The two songs Steely Dan were proudest of and the two artists they still couldn’t compete with
When you look around at the current landscape, it doesn’t take long to realise that most musicians talk a good game about wanting things to be done a certain way. However, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anybody with as much of a perfectionist streak as Steely Dan.
It’s something that most musicians struggle with, to a degree. After all, as an artist, there’s always a natural desire to get everything just right, especially when there’s a specific vision involved and a certain approach guaranteed to get you as close to that vision as possible. However, most musicians also recognise that constantly striving for perfection when it doesn’t actually exist can often be more detrimental than beneficial.
In the realm of Steely Dan, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s perfectionism is well-known. Their meticulousness and arduousness in the studio are well documented and a major reason why their sound became so tight and smooth, but it’s also why certain collaborators and musicians found it nearly impossible to work with them at all.
On Gaucho, for instance, the pair’s unrelenting pettiness resulted in a pissed-off Mark Knopfler, who they’d initially enlisted for some overdubs on the track ‘Time Out of My Mind’. He even reflected on it later, saying that working with them was effectively like trying to achieve the impossible, which is far from the kind of positive working environment anybody expects or wants when working with other established or well-respected musicians.
In fact, many of these instances came from the same record, with others, like ‘Babylon Sisters’, needing a hefty amount of mixing (274, to be exact) before Fagen was finally happy with it. When you consider that most songs go through about two or three mixing revisions, this sounds positively heinous – not just for Fagen, who decided to take on the task of intense overkill, but for those around him, who had to witness this utter insanity unfold in a space intended for creativity.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that they’re also their harshest critics. This isn’t usually all that uncommon in the music space, again because, as artists, their eye for detail is better than most when it comes to their own work. And Fagen has actually said in the past that some of their albums are “fairly humiliating”, no doubt referring to his eternal search for a version of himself and his art that doesn’t even exist.
However, in 1981, Becker told Musician Magazine that two songs on their debut album, ‘Do It Again’ and ‘Reelin’ In The Years’, are “good fucking records”, to which Fagen said he agrees. Becker added, “It’s only fuckin’ rock n’ roll. It’s for kids. It’s not Gustav Mahler, or even Tristin Fabriani.”
Still, it might’ve seemed like a fairly dismissive comment, especially the kids part, which Becker didn’t explain much, except for another comment about not really knowing who their audience is supposed to be. But that’s likely another symptom of being too close to your art and not stopping the pursuit of perfectionism for long enough to see what’s going on outside. Or maybe it’s simply that good music doesn’t have a specific demographic, and appeals to everybody and anybody so long as they find something to connect with.
Either way, many fans would probably agree about some of their best material being found on Can’t Buy A Thrill. Some might disagree, but many of those songs represent much of what would become Dan’s signature feel, especially ‘Reelin’ In The Years’, which not only includes many of their familiar facets but also ultimately kick-started a completely new era for guitar rock.
