The hilarious reason Eagles drove Steely Dan’s Walter Becker “nuts”
One of the stranger convergences of 1970s rock bands happened between Steely Dan and the Eagles. The two acts weren’t engaged in a turf battle: the Eagles were country rock pioneers who were transitioning into one of the world’s premiere stadium rock acts by the end of the decade. Steely Dan had done the opposite – after pairing the group down to just Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the duo found solace by getting off the road and becoming a studio-only band.
Steely Dan made the first reference when they included the line “turn up the Eagles / the neighbours are listening” on ‘Everything You Did’ from 1975’s The Royal Scam. What proved to be the root of Steely Dan’s apparent swipe at the Eagles? Some enthusiastic listening habits, according to the Eagles themselves.
“Apparently, Walter Becker’s girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time,” singer/guitarist Glenn Frey is quoted as saying in Gavin Edwards’ Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed. “I think it drove him nuts. So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day and that was the genesis of the line.”
The call-out isn’t really insulting – it’s sardonic in a very Steely Dan kind of way. But that reference would later tie the two groups together on a couple of different occasions. Future Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmidt, who at the time was singing with fellow country rock icons Poco, provided backing vocals on The Royal Scam. Don Henley was even invited to provide the backing vocals for ‘Peg’, but when Henley didn’t mesh with the track, those duties were filled by Michael McDonald.
In order to pay them back for the lyrical reference, Henley and Frey decided to include a Steely Dan reference in their own work. While penning the lyrics to ‘Hotel California’, the pair originally had the line “stab them with their Steely Dan / But they just can’t kill the beast” included. When that seemed too direct for their nightmarish tale, Henley and Frey opted to change the line to “steely knives” in order to preserve the metaphor. “We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, so ‘Dan’ got changed to ‘knives,’ which is still, you know, a penile metaphor.”
