The one musician Donald Fagen said was always “perfect”
There are plenty of musicians who could have walked away with horror stories working with Steely Dan.
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had a lot more tolerance for the true professionals in their field, but if they didn’t have the right tone or touch to work on one of their records, it wasn’t hard to see them give even the greatest guitarists of all time the cold shoulder. But as far as Fagen was concerned, not every song needed to be absolutely pristine for him to find the beauty in it.
Then again, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the band ran their band like musical dictators. The stories of getting the tracks on Gaucho sounds like a horror story for anyone that has been in their fair share of recording studios, but even when someone played to the best of their abilities, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Fagen and Becker to spend an entire day working on on of their tunes and then scrap the whole thing when they found someone better to lay down a guitar solo or play the drums.
Because, really, what they were doing wasn’t about songwriting in the traditional sense. They knew what the music was supposed to sound like in their head, and the biggest part of their job was finding the right sonic tools they could use to help create that sound. That meant listening intently to every subtle nuance that every player worked with, and that kind of practice came from people already well versed in jazz vocabulary.
‘The Dan’ were practically a jazz band that happened to be on the charts with the rest of the world, and even if they had rock and roll players on their records, there’s a reason why they gravitated towards people like Larry Carlton and Denny Dias whenever they needed a solo. These were the people who could make a song come alive, but the jazz greats weren’t always about playing the most tuneful songs of all time.
Ornette Coleman had spent his entire life making a more avant-garde take on jazz, and while the mainstream had absolutely no time for his little experiments, Fagen could still appreciate that kind of playing. His heroes were always reaching for something new whenever they performed, and compared to every other jazz player, no one could even touch the kind of tone that Eric Dolphy had whenever he played with giants like John Coltrane.
Coltrane already deserves a place among jazz’s finest musicians, but Fagen felt that Dolphy’s strength was being able to get all of his emotion out whenever he played, saying, “Coltrane rarely played out of tune. I like him best as a wild, off-center hard bop player. Eric Dolphy plays out of tune, out of time and just plain out – and it’s always perfect. I couldn’t play Eric when my mom was home, though.”
And while you wouldn’t hear that kind of off-the-wall playing on a Steely Dan record, Fagen’s voice fits into the mould of what Dolphy was going for. He didn’t exactly have the nicest voice in the world, but on every one of their albums, it’s hard to picture anyone else singing one of their songs, either. Michael McDonald being demoted to backup singer was unthinkable, but it takes a certain kind of vocal register to make songs like ‘Peg’ sound like they do.
Dolphy did have his moments where things could have sounded out of tune every now and again, but Fagen never saw his imperfections as a bad thing. Any other musician is going to want to tell their story through their instrument, and you can feel every single ounce of fear, pain, happiness, and humour depending on which part of the song Dolphy is playing.
