The musician Walter Becker said was out of his league: “I’m really out of class here”
It was known amongst musical circles that entering the studio with Steely Dan, should be done with extreme caution, for Walter Becker and Donald Fagen settled for nothing less than what they would deem as perfection.
Even someone as talented as Mark Knopfler was put to the sword. When they enlisted the Dire Straits axe-man to lay down some guitar parts on 1980s’s ‘Time Out of Mind’, from Gaucho, his reputation was quickly thrown to the wind when he didn’t meet the band’s standards.
Failing to deliver the solo Becker and Fagan desired, Knopfler left the studio with a rather telling appraisal of their methods: “It was a strange experience,” Knopfler recalled, “Like getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boot.”
Then there was ‘Peg’ from their 1977 record Aja. It was a song meticulous in its textural approach, and so again the band sought out a guitar solo to match. But before they landed on their finished product, which was ironically rather muted in the mix, they fired seven session guitarists, all of which came and went, dying on their sword of effort that simply wasn’t enough for the rigorous pair.
But that record boasted a track that had an inverse effect on Steely Dan, even causing them to question their own legitimacy as musicians. On ‘Home At Last’ the band welcomed the inclusion of Bernard Purdie, who laid down the drums on the record and in turn raised the bar of quality that even Walter Becker couldn’t reach.
He said, “We had done a couple of albums with a little band and we had you know heard these players and done overdubs and stuff with them and I found myself in the room with these guys and I felt like, wow I’m really out of class here.”
When Becker and Fagan told Purdie that they didn’t want a take on the Motown shuffle for the track, nor the Chicago style either, just that they wanted the drum beat to played at half-time. It was a relatively arbitrary note of direction for Purdie to follow, seemingly setting up for a firing that would have been on brand for the pair. But instead, Purdie introduced them to a beat he confidently dubbed “the Purdie shuffle” a beat that he told the band could be “comfortable with” while ending “up getting exactly what you asked for half-time funky laid back without thinking that it’s a shuffle.”
It was a key component to the song, giving it that laid back lounge soundscape and allowing for the keys and vocals to take centre stage. It’s a role not lost on Becker, who still attributes the success of the song to Purdie.
Becker said, “You’d come in with a tune and have sort of something in mind, but the way Bernard played stuff was always he always had some unique stylistic thing that he did that you would never imagine in advance and that nobody else would do. This tune was a good example of that.”
