The one band who truly inspired Steely Dan: “We both loved all that”
Perhaps the reason why the 1970s are often regarded as the greatest decade of music is that the musicians who were active during the period had a wealth of things to inspire them. The ‘50s saw the birth of rock and roll as we know it, and the ‘60s saw a slight expansion on this with the emergence of new sounds, meaning that by the 1970s, artists were truly hitting their stride.
By this metric, music should have continued to improve year upon year, and while there’s no denying that the state of contemporary music is still healthy, there’s also a glut of it to be digested and not all of it is going to be following the same paths of influence, nor is it automatically going to be any good. The ‘70s, therefore, had the best of both worlds – a healthy amount of prior music to base your ideas upon, but not so much as an overabundance.
This meant that bands like Steely Dan, who released their debut album in 1971, had two decades of splendid innovation to look back upon for their inspiration, and with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker both being accomplished musicians, it was clear that they were only going to get better as time went on as they gelled more with the other musicians around them.
Their soft rock and jazz pop leanings were the most evident, and they utilised it to great effect to make a blend of genres that hadn’t really been explored to a great extent by many other artists, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t other groups and scenes out there that were able to provide a significant amount of inspiration to the duo.
Surrounding Fagen and Becker in the ‘60s were plenty of acts in the counterculture movement such as the Grateful Dead, but many groups emerging from the New York arts scene such as The Velvet Underground, and while they both acknowledge the importance of these two acts as having had a reasonable influence on Steely Dan’s output, there was one that stood out to Fagen in particular as having provided a significant model for the band to base themselves upon.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2021, he reflected on the formation of Steely Dan and how they first came to settle upon a sound. “When we first started, if we had any models, first of all, there was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention,” he confessed. “We got to see a bunch of shows when they spent a summer at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street in the Village. In the afternoons, you could go in for nothing and watch them rehearse. And we both loved all that stuff. We loved what he was doing on stage and the humor, like a combination of Lenny Bruce and the hippie, counterculture humor.”
While Steely Dan weren’t quite as overt as Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were with their use of zany humour, there’s still plenty of playfulness to their sound, and the way they also managed to show off their technical flair in their music was slightly more subdued. That being said, the parallels between the two are palpable, and if you’re going to base yourself on any act that fused rock with jazz, Zappa is surely not a bad place to look.
