“Smell those proverbial roses”: the only music Donald Fagen listens to
Walker Becker and Donald Fagen may have seemed like just your usual hippie musicians, but everything they represented within Steely Dan extended far wider than those stereotypes. During a time when the counterculture movement was in full swing, Steely Dan stood out as the real pioneers, with a sardonic musical approach that epitomised the future-gazing thinking of the time.
With earlier influences like Frank Zappa and The Fugs, Steely Dan thrived during a time when disengaging from the hippie counterculture movement was almost impossible. Although they were often lumped into the same types of categories, the band felt disdainful towards the label, echoing a sentiment Zappa would later adopt in an effort to distance himself.
In the early days, however, Zappa was a huge hero in the eyes of Fagen, who drew a significant amount of inspiration from his first influential outfit The Mothers of Invention. It’s easy to understand why, given the fusion of avant-garde and comedy within albums like We’re Only in It for The Money. However, the two also redefined what it meant to involve jazz sensibilities during a time that placed such importance on rock ‘n’ roll.
Steely Dan and Zappa both shared a penchant for satirical approaches, but they also took many quintessentially jazz elements and applied their own spin on them. This was a natural direction Fagen would take from as far back as his school days, when he would listen to many of the jazz greats, like Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk.
Now, however, his life has entered a new chapter where music takes up less of his time. Instead, he’s hard at work, composing “almost every day” and playing “some standards and jazz tunes” in the hopes that one day he might hear his work being played in a movie theatre. When he does stop to “smell those proverbial roses”, however, he continually revisits the same things.
According to the musician, these include “old jazz records” like “Ray Charles, Chicago blues, some French composers” and, occasionally, “with shutters drawn, I sneak a listen to my crackly copy of Highway 61 Revisited.” Considered by some as Bob Dylan’s magnum opus, his ironic and cynical approach to songwriting on Highway 61 Revisited seems like an entirely fitting addition to Fagan’s limited listening habits.
He may feel like he has outgrown some of music’s most genre-defining trailblazers, but amid the jazz greats, Dylan sits perfectly on the opposite side of the scales. After all, any of Steely Dan’s earlier traits could be viewed as a mirror of the legendary troubadour both in attitude and musical sensibilities, each arriving as significant reflections and challengers of the accompanying counterculture wave.
