The one singer Donald Fagen wished he could be: “I’m really envious”
When Steely Dan first started, Donald Fagen and Walter Beck didn’t ever bother learning the phrase ‘good enough’.
They were looking for nothing less than perfection when they made their records, and given how much time they would labour over a single drum part, you’d have to wonder whether they were actually drill sergeants that happened to be behind a board instead of in a locker room. But Fagen did have that little inkling that made him wish that he could take his foot off the gas every so often.
Then again, would any of ‘The Dan’s records have been better if they had taken that approach? Every one of their greatest hits featured them getting the most out of every instrument, and even if it did leave the players with a few bruised egos every now and again, it’s important for everyone to be on the same wavelength when working on a record. And Fagen was the one who usually had the biggest burden being the singer of the group.
He never saw himself as a vocalist, but when you look through all of their greatest hits, there was no way anyone else could have done justice to what he did behind the microphone. Every character in their songs was more than a little bit unsavoury, and even if Fagen did sprinkle in a dash of sympathy for everyone they sang about, you could hear him stretching himself as much as the band when working on ‘Kid Charlemagne’.
But even if Steely Dan were some of the best “rock and roll” musicians out at the time, the genre wasn’t always about trying to be the most perfect musician in the world. There were certainly virtuosos out there if you knew where to look for them, but when the genre was just finding its feet, some of the best musicians were the ones who left a lot of their mistakes in the mix for the world to see. And no other artist seemed to be more proud of his mistakes than Bob Dylan when he wrote his tunes.
All of his tracks have practically become part of American folklore now, but part of Dylan’s mystique was in the fact that the songs were never truly finished. They have come out on his records, and you can listen to them until the end of time, but whenever he played live, the audience usually had no clue whether he was going to kick into something completely different midway through a song or try his hand at rewriting certain verses to suit where he was at any given time.
Steely Dan never operated in that way, but Fagen did wish he could see what that version of performance was like whenever he saw Dylan play, saying, “I’m really envious in a way of Bob Dylan, who really is very free in the way he tries different things with different songs. I don’t know if it’s always successful, but he certainly has a lot of fun messing around with his tunes. I have differences in phrasing — I have been doing them for a long time, and by now, they may have diverged from the original performances — but not in any radical way.”
Whereas Dylan’s songs were a work in progress, though, there aren’t many Steely Dan songs that benefit from Fagen improvising every single time he plays. He and Becker were working to make sure that everything was perfect, and since Larry Carlton and Steve Gadd had done their part to make some of the tastiest performances ever laid down on record, the only thing Fagen could hope for was that the touring band could match half of what they sounded like when they pressed their albums on vinyl.
It might get more than a little bit boring trying to make everything feel fresh when playing the same thing live, but part of being a member of ‘The Dan’ is knowing that nailing it is always a challenge. No one walks away from a song like ‘Aja’ or ‘Peg’ thinking that every part of it is easy, and the idea of hitting every single accent perfectly is half of the fun whenever they perform their tunes live.
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