The humiliating Steely Dan album Donald Fagen wants to forget: “Piece of shit”
Steely Dan: the artisanal coffee of classic rock. Nobody was safe from their tailored sarkiness. Not even themselves.
There are plenty of rock stars who have slated their peers, there are some who have slated themselves, but there is only one who has slated the genre of rock ‘n’ roll as a collective subculture.
Donald Fagen – rock ‘n’ roll’s own sardonic anti-hero, who is actually part of a secret jazz band merely masquerading among the market force of ‘guitar bands’ – once opined: “I don’t like rock music, to be frank.”
He casually continued, “I know David Byrne, and I once heard Nirvana, I think. But anthemic rock music is inherently fascist – anything intended to move huge masses of people is politically offensive to me”.
It’s a bold stance to take for someone who makes his living in that arena. But old Fagen is always “just being honest”. In fact, he’s often taken a similar stance when it comes to his own discography and how inherently offended he is by it. “I don’t listen to our old records,” he once said, “but if I happen to hear one on the radio, my general feeling is humiliation.”
However, it wasn’t just the early years of the band’s discography that perturbed him. Back in 2013, when Steely Dan almost accidentally became a touring band again, it was noted that their most recent release, 2003’s indifferent Everything Must Go, was mysteriously absent from all their set lists.
This mystery didn’t rumble on too long because when Fagen was asked by Jeff Niesel why they ditched all efforts from what was then and remains their most recent release. Characteristically, Fagen quickly quipped: “We don’t play any of that piece of shit. Are you kidding me?”
The album remains the only Steely Dan record not to reach Gold certification in the US. It is easy to see why. In truth, it’s only a bad record by virtue of the fact that it’s not good enough to be anything else. Fagen noted this himself by paradoxically claiming it was “underrated” and a “piece of shit” that didn’t have any worthy offerings for the band to play live, even under the “fascist” pretence of a rock show.
It might be an odd appraisal, but he pretty much nails it in one. There is a tragic irony to fact that the Walter and Becker partnership bowed out on an album that they deemed too poor to ever play live, but good enough for critics and fans to gloss over without too much scorn. There is simply a tepid indifference to the album that typified the band’s persona in some way.
It lacks the luscious hooks of their “humiliating” early work, it even lacks the comic controversy of the clever postmodernism displayed in 2000s cuts like ‘Cousin Dupree’ that dominated the discourse of their comeback album, Two Against Nature, that arrived three years earlier.
In fact, Everything Must Go is lacking in pretty much everything that made Steely Dan a great band, but they’re such a great band, polished and tight to an nth by that point, that on the whole, you barely notice. It just sounds like the elevator music that their most cutting critiques have always brandished against them.
Upon its release, Fagen quipped, “We were the enemy of punk bands all over… where are they now?” He might be the self-appointed master of “irony”, but a bit of punk was exactly what their sorry farewell lacked, not that they cared all that much, which, in itself, is very punk indeed. But at the final, ninth hurdle, the dark side of that lack of care finally reared its ugly head
