The writers Steely Dan used as inspiration for their band
New York has always been a hub of creativity. Granted, it has had its ups and downs, such as in the late 1990s when the lack of any kind of scene gave way to a new scene made by people bored of the city, but generally speaking, frontrunners in music, art, and literature have littered the streets of the Big Apple. Two of these creative minds who would leave their mark on the artistic world were Steely Dan founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.
When they were growing up, there was a buzz around the entire world as Beatlemania and the revolution in music and art that had come throughout the ‘60s had really taken hold. People were being encouraged to be creative, and they were living in a world where being creative could be profitable. Subsequently, Becker and Fagen had their eyes on pursuing music, and there was a lot in New York to draw influence from.
On his album The Nightfly, he recounts growing up in New York and uses every inch of the city as musical inspiration. That album gives us an idea of what Fagens’ surroundings were like growing up and how those surroundings influenced him creatively. Late-night jazz bars, edgy fiction, and the rise of rock ‘n’ roll were everywhere, and they brought him and a young Walter Becker together.
“When I met Walter [Becker] at Bard in the late ‘60s, we were really dissimilar in the actual circumstances of growing up,” he recalled, “But we dug the same stuff. He knew all the references I did. Jazz, science fiction, comic novelists, what they called ‘black humour’ at the time.”
While music was at the heart of the duo’s initial friendship, there were also a lot of writers who were creating exciting fiction that they enjoyed. “John Barth, End of the Road, before he started to write these schizotypal sort of things. Bruce Jay Friedman, who edited a volume of black humour, is largely forgotten now; a very funny novelist and actually preceded Philip Roth with that sort of Jewish humour,” said Felder, “Edward Albee’s early plays.”
It was these writers who ended up influencing a lot of Steely Dan’s music, particularly their complex lyricism. “I think what all these writers had in common was a pessimistic view of human nature,” said Fagen, “And there were conversations in these novels that were almost supernaturally unfiltered. People would just say what they were thinking. That particular thing was something Walter and I picked up on and it was in the back of our minds when we were writing lyrics.”
You can hear this kind of attitude to writing in a lot of Steely Dan’s music. When they locked themselves in recording studios, creating exciting music and touching upon different themes both in style and topic, they were never afraid to write about subjects that some could perceive as controversial.
