How Steely Dan album ‘Gaucho’ nearly destroyed Jeff Porcaro
While Steely Dan has garnered great respect from generations of listeners, bandleaders Donald Fagen and the late Walter Becker also cultivated a reputation as two of the fiercest perfectionists in popular music. Dedicated to their craft, the tales of the band putting musicians through the wringer are manifold.
Perhaps the most famous example of their tenacity is what unfolded when recording their revered 1980 album, Gaucho, a body of work noted for marking a stylistic shift in the band’s sound. At this juncture, the focus was on rhythm rather than harmonically complex melodies. The studio sessions have gone down in history as some of the most taxing known to man, fuelled by Becker and Fagen’s relentless perfectionism.
One of the musicians the duo hired was Dire Straits leader and guitarist Mark Knopfler, one of his day’s most technically gifted six-string players. Impressed by the Scotsman’s work on cuts such as ‘Sultans of Swing’, Steely Dan hired Knopfler to play on ‘Time Out of Mind’. Yet, it proved to be a morale-destroying experience. “It was a strange experience,” Knopfler recalled, “Like getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boot.”
It wasn’t only Knopfler who felt the pang of this Herculean recording task. Despite the session musicians playing on Gaucho being some of the finest available, Becker and Fagen were unsatisfied with the number of basic tracks, particularly regarding the drumming. Demonstrating the eminence of the drummers appearing on the record, the likes of Steve Gadd, Rick Marotta, Bernard Purdie and Jeff Porcaro all chipped in with their efforts. As is well known, Gadd provided one of the best-ever drum solos on the earlier Steely Dan track, ‘Aja’. However, this is Becker and Fagen at the helm, and they kneel to no man.
Recalling what occurred during a 2006 interview with Sound of Sound, Fagen outlined a conversation he and Becker had with recording engineer Roger Nichols. He said: “It’s too bad that we can’t get a machine to play the beat we want, with full-frequency drum sounds, and to be able to move the snare drum and kick drum around independently. Nichols replied, ‘I can do that.’ This was back in 1978 or something, so we said, ‘You can do that???’ To which he said, ‘Yes, all I need is $150,000.’ So we gave him the money out of our recording budget, and six weeks later he came in with this machine and that is how it all started.”
One man who was particularly destroyed by the recording process was drummer Jeff Porcaro. When speaking to Modern Drummer, he claimed that the only track on the album he played on, the titular ‘Gaucho’ required “something like 47 edits” and was captured through the night in sessions where the band were made to “play like their depended on it”.
He said: “From noon till six we’d play the tune over and over and over again, nailing each part. We’d go to dinner and come back and start recording. They made everybody play like their life depended on it. But they weren’t gonna keep anything anyone else played that night, no matter how tight it was. All they were going for was the drum track.”
Listen to Gaucho in full below.
