timeline

Steely Dan

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, two Bard College friends who made jazz-flavored pop with ironic narrators, then dropped the touring band and built seven albums in the studio with the best session players in Los Angeles.

Origin
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, United States
Years active
1971-1981, 1993-2026
Genres
jazz rock, soft rock, pop rock, jazz fusion
Labels
ABC, Probe, MCA, Giant, Reprise, Warner Bros.

Bard to Los Angeles

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met at Bard College in 1967. After Fagen graduated in 1969 they moved to Brooklyn, pitched songs at the Brill Building and toured as the backing band for Jay and the Americans. Producer Gary Katz hired them as staff songwriters at ABC Records in Los Angeles. In 1970 he produced Linda Hoover's I Mean to Shine, with Fagen, Becker and Jeff Baxter in the backing group and five of the duo's songs. It was shelved and came out only in 2022.

In early 1972 they put together a first line-up: guitarists Baxter and Denny Dias, drummer Jim Hodder and singer David Palmer. Their first single, Dallas, was withdrawn soon after release because its country feel was unrepresentative. The name came from a fictional sex toy in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Katz and engineer Roger Nichols stayed with the band through 1980, and Nichols won six Grammys for his work with them.

The band years

Can't Buy a Thrill came out in October 1972 and reached 17 in the United States. It produced two hits, Do It Again and Reelin' In the Years, and Palmer sang two of its songs. Fagen was reluctant to sing live, so Palmer handled much of the stage vocal work until he was fired in April 1973. Fagen sang every lead on Countdown to Ecstasy, released that July, whose My Old School recalls a drug raid at Bard.

Pretzel Logic followed in February 1974. Writing was hard, so the duo recorded a cover and three songs that predated the group, and they leaned on studio drummers such as Jim Gordon and a 19-year-old Jeff Porcaro. Rikki Don't Lose That Number became their biggest single, reaching 4. A tour ran from March to July 1974, with some British dates cancelled because of Fagen's health. Afterward Becker and Fagen dismissed the other three members and Steely Dan became a studio-only project. The last concert before the hiatus was on 5 July 1974 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

The studio years

Katy Lied (1975) marked the first appearance on record of Michael McDonald, who sang on four songs, and Porcaro played drums on all but one track. Becker and Fagen disliked its sound after a noise-reduction malfunction. The Royal Scam (1976) opened with Kid Charlemagne, whose guitar solo is by Larry Carlton, and its UK single Haitian Divorce reached 17.

Aja, released on 23 September 1977, was their best seller. It reached 3 in the United States, went double platinum, and won a Grammy for best engineered recording. Becker and Fagen used nearly forty session players across studios in Los Angeles and New York. Deacon Blues and Peg came from it. Gaucho (1980) took two years to make. Becker was hit by a car during the sessions, and Keith Jarrett won a co-writing credit on the title track. In late 1979 most of a nearly finished song, The Second Arrangement, was accidentally erased. The band disbanded in June 1981.

Return and legacy

Fagen made The Nightfly in 1982 and Becker moved to Maui. In 1993 they reunited around Fagen's Kamakiriad tour, and Alive in America followed in 1995. Two Against Nature (2000) won four Grammys in 2001, including Album of the Year, and the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that March. Everything Must Go (2003) was their last studio album.

Becker died on 3 September 2017, aged 67, and Fagen carried on as the sole official member. In 2023 a cassette of the lost Second Arrangement, found by Nichols's daughter Cimcie, was released through the fan newsletter Expanding Dan. The band has sold more than 40 million records. Critic Colin Marshall wrote in 2021 that their music pulled jazz chords into pop structures under ironic, detached narrators, and that a 21st-century reappraisal tied it to the yacht rock revival. Aja remains a frequent audiophile test record.

Members

Records

Songs

Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, Michael McDonald, Deacon Blue

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Fan sites and communities

  • The Steely Dan Reader Four decades of interviews and reviews sorted by era, plus the text archive of the Metal Leg newsletter.

Sources

  1. Steely Dan, Wikipedia
  2. Official biography, steelydan.com
  3. Born Middle-Aged: Eight Books on Steely Dan, Los Angeles Review of Books (2021-11-21)
  4. Walter Becker of Steely Dan dies aged 67, uDiscover Music (2017-09)
  5. setlist.fm: Steely Dan statistics, setlist.fm
  6. Steely Dan's 20 greatest songs, ranked, The Guardian (2022-10-20)
  7. Linda Hoover on her great lost LP with Steely Dan, I Mean to Shine, The Guardian (2022-07-07)
  8. Aja, National Recording Registry record, Library of Congress
  9. Steely Dan KMET Record Plant 1974, Internet Archive (1974-03-20)
  10. Steely Dan 1974 Rainbow Theatre London BBC, Internet Archive (1974-05-20)
  11. Complete National Recording Registry listing (JSON), Library of Congress