The 1973 Steely Dan song that Steven Tyler turned down: “Are you serious?”
Anyone going into play on a Steely Dan song had to have a reasonably high pedigree in their instrumentation.
Foregoing the traditional approach to capturing a band playing live, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were not going to rest until they had songs that were perfect from top to bottom. While every Steely Dan record featured a who’s who of the greatest session musicians of the 1970s, a few legends refused to go anywhere near the jazz-rock legends.
First emerging as a traditional rock and roll band on the album Can’t Buy a Thrill, Steely Dan had already started carving out their niche in the rock scene. Throughout every track, Fagen and Becker paint the subjects of their songs as the most despicable characters in rock and roll, albeit with a touch of sympathy to make them more palatable. For all of the great songs on their first album, something was missing on tracks like ‘Dirty Work’.
Since Fagen was too shy to get in front of the microphone, the idea behind their first singles was to have David Palmer sing lead vocals. Although there was nothing wrong with Palmer’s vocal chops, his blue-eyed soul voice felt alien compared to the lyrics, sounding so effortless when coming out of Fagen’s mouth.
Though Fagen reluctantly assumed lead vocal duties for most of the group’s career, the musicians behind him would include a handful of the most well-respected singers in the rock scene. Aside from getting the session guitarists and keyboardists to sing the tracks, Michael McDonald of The Doobie Brothers and Steven Lukather from Toto also turned in time behind the microphone, singing backing vocals on tracks like ‘Peg’.
When working on their sophomore album, Countdown to Ecstasy, there was a good chance that the band could have acquired assistance from Steven Tyler. After laying down a backing track for the song ‘My Old School’, guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter sent the tune to the Aerosmith frontman, hoping he would take to it.
After giving it a listen, Tyler thought that the song would be better suited to Baxter, as the guitarist recalls to Rock History Music, “When I sent it to him, he said, ‘Who’s singing?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s me, but I did that as a scratch vocal so that you knew where it was going.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you sing?’ I said, ‘Because I’m not a singer.’ He said, ‘Well, you are.’ I thought I was not. I asked, ‘Are you serious?’ He said, ‘Yeah, take this shot.’ So I figured he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do.”
‘My Old School’ would eventually become one of the defining tracks on Countdown to Ecstasy. Built around a punchy horn arrangement and a groove that blurred the line between rock and jazz, the song captured the sharp wit that would soon become Steely Dan’s trademark. Lyrically, it was inspired by Becker and Fagen’s own troubled experiences at Bard College, where a drug bust involving several students left the pair with a lifelong resentment toward the institution.
Taking the reins away from Fagen, the track features some of the most tasteful playing Baxter ever laid down, putting a certain cynicism to the nostalgia alluded to in the lyrics. Although the song did have its fair share of highlights, it wasn’t enough to get Steely Dan on the radio just yet.
Compared to the knockout single ‘Reelin’ in the Years’, Countdown to Ecstasy was full of production and songwriting choices of a band still coming into their own. Once they started on Pretzel Logic, though, the band found their lane as one of the best jazz-rock acts of their time. Steely Dan had a lot of work to do before becoming musical legends, but they didn’t need Steven Tyler behind the mic in order to kick ass.
In hindsight, Tyler’s refusal may have helped the song find its proper identity. Steely Dan were already moving toward a sound that relied less on outside personalities and more on the meticulous musical world Becker and Fagen were building in the studio. ‘My Old School’ became an early example of that philosophy, proving that their songs didn’t need a star vocalist to stand out.
