By picking Donald Fagen as the subject of a biography, Peter Jones certainly didn’t make things easy on himself. The Steely Dan co-founder has long been wary of the press and gave relatively few interviews during the band’s prime. And when he did deem to do so, sometimes answered in...
By picking Donald Fagen as the subject of a biography, Peter Jones certainly didn’t make things easy on himself.
Fagen meets musical soul mate Walter Becker while both were students at Bard College in the late ‘60s. Social outcasts who shared a love for black humor, skepticism, science fiction and jazz, they bonded immediately. All of whom had adventures under the exacting and near-perfection musical accompaniment with changing tempos under a sometimes disarmingly placid surface. In the 1970s, no one sounded like Steely Dan. Especially in how the group would fuse jazz chords, melodics, and structure into traditional rock, even using the skills of some of that genre’s leading lights.
Jones charts Fagen’s early shyness onstage and hesitancy to take the burden on lead vocals and his hatred of life on the road. The latter led Steely Dan to get off the road permanently and break up “the band” which gracedNo matter—this band was not a democracy. And Becker and Fagen’s relentless quest for sonic perfection in the studio meant that Denny Dias, Jim Hodder, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter were sometimes used sparingly on the final product that record buyers took home.
And when human imperfections gnawed at them, there was “Wendel.” An early version of a computer sampler/synthesizer that cost $150,000 , it could take a single drum beat and repeat it all sorts of ways to absolute perfection in timing and volume to Becker and Fagen’s exacting desires. The contraption was so much a key part of, that Wendel was awarded his own platinum record.
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