The American city Donald Fagen considered the height of stupidity: “Nobody seemed to understand”
Given that the sound they adopted from early on in their career was so vastly different from everything their peers were making, it’s hard to definitively say if Steely Dan particularly embodied the sound of any particular city, let alone the whole of America.
Its two founding and only consistent members, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, initially met at college in New York and quickly bonded over a shared interest in jazz music and satirical humour, injecting this into their pre-Steely Dan work and beginning to forge something of a unique identity for themselves, detached from what the wider industry was generating at the time.
They’d eventually find jobs as songwriters for the illustrious Brill Building songwriting house in Manhattan, working alongside other notable songwriting partnerships such as Carole King and Jerry Goffin, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, but the wide reach of everything they were working on didn’t exactly scream out with a particular identity either.
Returning to their roots of jazz and inflecting it with some of the pop sensibilities they’d acquired from their group, they ended up creating something entirely different in its approach. However, this was hardly an indication of their identity as New Yorkers; they were just operating on a completely different level than everyone else, essentially just two misfits who didn’t have their own scene to fit into.
The future of music in New York saw art rock, punk and new wave eventually becoming the dominant forces, and Fagen and Becker would eventually find themselves in a position where they would decamp from their home in New York and move onto pastures new in order to give themselves a better chance at finding the right people who shared their vision.
However, having this sardonic sense of humour and distaste for things that were more deliberately trying to fit into a particular mould and follow the crowd meant that, despite moving to Los Angeles in order to amass a group of musicians to perform with them, it came at a cost.
Steely Dan first set up camp in their new home of LA shortly before they went into the studio to record their debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, in 1972, but were met with a city that was so far removed from everything that they’d come to know in New York. They may have established themselves and gained a considerable audience by the time they came to record their sixth album, Aja, but they were distinctly fed up with the falseness of the city around them, unsure of how anyone could stomach living there for so long.
“LA was certainly a lot of laughs,” Fagen later laughed in a 2012 interview with GQ. “Neither of us really liked it, because we just weren’t LA-type people. We called it ‘Planet Stupid’. Nobody seemed to understand us there.”
It makes sense that this would be their perspective, seeing as so many of their songs seem to poke fun at the pretentious nature of the West Coast attitude and the hollowness of the people that resided there, even if this is a common misconception about the place. That being said, it’s the city that brought them fame and fortune, so despite mocking it for all it was worth, they’d somehow found the most appropriate home for themselves as artists, even if it was subject to immense amounts of scorn from the duo.
