‘Peg’: The Steely Dan guitar solo that required seven guitarists to perfect
Entering the realm of a Steely Dan composition, every musician understands the high standards expected. Instead of casually embracing a groove and seeing where it leads, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are notorious for pushing their session players to their limits, tirelessly striving for that elusive perfect take. Nonetheless, there are moments of rare exception when their unwavering determination manages to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Even if you feel unfamiliar with Steely Dan, their influence extends far and wide through countless songs that have borrowed and emulated their signature sounds, often extracting beats and hooks from their iconic album Aja. One of the most frequently sampled tracks, ‘Peg’, demonstrates the duo’s rigorous work ethic and precise compositional techniques.
Many have noted the duo’s intense meticulousness over the years, along with their attention to detail and perfectionism that made finishing any track near impossible. In the case of ‘Peg’, the duo enlisted the help of highly talented musicians for a session, scrapping every performance and then bringing in an entirely new band the next day.
Their engineer Elliot Scheiner noted the difficulty of the process, saying: “Every track, every overdub had to be the perfect overdub. They didn’t settle for anything. They were always looking for the perfect.” By being seemingly invincible to any detriment to their sales, their rhythm guitarist said there may have been some element of “license for abuse”, but it also meant that they never had to settle.
They engaged in a cut-throat level of trial and error, going through several iterations of bands and taking each as an opportunity to figure out who fit the style of the song perfectly. This proved particularly ruthless with the ‘Peg’ guitar solo, performed on the record by session player Jay Graydon, who was chosen after seven previous guitarists.
Although the process was long and arduous, Randall recalls “feeling really good about it”, despite Fagen feeling “silly spending all this money for this one brief blues solo”. When they recruited Graydon, he was understandably over the moon, saying, “Every studio guitar player wanted to be on a Steely Dan record.”
The concise solo complements the song flawlessly, though a similar sentiment could be expressed had they opted for any of the numerous alternate takes available. However, we remain uncertain since we can only listen to a handful of rejected attempts at the outset, all of which are evidently of lesser quality. After a marathon recording session lasting four or five hours, even Graydon himself departed from the studio without a definitive verdict on whether the solo was worth keeping. Then, one day, as he casually turned on the radio, there it was – a pleasant surprise confirming its worthiness.
