The story of the 1977 Steely Dan classic that went through eight discarded guitar solos
When it came to studio perfectionism, nobody reached the levels of exact precision like Steely Dan.
They just didn’t want to be shit. “It would just be too sad to put in all that time and energy and end up with a shitball album,” is how Donald Fagen put. That outlook, however, resulted in a rather extreme studio approach.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagan infamously dropped their original band of players around the recording of Pretzel Logic and began substituting in some of the best session musicians in the business to cover their complex arrangements. It was arguably the moment the band cemented their place in the music world. Using session musicians would transform the group. But even the best players oftentimes didn’t make it onto a record.
The peak of Becker and Fagan’s demanding nature came while recording their landmark sixth studio album, Aja, a record that David Crosby would go on to hail as one of the greatest ever made. It’s a record that has come to be highly regarded among musos and laymen’s fans alike, arriving in 1977 and crystallising the group as the premier compositional outfit of the era.
Although the album only has seven tracks, the duo’s desire to reach the highest quality possible meant that over thirty different musicians rotated through the studio throughout the nearly eight-month-long production, including legendary figures like Bernard Purdie, Wayne Shorter, Larry Carlton, and Jim Keltner.
Entire bands would be shuffled in and out, with Becker and Fagan stating in the Classic Albums documentary that they eventually felt sorry for the elite group of musicians that would come in for the first sessions of the day, as the duo already knew that before they started playing, their takes wouldn’t be used.
Most of those early sessions were for Becker and Fagan to workshop the song’s arrangement, picking apart when they liked and disliked of the most minute of details. It was a process that put the duo in dictatorial roles, sitting atop a studio throne and deciding the fates of the best musicians around.
One of the more infamous compositions was ‘Peg’, the album’s first single. Although it’s less than four minutes long, eleven musicians are credited on the final take, including prominent backing vocals from The Doobie Brothers lead vocalist, Michael McDonald. But perhaps the mouse interesting moments came with the introduction of the guitar, and infamously tough area for session musicians to excel in for Steely Dan.
In search of the perfect solo
Although jazz guitarist Steve Kahn played the song’s intricate rhythm part, the duo let a whole slew of players attempt the song’s guitar solo. “This tune I think is infamous among studio players,” Fagan explains. “In that, we hired a couple of guitar players to play the solo, and it wasn’t quite what we were looking for”.
The duo doesn’t mention any players by name, but they estimate that the number of guitarists who came in and attempted the solo before being discarded ranged anywhere from five to eight. Those attempts were kept on tape, and the pair go through a couple of examples of unused takes during the Classic Albums documentary. In their signature dry style, they make brief comments on some of the takes, with Fagan jokingly asking Becker: “Wouldn’t you hate if someone did this to you?”.
After a couple of effect-heavy takes that ended up on the cutting room floor, the two eventually play the iconic final take from session player Jay Graydon. Becker describes Graydon as whipping off the solo “with no difficulty whatsoever”, which sounds vaguely insulting to other guitarists in the pair’s own incredibly droll way.
Despite the technical proficiency of the other takes, it’s hard to argue that the two didn’t choose the perfect one. Graydon’s solo is hard-edged and dynamic in ways that make the other solos sound twee in comparison. While the Dan might be renowned for a certain level of smoothness, there’s something gutteral about Graydon’s approach that provides a gritty, gorgeous contrast, seemingly something that Fagen and Becker were looking for.
Playing into an orange squeezer to provide the cushion of echo, Graydon’s solo is incredibly difficult to get in-tune. And maybe that danger appealed to their appetite for the jazzy edge of classic rock, too. After all, at this stage, their status as sardonic outliers poking fun at the mainstream while also sitting firmly on AM radio themselves was well established.
It may have taken a long time and many different musicians, but the group eventually got their desired results. Once again, despite the extremeness of their perfection, the results speak for themselves with another Steely Dan classic.
