“We were impressed”: the only artist Steely Dan considered an inspiration
You could say that 90% of all Steely Dan music feels like it was perfected in a lab rather than played by actual musicians. I mean, there’s a good chance neither you nor I have seen Donald Fagen or Walter Becker in real life, so maybe they really are the kind of cyborgs who cracked the mathematical code for sublime yacht rock in the 1970s. For music that sounds like it came from another planet, though, it’s hard to imagine any one song being a major inspiration for them in the early days.
Granted, it’s not like there aren’t points of reference for where they got their start. On Can’t Buy A Thrill, it was clear that they were going for the same kind of groove that would turn up on old R&B records like on ‘Do It Again’, but as the years went on, their peers didn’t seem to exist in the same area as rock. They felt like they could have a go at melodies from people like Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis and hold their own in their weird way with chords, and the stories were unlike anything you’d see Bob Dylan write.
That’s because, by this point, Fagen and Becker were done being considered members of a band. They were overseers of the music they wanted to hear, which normally meant switching out every single session player they could think of until they had the kind of take they felt had the most magical feel behind it.
And listening to their records, it’s not like that hard work didn’t pay off. Aside from the fact that the actual production sounds fantastic, the real cornerstone of their sound is the way that they use each session musician. On every track on Aja, for example, there are pieces where guitarists like Larry Carlton are there to provide the perfect guitar track, or other times like the title track, where Steve Gadd will deliver a clinic on how to make some of the best drum sounds the studio had ever heard.
“I don’t think we were trying to imitate any of the top songwriters, except, in a roundabout way the very arty songs But Bacharach had written.”
Walter Becker
But Steely Dan were far from the first sonic professors to get behind the board in the studio. Phil Spector had been going strong creating his Wall of Sound, but when looking at the basic construction of their tunes, they felt that they had much more in common with the kind of music that Burt Bacharach had been writing during his prime in the 1960s.
Despite never claiming to have major inspirations, Becker has said that they were more than happy to acknowledge what Bacharach did for their musical development, saying, “I don’t think we were trying to imitate any of the top songwriters, except, in a roundabout way the very arty songs But Bacharach had written for Dionne Warwick. Those were an immense source of inspiration for us, but we weren’t trying to copy them: his pieces had these formal, Stravinskyesque angularities that were reminiscent of 20th-century classical music. We were impressed by how far out he was able to get and still make it sound sort of like pop music.”
Although Becker and Fagen did put a fair bit more window dressing behind most of their tunes, that didn’t stop some of their hits from having a similar tone to them. While a track like ‘Peg’ has a blues-based groove to it, the subtle runs in the background feel like something could have come out of a Bacharach tune, especially with Chuck Rainey playing the bass like a horn would.
But it really goes to show you what a craftsman Bacharach was for influencing this kind of music. His hits weren’t exactly cool in the same way that The Beatles or The Rolling Stones were, but if anyone was the least bit curious about what good songwriting was, they owed it to themselves to study every one of his parts.
