The filmmaker who inspired Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen
Donald Fagen is not like most rock stars, and Steely Dan isn’t like most rock bands. While aesthetically, tonally, and production-wise, there’s a hint of rock ‘n’ roll kinship, there’s an argument that Steely Dan wasn’t really even a rock band at all.
As Fagen proclaims in his tour diary Eminent Hipster: “Rock star, people forget that it wasn’t used widely until — well, I forget when, but there wasn’t this institutionalised careerism in rock that there is now. I don’t like rock music, to be frank. I know David Byrne, and I once heard Nirvana, I think. But anthemic rock music is inherently fascist — anything intended to move huge masses of people is politically offensive to me.”
The formulaic formatting of rock music, engineered to move the masses with comfortable familiarity, is something Fagen is steadfastly against. He argues: “Most pop music, nothing much happens; you’ll hear something, and it’s repeated. I like when there’s some development. The jazz arrangers of the 1950s and ’60s really knew how to develop a piece of music.“
However, there is one tenet of Steely Dan’s work that does align with pop and blurs the prognosis that they’re purely a jazz band: the lyrics. The pure structural arrangement of words in a verse-chorus fashion is no different from The Beatles. And frankly, the world would be at a deficit had they deprived us of this element and stuck to instrumental compositions. “My natural motive is irony,” Fagen explains, and we’ve been the benefactors of that wit extolled in song.
Through his mirthful musings on life, we get some of the most honest lyrical depictions of the whole human comedy. This unique viewpoint bears a striking kinship with the actor, comic and filmmaker W.C. Fields, who perfected the role of the egotistical drunkard who is simply trying to get by and, as such, garners your sympathy despite his sins. “He had an impact on my life,“ Fagen told New York Magazine, never mind just his work. “He understood that most of life is just, you have to have the appearance that you know what you’re doing.“
As Fields, the famed misanthropissed put it himself, “I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.” Fine-tuning his outlook further, he quipped, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” And finally, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” His comic trick, in essence, was to say how should I know but never fully pronounce that fact and bumble along as though he did.
Of all the songs where Fagen channelled this, his solo effort ‘Brite Nightgown’ was the most direct. Fields would commonly refer to death as the “fella in the bright nightgown”, and Fagen borrowed this motif for his absurdist track. Expanding on his influence in a more general sense, Fagen continued: “Yeah [he’s an inspiration], especially the movies he wrote and directed himself. It’s a Gift is one of my favourites.“
As it happens, It’s a Gift comes with a synopsis that could just as easily be the premise of the Steely Dan track: “A henpecked New Jersey grocer makes plans to move to California to grow oranges, despite the resistance of his overbearing wife.“
