Steely Dan - Donald Fagen

In a band, being able to play doesn't matter. Who do you think you are, Steely Dan?
(from the film “Sing Street” by John Carney, 2016)

Do you only like those raw, immediate, nailed-it-in-one-take records? Fine, you can wait outside. Everyone else, though — those interested in the pursuit of perfection — can stay. Provided you're willing to put up with the maniacal sonic dictatorship of two unnatural, cantankerous characters: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. That's roughly the invitation the two masterminds behind Steely Dan must have extended to the army of musicians and session men involved in the making of “Aja”, the New Yorkers' sixth album and the definitive manifesto of their sophisticated jazz-pop. It was a kind of perfectionist odyssey spent for months in a prison-like studio (four of them, actually), where a mere hint of hiss could ruin days of work, and where recording a track meant going through two stages: reaching perfection, and then going beyond it, which gave the work a more “human” feel. Now you understand why they called themselves two against nature?

But plenty of people took up the challenge. The guitarists, first of all — a parade of stars: Jay Graydon, Larry Carlton, Dean Parks, Danny Dias, Lee Ritenour, Steve Kahn. Then Chuck Rainey lending a hand to Becker on bass, plus the cream of the crop among drummers of the day: Rick Marotta, Jim Keltner, Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, Steve Gadd, Paul Humphrey, Ed Greene. Finally, a mixed bag of pianists and keyboardists (Victor Feldman, Michael Omartian, Don Grolnick, Paul Griffin, Joe Sample) and saxophonists (Tom Scott, Pete Christlieb, and a former Wheater Report member, Wayne Shorter). The icing on the cake: the spectacular production of the faithful Gary Katz, backed by sound engineer Roger Nichols, and the mastering job by an ace like Bernie Grundman — not surprisingly, the album would go on to win the Grammy for Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording of the year, to the delight of audiophiles and electronics dealers the world over, who used it to test the capabilities of their finest hi-fi systems.
In the end, around forty musicians would rotate through the studio, all survivors of those terrifying, workaholic sessions in which recording a single solo or drum hit could take an entire night and still not be enough. “We spent most of our time writing, recording and obsessively tinkering — we overdubbed most of the overdubs,” Becker would tell an incredulous Cameron Crowe of Rolling Stone.

Strawberry Jazz

It's easy to sound this good when you're playing with a stacked deck and fielding the best musicians around – or so the argument goes. Fair enough, but what about the songs? Well, those are even better than everything else. They're the longest and jazziest tracks in the Steely Dan catalogue, yet they still manage to nail the listener to the wall with inescapable refrains. They're the most incredible schizophrenic creatures in the history of pop music. That, ultimately, is where the Dan's strawberry-flavored revolution really lies: before them, jazz's twisted harmonies and compositional techniques had almost never found an outlet in popular song, not even in its most noble form (from the Beach Boys to the Beatles). They managed to graft those techniques onto catchy tunes with irresistible grooves, where a muscular rhythm section is flanked by jazz-rock guitars, complex electric-piano voicings, horn phrasing and soul-derived vocal harmonies. But at the same time, before them, pop had never been so cerebral and genetically engineered, to the point of being almost unrecognizable in that cold fusion of rock, soul, blues, funk and jazz. And yet it's pop, nothing but pop to be belted out at the top of your lungs. Complete with instantly catchy choruses. Like "When Josie comes home/ So good/ She's the pride of the neighborhood" ("Josie"). Try listening to it and resisting the urge to hum it for the rest of your life…

If the previous (excellent) "The Royal Scam" had steered their sonic prism toward reggae, funky and even dance vibrations, with airier orchestration and more exotic sounds, "Aja" draws on swing and be-bop traditions, as well as the golden age of jazz, from Count Basie to Duke Ellington. It's a masterful game of polished surfaces, buffed to a mirror shine by a team of studio luminaries. Elegant and understated, just like that black cover featuring the face of Japanese model Sayoko Yamaguchi, photographed by Hideki Fujii.
The rock edge of previous records is smoothed over by the softness of horns and keyboards in an ever more velvety and intricate web of arabesques. Still, a contagious euphoria shines through, a legacy of those memorable sessions, with jazzy improvisations wrapping perfectly around the instrumental beds. So, paradoxically, in its boundless sophistication, "Aja" ends up sounding far more daring and disorienting than plenty of records of pure, red-blooded rock'n'roll.

Seven Capital Feats

Just seven songs, all of them practically flawless. Starting with the closer, the aforementioned marvel called "Josie", which enchants on every listen, with its rubbery groove laid down by the Rainey (bass)-Keltner (drums) duo, its dizzying refrain, its solid funk beats, intricate cross-rhythms and concise guitar solos over a soft bed of horns and synths. Fagen delivers it with an (almost) romantic flair, backed as ever by those trademark backing vocals. And yet it's one of their grimmest stories: a portrait of urban decay, steeped in sexual abuse and drugs. The opener "Black Cow" too, behind its smooth refrain, Rainey's slinking soul-funk basslines, Feldman's Fender Rhodes solo and Scott's explosive sax, doesn't spare any harsh details, recounting a man's revulsion toward his unfaithful wife ("Like a gangster/ On the run /You will stagger homeward/ To your precious one/ I'm the one/ Who must make everything right/ Talk it out till daylight"). The track's groove wouldn't escape the notice of hip-hop duo Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz, who would build their hit "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)" straight from a sample of it.
Another instance of schizophrenia: lyrics that are often bitter and cynical, with a Dylanesque flavor, laying bare the horrors of post-Nixon America right in the face of anyone briefly lulled by those dreamy Gershwin-esque arrangements. The strange, the weird, becomes familiar, and vice versa. Deliciously enjoyable lyrics, mostly cryptic, elliptical and mocking, packed with wordplay, slang terms and literary references tied to American culture and the lifestyle of big cities (New York and Los Angeles in particular). A style that – as has been noted – finds an effective cinematic alter ego in Woody Allen's New York comedies, equally light, ironic and intelligent. Among the literary references, besides their ideal beat godfather William S. Burroughs – who inspired them from the very choice of their name, taken from his "Naked Lunch" – one can sense the black humor of playwrights like Bruce Jay Friedman and Terry Southern, but above all the caustic gaze on human folly of Vladimir Nabokov, author of "Lolita" and "Pale Fire".

With every listen, the songs reveal new nuances, the instruments feeding into a hypnotic flow that grows ever more sinuous and absorbing. Take the title track, ambitious and multifaceted across its 8-minute runtime. A latin-pop-jazz essay in suite form, with Fagen's vocals bolstered by Tim Schmit's (ex-Eagles) sophisticated harmonies, two pianos underpinning it (Omartian on acoustic, Sample on electric), and at least a couple of sensational showcase moments: Shorter's rhapsodic tenor sax solo, gently descending back into the vocal theme, and Gadd's explosive closing drum excursion, punctuated by horns and synthesizers: "Make it sound like hell," Becker reportedly told him. And he didn't need to be told twice. But then, who is "Aja"? According to the official story, a Korean girl who married the brother of one of Fagen's schoolmates, though Fagen himself has pointed out that the song describes "the tranquility that comes from being in a calm relationship with a beautiful woman." Speaking of playing with a stacked deck…
With the solemn Rhodes-and-guitar fanfare that opens "Deacon Blues", instead, we move into the melancholy mists, steeped in bitterness and disillusionment, of a ballad dedicated – in Becker's words – to "the mythical loser musician," that is, to the contradiction between apparent glory and the frustrating reality of the daily grind. Enter Deacon, a new hero in the Dan's crowded pantheon of losers, and a fresh excuse for a chorus worth framing.

Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

Three gospel backing singers and Christlieb's tenor sax support Fagen in this poignant declamation on the price of success. Too gorgeous not to borrow its name, the Scottish band Deacon Blue would decide, among the most fervent disciples of the Steely Dan gospel with their own delicate sophisti-pop. Even so, those devilish "major mu" chords cooked up by the unnatural duo will remain an elusive Holy Grail.

Speaking of followers: if Joe Jackson's "Night And Day" would go on to sing the bewilderment of the Englishman in New York, the Steely Dan of "Aja" already let their disenchanted resignation toward the lifestyle of 1970s Los Angeles show through – the city they'd moved to after leaving the East Coast behind: an asphalt jungle where you have to "slither like a viper through these suburban streets" ("Deacon Blues"). A feeling that resurfaces in "Home At Last" ("I know this superhighway/ This bright familiar sun/ I guess that I'm the lucky one"), essentially the Odyssey revisited in shuffle form, with piano to the fore and that funky beat Purdie would reprise on "Babylon Sisters" on the following LP, "Gaucho". In this urban Babel there's also room for a frantic nocturnal tryst (the lascivious uptempo "I Got The News"), until the first rays of sun peek over the skyline, to borrow a phrase from Fagen/Nightfly.

The record's greatest hit, though, is "Peg", a snapshot of an aspiring actress delightfully swung over near-disco rhythms, propelled by Marotta's drums, amid hazy backing vocals and the sultry lead vocals courtesy of the legendary Michael McDonald, sealing yet another killer refrain: "Pantonal 13 bar blues with chorus," as Steely Dan themselves would describe it. Legend has it that as many as seven musicians took a crack at the 30-second guitar solo – pure be-bop improvisation – before the two impossible-to-please despots finally settled on Graydon, while the song's final mix – an eight-handed job, with Al Schmitt at the console alongside Katz, Becker and Fagen – reportedly took a full 12 hours.

Known Perfectionists

Plenty of anecdotes have emerged from the record's epic sessions, recounted in the invaluable DVD "The Making of Aja" as well as in the biography "Reelin' in the Years". Rainey, for instance, has told the story of how Fagen and Becker ordered him not to slap the bass on "Peg", and how he kept doing it anyway with his back to the control room, eventually winning them over thanks to the final sound. Things nearly came to blows when Katz, after being away for days, pointed out that the drum cymbals weren't audible enough on the title track: "I don't know where you've been these past few days, but you can go right back there," Becker snapped at him. Katz himself apparently had a habit of buttering up musicians with small talk about baseball before breaking the news that the solo they'd spent hours working on wouldn't make the final cut. McDonald recalls exhausting phrasing sessions, in which the same word or vocal line would be repeated over and over until the pronunciation was absolutely perfect. Then there's the famous story of the disappearance of the original multitrack tapes for two songs, never recovered despite a reward (a mere $600!) offered by Fagen to anyone with useful information on their whereabouts.

Legendary chronicles from legendary times for the studios, even in a year like 1977, which in official rock historiography rhymes with the arrival of punk's do-it-yourself revolution. But Steely Dan always remained suspended in another dimension entirely, forever throwing their eternal jet-set poolside party, or "yacht rock" bash, as it would come to be dubbed under the most unlikely of labels. A laboratory alchemy of "jazz, rock, cheap soundtracks and the fake jazz of certain TV productions," in Fagen's own words. It's no wonder all this irritated the die-hard advocates of raw sound and so-called "authenticity," always keeping a stock of adjectives ready to fire like arrows at their records: slick, over-produced, sterile, and so on and so forth. "Aja will keep fueling the rock purists' complaint that Steely Dan's music is soulless, calculated, and the very antithesis of everything rock is supposed to be," wrote Michael Duffy in his review at the time for Rolling Stone. Years of new cool, acid-jazz and sophisti-pop would go some way toward setting the record straight, even if, sadly, not entirely.

The facts remain, regardless: "Aja" would prove a spectacular bestseller for Steely Dan (three million copies sold compared to the 500,000 of each previous record, a platinum disc and a No. 3 chart placing, with 3 singles in the Top 40), elevating their perfectionism to a new formal peak, one that would pave the way for the following "Gaucho" and, above all, for Fagen's ultimate solo masterpiece: "The Nightfly" (1982).
It would go on to be a go-to demo record for showing off the clean sound of stereo systems in every corner of the globe, yet it never lost its bittersweet aftertaste. Cheerful and light only on the surface, "Aja" is a record of bitter disillusionment with the "California dream." An admission of frustration and failure, whispered in the middle of a cocktail party.

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17/01/2021