A timely reelin’ in of all 45years of Steely Dan
Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion Edited by Barney Hoskyns Constable €21 ★★★★★
Rock fans of a certain age and disposition will have felt heartsore on hearing news of the recent death of Walter Becker, aged 67. Becker was one half of the incomparable rock duo Steely Dan, the other half being Donald Fagen. They had been pals and musical collaborators since first meeting at Bard College, upstate New York, in the late Sixties. Major Dudes, an anthology of reviews and interviews dating from 1972, has inadvertently become a funeral song as well as the celebration of a life’s work.
Editor Barney Hoskyns remarks on how Becker and Fagen come across in person like a comic double-act – a hipster Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. I once met them at a Mayfair hotel in 1996, and recall Fagen as a grownup schoolkid cracking jokes to hide his shyness, Becker more like a laid-back college lecturer with one eye on the clock. They didn’t give me as tough a time as some of the interviewers here. Publicity schedules seemed to them a slog; their ‘wild time’ was in the studio.
Following an indifferent stint as songwriters in New York, they decamped to California in June 1972 to record their debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill. To the record company’s surprise, it yielded two hits, Do It Again and Reelin’ In The Years. The Dan’s one-off amalgam of R’n’B, pop and West Coast jazz had struck a chord, and their oblique, ambiguous lyrics were a good fit for the cynical, won’t-get-fooled-again Seventies.
It launched an amazing run of albums, one per year, until the delirious peak of Aja in 1977. Its sales put them in the major league, and perhaps planted the seeds of their downfall.
A gruelling perfectionism took hold, and by the time of Gaucho, their 1980 follow-up, they had reached a dead end, Becker tending a broken leg and heroin addiction, with Fagen headed for a breakdown.
While Major Dudes will be a must for devotees, it feels a bit repetitive, and the relentless wisecracking of the interviews begins to sound the same. The book saves the best till almost last.
Ian Penman’s essay offers a magnificent double salute to Fagen’s recent memoir and to the unique ‘musical grain’ of the Becker/Fagen output. I have never read a better account, for instance, of the way Black Cow from Aja turns the corner from a depressive ‘plod’ to the sunstruck uplands, ‘a homecoming parade of high-five bass and pungent roadhouse sax’. Hats off to him.
Books like this are generally hailed for ‘sending you back’ to the music. But in the case of Steely Dan, I didn’t need to be sent – because their music is the place I’ve been living for years.