Perfection and precision can be funny things — especially in music, where all you really need are “three chords and the truth.”
Rarer still is the group that turns that alchemy into sounds with a unique (that is to say, hard to categorize) but universal appeal.
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, aka Steely Dan did just that. Obsessive musicians on a perpetual quest to hit just the right mix of notes, they would’ve been at home in a lab. And in many ways, the studio was their lab. Edison had Menlo Park. Becker and Fagen The Village Recorder.
To operate smoothly, a machine needs every part to work well and work together. Becker and Fagen did this by swapping musicians in and out of songs. On the Aja album, there were 6 different lineups for 7 tracks. Recognizing that Chuck Rainey could play the parts better, Becker even took himself out of the lineup for “Black Cow,” “Aja,” and “Peg.” The end result of this endless iterating? Timeless music. Music that is (strangely) at home on the AM dial, at your local college radio station, and in the grocery store. You can still hear songs like Hey Nineteen and Peg fairly often.
As Becker himself noted:
“We have been fortunate enough to do something that has always been out of the mainstream and yet have an audience for what we do.“
We lost Becker on this day in 2017, but his legacy lives on the sounds of Steely Dan. On our radios, in our earbuds, and overhead in the aisles at Safeway.
Have a favorite track by Steely Dan or Becker himself? Let me know in the comments!
Kevin Sent 