The Steely Dan song Michael McDonald deemed impossible to sing
Once one of the many bywords for 1970s lameness, Steely Dan have been embraced by a new generation for their jazz-inflected character sketches and stellar pop hooks. Their 1975 record ‘Katy Lied’ is arguably the best example of both these sides of the band. Four albums in, most artists are starting to run out of ideas but part of The Dan’s creative windfall came from an unlikely source. Namely, their new backing singer!
Famously, the band got through backing musicians like Hitchcock got through blondes. The sheer complexity of their music drives legions of talented guitarists to throw up their blistered hands and demand that Becker and Fagen lose their number immediately. While touring 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy in particular, Steely Dan were taking on anyone who’d looked twice at an instrument just to get through the tour, which put a relatively unknown singer-songwriter called Michael McDonald on their radar. Being a die-hard fan of the band, McDonald jumped at the chance to audition for them.
He told the Ventura County Star, “I literally threw my piano in the back of my Pinto and drove down to where they were rehearsing and auditioned.” While the audition went well, it soon became apparent that it wasn’t just for his piano skills. Lush, multilayered vocal harmonies were already a key part of the band’s sound. Easy enough to produce in the studio but a lot harder to achieve live. What made McDonald appeal to the band wasn’t just his ability on the ivories; it was also his ability to hit high notes, or as Fagen put it, “sing like a girl”.
McDonald’s appeal ran a lot deeper to Fagen and Becker than his ability to replicate their music, though, as he was invited to join the band full-time after the tour for Countdown to Ecstasy was over. McDonald accepted eagerly, and not because he had the time on his hands either. Steely’s previous guitarist, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, had joined AOR mainstays the Doobie Brothers and recruited McDonald to sing for them while lead singer Tom Johnston took time off to recover from a serious illness. So, McDonald found a way to split his time between singing live for the Doobs and joining Steely Dan in the studio recording their upcoming album. Truly, what better life could a man lead in the 1970’s?
That said, McDonald soon found that the previous backing players on Dan records were not kidding, and that Fagen and Becker were hard taskmasters in the studio. For the most part, he was up to the job, featuring prominently on tracks like ‘Bad Sneakers’ and ‘Rose Darling’. There was one major exception to this, the album’s side one closer ‘Doctor Wu’.
The track’s complex backing vocals were sent over to McDonald, and, in listening to the track, he realised he’d have to sing extended sections of them in one breath. He passed on giving it a try because, as he told Mojo decades later, he’d lost a lot of his lung capacity to a capacious pot habit.
This is a crying shame as the song is a highlight of the album. As paranoid as it is catchy, the track creates the character of an unscrupulous therapist called Doctor Wu to rail against those who manipulate others under the guise of helping them. Thankfully, Fagen and Becker didn’t hold it against McDonald and would work with him for years to come, even welcoming him back into the band for their 2006 reunion tour. Perhaps they understood where he was coming from, after all, it was Cali grass in the ’70s, who could blame the guy for having a habit?
