Real places, familiar faces: the geography of Steely Dan
Steely Dan are one of pop music’s great storytellers, up there with Nick Cave and Ghostface Killah for their eagle’s eye for detail and novelist’s skill with character building. ‘Cousin Dupree’, ‘Bad Sneakers’, and ‘Deacon Blues’ all have the kind of depth and weight that most short story writers would kill for. What’s more, the stories featured in those songs are at least partially based on their real life. ‘My Old School’ example is about an actual drug bust that occurred at Bard College, the alma mater of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.
The story is given weight by the fact that the opening lyric directly name-checks the hamlet on which the college campus is based: “I remember the 35 sweet goodbyes / When you put me on the Wolverine up to Annandale / It was still September.” This gives the narrative a tangibility that helps it stick in the listener’s memory, and it’s a trick repeated all over their music.
In fact, the very name of ‘Deacon Blues’ comes from a location name combined with their trademark sardonic wit. The song, a study of a man beaten down by life, ponders, “They got a name for the winners in the world / I want a name when I lose / They call Alabama the Crimson Tide / Call me Deacon Blues’. The line is a reference to The University of Alabama’s all-conquering college football team, the Crimson Tide. It was actually a real-life observation from Fagen, which gives the track a self-aware edge that stops it from descending into smug superiority.
Their lyrics go beyond mere namechecking of different states and cities, although they use Americana style. ‘Parker’s Band’, taken from the 1974 masterwork Pretzel Logic, is a heartfelt tribute to the life of Charlie Parker, a key influence on the band. Not content with paying tribute to Bird’s music, though, it also acts as a whistlestop tour of the locations most important to him.
These include a wide range, from his place of birth (“Kansas City born and growing / You won’t believe what the boys are blowing”) to the clubs he made his name in (“Either way you’re bound to function / 52nd Street’s the junction”) all the way to the psychiatric hospital he was committed to later in life (“You’ll be grooving high or relaxing at Camarillo”).
This specificity was there from the very beginning. ‘Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)’, as Fagen himself detailed to Aimee Mann, is a song about how he and Becker lived together in “A tower room at Eden Rock”. At the time, they had to put up with their downstairs neighbour, a bitter guy whose day-to-day life seemed to consist of drinking beer and bitching about what he felt he was entitled to, leading them to decide that the whole borough “owes the charmer under me”!
The list goes on and can actually be found here if you want to disappear down a rabbit hole you’ll struggle to get out of. But hey, it’s a rabbit hole consisting of classic Steely Dan tracks and their impeccable lyricism.
