Steely Dan talk about their seventh album Gaucho in an extended interview with Musician Magazine in 1981.

Those consummate troublemakers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, are finally cornered, producing dangerously controversial observations on film, literature, Free Jazz, touring and the music of Steely Dan, undermining nearly every tenet of the music industry.

Three years, two hundred outtakes, a few mistakenly erased tracks, and one shattered shank after Aja, Steely Dan has come sauntering out of hibernation with a ravishing new record, Gaucho. It’s elegant, it’s extravagant; it shows again why Walter Becker and Donald, the masters of Ellingtonian Backbeat, Coolpop-Jazzrock, are the closest thing this generation has to pre-war sophistication of Porter and Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Weill and Waller. If Aja convinced Woody Herman to let his big band loose on Steely Dan materiaf (Chick, Donald, Walter and Woodrow, 1978), prompted a Berklee College of Music songwriting analysis course featuring their work, and elevated the taste of the frat-dance college crowd, one wonders what kind of a dent Gaucho might make. One thing it won’t do is send Steely Dan back on the road, not even after Becker’s carcrunched leg heals completely. Nor will they perform in their native New York. So we are left solely — and quite happily — with the music at hand.

Which is, as may be expected by now, sublime and fragrant and audaciously smooth. Steely Dan Inc.’s revolving door of studio sidemen hasn’t stopped swinging yet — some 36 grace Gaucho — and I mean this in the musical sense as well: rarely have so many done so little spontaneous blowing for so much music that sounds so fresh. But it probably won’t sound that way upon first or second listen; chances are it will sound soft and round, blandly pleasant, almost superficial. With further listening, each of the record’s seven tunes opens and deepens, revealing the harmonic jewels and subtle understated solos. At first obscured by the dominant colors of the surface, background colors become apparent, much as they will in fine oil paintings as your eye moves closer and closer to them; rhythmic nuances make themselves felt; each piece eventually jumps out of bed with the others and goes its own way: the patina, a rather mundane orgy of highgloss sensuality, gives way to the substance — seven different compositions in profound intercourse with their own partners, their indigenous lyrics.

As for the lyrics’ subject matter, rest assured Steely Dan enters the ’80s with some timely tales of tawdry high- life and desultory desperation. Gaucho overflows with mystics, coke dealers, sexual rivals, gosling girls ignorant of ‘Retha Franklin, concupiscent Charlies out for “that cotton candy,’ playground hoopers, Third World schemers mobilized on First World lawns, surprisingly gay friends and bodacious cowboys. The stories are rich, richer than Aja‘s, the metaphors subversive and witty. For instance, the rival lover is introduced with the couplet, “The milk truck eased into my space/Somebody screamed somewhere.” All in all, we may say this about Steely Dan: the more things strange, the more they stay the same. I recently spoke with Messrs Becker and Fagen at an MCA rented suite of the Park Lane hotel on Central Park South in New York. As I entered the room, the two jokingly whined about the day’s previous interviewers; every one, it seems, had grazed over the parched grass of basic bio material, asking, “So did you two really meet at Bard College?” With furious swipes of my pen, I mimed scratching that one off the top of my list of questions and mumbled something about my masterplan being destroyed.

MUSICIAN: It has been a considerable time since Steely Dan first started: how do you feel you’ve grown as artists, as musicians and lyricists, since that time?

FAGEN: [Long pause] It’s a matter of maturing. Becoming more selective with material, knowing what to write about, being able to pick and choose — showing more discretion than in the earlier days. Musically, our harmonic vocabulary and so on has expanded a great deal. so I feel we’ve progressed a lot since our first records. They are plain embarrassing, if you listen to them.

MUSICIAN: When you look back at your older work — as all artists, regrettably or enthusiastically, must do — do you think, “Oh God, that just wasn’t it at all”?

FAGEN: [ Laughs] Well, yeah, you know I don’t listen to our old records, but if I happen to hear one on the radio, my general feeling is humiliation. I don’t really understand some of our earlier stuff.

BECKER: [Limping slowly back into the room] You mean: why would we do a thing like this or that?

FAGEN: In terms of why we would do certain things musically and also lyrically.

BECKER: Like, say ” My Old School”? Gimme a for instance…

FAGEN: Not that one so much. That one has taken on a certain, well, it’s improved with age. I’m trying to think of a really embarrassing one, but I can’t off-hand.

MUSICIAN: At what point can you begin to stand yourself, listening back? 1974? 1975?

FAGEN: The next album I like pretty well. The one we haven’t done yet. The rest of them are fairly humiliating.

MUSICIAN: You don’t feel Gaucho is what you want to sound like?

FAGEN: Well, on the humiliation scale each album gets lower and lower. I think starting with Pretzel Logic, I began to like a few cuts here and there as things I can really listen to.

MUSICIAN: How do you feel, Walter?

BECKER: Differently. But I don’t listen to them either. I mean there were a lot of things that were very shoddily done, and a lot of things that were just bad, but probably different things for me than for Donald. We were doing the best we could, but fuck it, it wasn’t very good. It’s like looking at yourself in a mirror: it’s not how you really look. Left-handed people look weird. I don’t know whether it’s ultimately good or not, I really don’t.

MUSICIAN: It’s good to the extent that you can see some growth in the mirror…

BECKER: Oh yeah, but whether it’s ultimately has been playing on my mind since 1970.

FAGEN: It’s like: have you ever seen a picture of yourself taken in 1969 or ’70 with a group of girls in mini-skirts or something and you say…

BECKER: What is that asshole doing there, or why was I wearing that sweater or a shirt with a fake turtle- neck or something. It’s just aged. But I don’t think it’s aged that much. The stuff that is lousy was lousy then.

“If you’re gonna present rock ‘n’ roll as an art form, you have to draw on some of the traditions that are used in literature, and one that’s proved effective is maintaining a certain distance from the subject.”

Donald Fagen

FAGEN: Yeah, that’s true… well, harmonically we were naive.

BECKER: And we were miming a lot of things, we were clowning around.

FAGEN: We started out imitating, as most people do…

BECKER: [Slyly] As we continue to, in a much subtler way. Nothing comes from nothing. But ” Do It Again” is a good fucking record. ” Reelin’ In The Years” is a good record.

FAGEN: I agree with that.

BECKER: It’s only fuckin’ rock ‘ n’ roll. It’s for kids. It’s not for Gustav Mahler, or even Kristin Fabriani. [ Laughs.]

MUSICIAN: Come now, only for kids?

BECKER: Well you know what I mean…

FAGEN: Basically, we’ve always composed for ourselves, which is the same as composing for your peers.

BECKER: Oh c’mon, you wouldn’t do a thing like this for your peers. Would you do this for John Banker? Would you do this for what’s his name? You know he doesn’t like this, you know he doesn’t need this.

FAGEN: Well I don’t consider him my peer.

BECKER: Who do you mean then?

FAGEN: Well, some people, some… uh, well: us basically.

BECKER: [Laughs] Oh, that’s different. O.K.

FAGEN: I guess I assume that people our age are thinking the same way we are. I’m not thinking of any individuals.

BECKER: But that’s all we have to go by. I can’t think of any individual that this stuff — it’s always amazed me that somehow I’ve felt we’re good but I never knew if there was anybody that would think so. Not good in any ultimate sense, but good compared to the bullshit you hear. But I don’t feel any older than my audience. I used to worry about getting old when I was I couldn’t imagine being 30 and being 17.

MUSICIAN: Did you ever feel like a part of mainstream culture — which I guess was mainstream counterculture — in the ’60s. I mean: how many times does ‘ 68 go into 1981?

BECKER: Hell now, God, we were wallflowers. We were cranks. What do you say…

FAGEN: Aliens.

BECKER: Yeah, that’s better, alienated. Aliens, freaks.

MUSICIAN: So how do you feel in the situation now, which I guess would make you more alien…

BECKER: Yeah, more alien…you got it. A lot of artists are aliens. They’re really a bunch of geeks when you get right down to it.

MUSICIAN: And classical losers too, in the sense that they just don’t fit it.

FAGEN: That’s right, in the sense that New York is the depository for misfit Americans — there’s a reason why we’re here. And why we don’t live in Cincinnati.

BECKER: You have misfit Americans and you also have perfect New Yorkers; the guy who doesn’t know who lives down the hall. It’s all a little strange.

MUSICIAN: You walk down the street and think: Hmmm, Something about all these folks is just a little off- center.

BECKER: Yeah, everybody’s weird here. I mean, everybody’s normal everywhere else, that’s the way it looks to me. I mean, after many years of living in Los Angeles I remember sitting in someone’s house, and somebody made a reference to the fact that someone was a Jew. I realized: not everybody is
Jewish here, not even nominally Jewish. Now this took me by surprise. I come from Forest Hills. I’m not Jewish, but what difference does it make?

FAGEN: You might as well be.

BECKER: I might as well be, you know: yish gdall, yish gdosh, baruch atah Adonoi. But what I mean is, I feel safe around Jews. Jews are not gonna drag me off to the gas chambers. Jews are smart. They’re not gonna lynch anybody, they’re civilized.

FAGEN: What we’re talking about is, basically metropolitan…

BECKER: But New York City is the only one.

FAGEN: It’s the only one in America, and maybe in the world, as far as truly being cosmopolitan.

BECKER: I mean L.A. is the biggest small town in the world. It’s the stix.

MUSICIAN: If artists are geeks, they’re also scavengers. Do you find you can feed off the flesh of the city, the raw material so to speak? Is it a stimulus that Los Angeles wasn’t?

FAGEN: I think New York has revitalized our stuff. But L.A. did a lot for us as far as giving us a perspective on America.

BECKER: It gave us something to complain about.

FAGEN: It gave us something to really complain about, to bitch about creatively.

BECKER: You can look at the people you see three times a week and twist them in your mind, treat them inhumanely in your mind, to create a character without actually defaming them. But you cannot accord them the respect that you accord every other human being. [Long pause] If there were no outside stimulus, I’d imagine we’d still have something to write about. Something we’d remembered or imagined.

FAGEN: You can create or compose in a vacuum.

BECKER: Keeping in mind that this is dance music, you are removing yourself from something by writing about it.

MUSICIAN: Do you think that act of distancing is important, not so much of “objectivity” as to keep a creative perspective?

FAGEN: I think it makes for better art. If you’re gonna present rock ‘n’ roll as an art form, you have to draw on some of the traditions that are used in literature, and one that’s proved effective is maintaining a certain distance from the subject. The trashier kinds of literature are the more basically sentimental kinds. Romantic, in the pejorative sense of the term. So we use that distancing technique in writing lyrics.

“We’re not trying to protect anything. It’s just that some of the smaller, pettier details in a story are the best ones. The little things that you retain in your sense more than in your mind.”

Walter Becker

MUSICIAN: Speaking of dance music, can you see a time when you won’t be concerned with prodding people out of their chairs?

FAGEN: I think we both really love rhythm-and-blues basically. A big back- beat. I don’t know if it’s a matter of dance music, it’s a matter of pulse or feel.

BECKER: Jump music. Rhythm music Something like that.

FAGEN: [Grinning] Race music.

MUSICIAN: Be careful, Donald.

BECKER: Race music. Obviously I don’t dance or nothing, and never have…

FAGEN: [Pointing to Becker’s crutches] Especially lately.

BECKER: Well, I’ve never seen you tripping the light fantastic in the last 32 years either.

FAGEN: But I have great shoes.

BECKER: Yes, you have great shoes. No one ever said you weren’t a snappy dresser, but the point is: you don’t dance. It’s great music in your car though, you’d rather hear it in your car than pretty much anything else.

MUSICIAN: Which brings me to another question. I know you agonize over your lyrics. Does it ever frustrate you that with many or most of the people listening, they may being going in one ear — and with little in between to stop them — right out the other? That all they may want is a beat and a hummable melody?

BECKER: I assume that’s the case for most of the audience, or at least a big part of it, and that’s why we try to always make the lyrics not grab your attention. We want them to sound good with the music, even if you’re not an English-speaking person.

MUSICIAN: But for those that are listening, atlas and dictionary in hand, you don’t want the lyrics to be one-shot deals, like a comedy record that you put on once and it gets tired pretty quickly after that.

BECKER: That’s definitely a problem. We have to be clever, but not funny.

FAGEN: We have a problem, trying not to cross the comedy threshold.

BECKER: Every time someone’s in the next room when we’re writing a song they’ll say, ” Don’t tell me you’re fucking writing songs in there, you’re not working, ‘ cause you’re fucking screaming and laughing in there. You’re not writing, you’re making up Pope jokes.”

FAGEN: Sometimes Walter comes up with a line, and it’s just too fuckin’…

BECKER: Funny. The whole thing would just stop; it would be like making Spike Jones records.

FAGEN: Suspension of disbelief would stop; there’d be laughter. You have to keep the equilibrium, have to maintain the irony, without getting into yuk-yuk territory.

MUSICIAN: There’s also always a certain self – consciousness about being funny. Walter, you once said you wanted to branch out into odd narrative styles and more radical approaches, as long as they were ” funny in the end.” What kind of ” funny” were you referring to?

BECKER: I’m talking about the possibility of maintaining one’s sense of humor under all possible circumstances. Funny as opposed to grave or solemn. Kurt Vonnegut’s not funny, there’s nothing funny about Dresden for instance, but it’s funny. And we can’t even be that funny in music.

FAGEN: When you’re writing about serious subjects, and I guess we are, we have to remember that it’s rock ‘ n’ roll music and the risk of being pretentious is real high, if you’re not careful. It’s just too short a time to really explain anything; it’s not a short story, it’s not a novel.

MUSICIAN: It has to be a miniature.

FAGEN: Yeah, a miniature, and sometimes you can’t fill in the details. So you hope that you give the proper signals, so that people will get a sense of what you’re talking about.

BECKER: In “Gaucho” for example, there’s more of a story — that you and I know about — that’s not in the song. There’s very little in the song. As far as I can tell, [ laughing] there’s very little in the song other than a fucking cape and a car and the Custerdome, and nobody knows what that is. So.

MUSICIAN: Let’s use that song as a jumping off point in terms of your lyrics. Certain artists — perhaps writers or film makers more than songwriters — strive for a certain amount of Polysemy, or ambiguity in their work, in service of not only their desire to create something rich in meaning for their audience but also to keep some of their work personal, kind of private.

FAGEN: We’re just trying to use what fits. It’s the exact opposite of the New York Times, where it’s ” All The News That’s Fit To Print.” Here, we print what’ll fit. Like you say, it’s not even a short story, hardly a paragraph, so the story doesn’t always fit. If you get — as opposed to the kernel of the thought — the
husk of the thought, maybe you can figure out what kind of story is there. I don’t feel like I’m being stripped of anything if I’m understood. Why would anybody doing this sort of thing want to preserve something or keep it for themselves?

MUSICIAN: I’m not talking about intentional mystification or impenetrability, but there is a school of thought which says, while the artist must communicate to his audience, he may also keep certain details or backgrounds or underpinnings of the art rather private.

FAGEN: It depends on the song and the subject matter. The lyrics must be subordinate to the music and you can only give as many clues as you have time for. There’s no intentional mystification.

BECKER: We’re not trying to protect anything. It’s just that some of the smaller, pettier details in a story are the best ones. The little things that you retain in your sense more than in your mind; they may not make much sense but they color something. It’s really hard. There may be something to what you’re saying, in that, if something is open-ended, or means more than one thing, or is elliptical or whatever, someone listening to it carefully enough will in fact become creative, and fill in the spaces with their own intelligence. And you’d be amazed at the songs people have written about that we’ve written. Some guy wrote us and said ” Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” is about Eric Clapton and the number is a joint. We get letters, phone calls — from people who ” know exactly what we mean” and they just have to tell us that they know.

[ If you’ve read this far, you’re probably pretty invested and would like to finish reading the interview… It’s quite long so we’re linking the pdf scan of the full magazine below. Enjoy! ]

---

Read the full interview here: https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All Music/Musician/1980/1981/Musician-1981-03.pdf (pages 62-72)