“The most difficult guys”: the musicians who hated working with Steely Dan
Being in the studio with any member of Steely Dan was never going to be easy. Even when they had everything sequenced perfectly on one of their records, they were bound to have a few problems when they were mastering it or happened to find one note that was out of place compared to what they had in their head. They ruled the studio with an iron fist in many respects, but that didn’t mean that everyone who walked into the session had to be happy to be there.
Then again, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were always willing to work with musicians whom they trusted. Larry Carlton may have had several different passes when working on ‘Kid Charlemagne’, but when working on a track like ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’, it was a communal idea for everyone to start off on one big chord before the official beat had dropped when the rest of the band kicked in.
But the usual rock session musicians were bound to be thrown for a loop. This was music created by the seasoned veterans of the genre, and since they had spent their first album trying to make the touring cycle fit with their usual style, they knew that their future was going to be making the studio their home and not rest until everyone was playing the tracks absolutely right. So, for any fairweather rock and roll guitarist, it was time for them to brush up on their jazz homework.
While Fagen and Becker didn’t consider themselves purely jazz musicians, they were clearly influenced by everything going on in the world of fusion. There had been people who had tried blending the two genres like Weather Report, but as soon as you hear something like ‘Black Cow’ or ‘Peg’, this was the kind of mix between jazz, R&B, and pretty much anything else other than standard rock and roll as one could get.
“They didn’t like the fact that these young kids were running these sessions.”
Walter Becker
If anyone was shooting for the best, it was better to get the biggest names in jazz for the record, but that’s easier said than done. Most jazz musicians were looking at pop recordings as lightweight fluff, so when a band actually tried to step up to their level, they were already looking down their noses at them before they even walked into the studio.
According to Becker, he remembered that the jazz musicians that they were working with wanted nothing to do with them for the majority of the sessions, saying, “To me, the most difficult guys – without getting down to specific names – would be jazz players who, if it wasn’t a jazz date, would treat it just like another gig. They’d have a kind of contemptuous attitude, and they didn’t like the fact that these young kids were running these sessions and trying to tell them what to do.”
It may have seemed like the highest imposition for anyone to dare try to play pop music, but listening to a lot of their work later, it’s easy to see why they should be regarded as one of the finest pop bands ever created. Aja always gets lauded for its fantastic production, but the real power behind the title track is some of the fantastic jazz lines that Wayne Shorter plays on saxophone.
However, the core message behind Steely Dan had more to do with the creative minds behind the board rather than how old they were. The jazz musicians may have had a few more years of experience under their belt, but being wet behind the ears in some respects doesn’t mean that you don’t know what you’re doing.
