“Pretty horrible”: the shows Steely Dan thought were terrible
It’s hard to imagine a world where Steely Dan were ever unpolished. As the godfathers of yacht rock, founding members Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were renowned for co-captaining a tight ship when it came to getting the best out of session musicians and were often praised for how precise they were in the execution of their complex jazz-tinged pop music.
Right from the beginning with their 1972 debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill, they proved just how impressive their chops were, but their story goes back even further than the album that brought the world belters such as ‘Reelin’ in the Years’, ‘Do It Again’ and ‘Dirty Work’. The duo began their careers as in-house writers for Dunhill Records, a subsidiary of label giant ABC, which was home to many acclaimed artists such as Jimmy Buffett, Solomon Burke and Dusty Springfield over its 11-year existence.
While the prospect of writing for others might sound like a cushty job to have, Fagen and Becker quickly grew disillusioned with their roles at the label, with the complexity of their compositions being the main sticking point for them, saying that artists were reluctant to push themselves to work on their elaborate visions of how pop should sound. Given how extraordinary their debut and all subsequent albums would be, it’s no surprise that the two were itching to get out of this situation and deliver their best work to the masses.
The duo would need to find a backing band capable of handling their works with the utmost care and precision. After enlisting the aid of guitarists Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter and Dennis Dias, as well as drummer Jim Hodder, they were ready to hit the studio and eventually the road. The album was a smash, but their performances weren’t exactly smooth sailing when they embarked on their maiden voyage.
Speaking to Melody Maker about their origins in 1974, Fagen quipped that Can’t Buy A Thrill came into existence rapidly out of necessity, citing that “we immediately went into the studio and did an album, simply because we didn’t have anything better to do. We weren’t doing so well as staff writers.” While they would immediately find themselves doing a lot better in their own right, getting the band ready to tour in an equally speedy fashion would prove to be a much harder exercise.
“The record was a hit so we started going on the road,” explained Fagen, before going on to be dismissive of how life on the stage initially panned out for the group. “Our first few shows were pretty horrible, but we’re pretty good now.”
“Pretty good” feels like something of an understatement given how revered the band would become for later albums such as Pretzel Logic and Aja, but also knowing how much of a hard-to-impress perfectionist and taskmaster Fagen could be, it’s probable that these earliest Dan shows were actually fantastic by most standards.
Despite their live shows improving by their own reckoning, the band, in their later years, would refrain from touring extensively and spent much larger portions of their energy on being the studio magicians they would be best known as.
