Steely Dan

Steely Dan began with a meeting at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 1967. Donald Fagen heard Walter Becker practising electric guitar at a campus café, introduced himself, and found their tastes overlapped almost exactly. The partnership that followed lasted, with one long interruption, for half a century, and produced a body of work that sits between rock, jazz and rhythm and blues without settling comfortably into any of them.After Fagen graduated in 1969 the pair moved to Brooklyn and spent around eighteen months in the touring band of Jay and the Americans, initially for a hundred dollars a show, later for less. Jay Black's description of them as the Manson and Starkweather of rock and roll has followed them ever since. They tried to sell songs in the Brill Building, where Kenny Vance of Jay and the Americans kept a production office and took an interest, and it was Vance's associate Gary Katz who, on moving to Los Angeles as a staff producer for ABC Records, hired them as staff songwriters. Katz would produce every Steely Dan album that followed.The first line-up put Fagen on keyboards and lead vocals and Becker on bass, with Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter on guitars and Jim Hodder on drums; David Palmer was brought in to sing lead in 1971 and let go in April 1973. Can't Buy a Thrill arrived in November 1972 and produced two hits immediately, "Do It Again" and "Reelin' In the Years". Countdown to Ecstasy followed in 1973 with weaker sales but two enduring album-rock staples in "Show Biz Kids" and "My Old School", and Pretzel Logic in 1974 delivered their highest-charting single, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number".By 1974 both men had had enough of the road. They dismissed the band, played their last show of the era on 5 July 1974 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and rebuilt Steely Dan as a studio project staffed by whichever session players suited a given part. The method became as famous as the music: solos auditioned from multiple players, takes accumulated over months, and a standard of execution that session musicians of the period spoke about with a mixture of admiration and exhaustion.The records made under that regime are the ones the band is remembered for. Katy Lied (1975) and The Royal Scam (1976) sharpened the approach; Aja, released in September 1977, brought it to its fullest expression, reaching the American top five and yielding "Peg", "Deacon Blues" and "Josie". Gaucho, delayed by technical accidents, a change of label ownership and difficulty in Becker's personal life, appeared in November 1980 and produced "Hey Nineteen".The lyrics were as distinctive as the arrangements. Fagen and Becker wrote in character, often about people whose self-account cannot quite be trusted — hustlers, fading hipsters, men explaining themselves at length — and set that material against harmonically dense, immaculately played music. The gap between the polish of the surface and the unreliability of the narrator is a large part of why the songs continued to reward listening decades later.The partnership dissolved in June 1981. Becker moved to Maui, stopped using drugs, and spent the decade at a distance from the industry, producing records for the British group China Crisis. Fagen released The Nightfly in 1982, a platinum solo album with a top-twenty single in "I.G.Y.", and later scored Bright Lights, Big City. They played together again in 1986 on an album by Rosie Vela and began writing, without finishing anything.The reunion was gradual. Becker sat in with Fagen's New York Rock and Soul Revue in October 1991, produced Fagen's Kamakiriad in 1993, and toured with him in support of it — Steely Dan's first shows in nineteen years. Fagen co-produced Becker's 11 Tracks of Whack in 1994. The live album Alive in America followed in 1995, and the Art Crimes tour of 1996 took them back to Europe for the first time in twenty-two years.Two Against Nature, recorded between 1997 and 1999 and released in 2000, was their first album of new studio material in two decades. It won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year, beating Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP and Radiohead's Kid A — a result that struck many observers as an award for a career rather than a record. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2001. Everything Must Go, in 2003, aimed at something looser and closer to a live performance, and included the first Steely Dan studio lead vocal by Becker, on "Slang of Ages".From 2006 the band toured almost every year with a settled group around Jon Herington, Keith Carlock and Freddie Washington. Becker's last appearance was on 27 May 2017 in Greenwich, Connecticut; he died of esophageal cancer on 3 September that year, aged 67. Fagen continued under the name, touring with the Doobie Brothers in 2018, with Steve Winwood in 2019 and as special guests on the Eagles' farewell tour in 2023 and early 2024, while a dispute with Becker's estate over ownership of the band's name and catalogue went unresolved. No Steely Dan shows have followed the 2024 dates.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.