, hated the bubblegum-style pop music they were churning out; Jay Black, lead singer of Jay and the Americans, later called them “the Manson and Starkweather of rock & roll.”

Things changed when a friend, Gary Katz, moved to Los Angeles to be a staff producer for ABC Records. Katz urged them to join him out in California. Adding guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, drummer Jim Hodder and singer David Palmer, they took the name “Steely Dan.” Between 1972 and 1980, they—with help from Katz and engineer Roger Nichols—created seven masterpiece albums: Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, Katy Lied, The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho. Their music was a cross-pollination of rock, pop, funk, rhythm and blues, mambo, swing, jazz and other styles. The critics loved them, and so did their fans. Many in both groups delved rather deeply into “the Dan’s” wry, elliptical lyrics, trying to discern their meaning.

Fagen considered his voice inadequate, and in fact it was nasal and reedy, yet distinctive. That and his stage fright kept the band from touring until ABC executives insisted. Between October 1972 and January 1974, they gave concerts all over the USA, opening for such acts as the Kinks, James Gang, Loudon Wainwright III, Taj Mahal, Elton John, the Beach Boys, Uriah Heep, the Guess Who and Black Oak Arkansas. Steely Dan headlined a few shows, one of which took place on May 10, 1973 at the Dillo in Austin. I tell you with the deepest regret that I did not attend, although “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years” were getting a lot of play on radio station KRMH, to which I often listened. They were also the leadoff band for a concert at the Cotton Bowl in August of that year.

There was never any doubt as to who called the shots in Steely Dan—the two Bard alums. By 1974, they had either fired all their bandmates or caused them to quit. Baxter, for example, walked away and joined the Doobie Brothers (a much more formulaic band) when Fagen and Becker decided to turn inward and work only in the studio. No more riding the wave before large, adoring crowds, as most young male rockers yearned to do. They hired the best studio musicians (such as Lee Ritenour, Rick Derringer, Mark Knopfler, Wilton Felder and Jerome Richardson), and it was the same for backing vocals. Fagen and Becker were known as hard taskmasters, always demanding perfection. Good enough was never good enough for them. Katz and Nichols eventually realized that all Steely Dan albums took longer than expected and came in over budget.

Even as they sold voluminous records, earned Grammys and made money, problems festered between these two high-strung men. The pressure to keep producing such great music wore on them. Becker seemed to have the worst of it—developing a heroin habit, having his girlfriend, Karen Stanley, die of an overdose (Stanley’s mother attempted to sue Becker for $17 million, claiming that he had introduced her daughter to cocaine, morphine, heroin and barbiturates) and getting hit by a car one night while walking home in Manhattan. They ended their musical partnership in June 1981 as Becker moved to Hawaii to live as what he called “an avocado rancher and self-styled critic of the contemporary scene.” He dabbled in music, while Fagen was somewhat more active.

After working together on several projects, they had a reunion in 1993. When they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, they gave one of the shortest acceptance speeches on record. I am unfamiliar with the second part of their career, but I read that their last two albums, Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go were popular and sold well. Fagen wrote a somewhat oblique memoir in 2013 called Eminent Hipsters, and they toured and took part in other edgy projects. But Becker was sick—sometimes canceling just before a show, sometimes leaving early for a hospital bed. He died of esophageal cancer on September 3, 2017. Fagen pledged to keep the Steely Dan name and brand alive.

Sad to say, Becker’s widow sued Fagen for ongoing profits made by Steely Dan, and there were legal battles over royalties that Fagan said employed “thousands of lawyers.” Now 78, he has had illnesses as well and may be nearing the end of the road. 

What can be said of Steely Dan, a cult band with more than a dozen enduring radio hits to its name? Its music defies categorization, and although many comparisons have been made, this band was sui generis: wholly unique. Steely Dan, which strove so excruciatingly to make effortless sounds, was the bomb. The seven albums Fagen, Becker et al. crafted between 1972 and 1980 do not account for their entire oeuvre (a term Jack might use), but they were undoubtedly a major contribution to American rock.