Jitterbugging for Jesus

So, as a co-founder and chaplain of the All-Night Underground Steely Dan Fan Land Cult Club–comprising graduates of the some of the best drug and rehab clinics* in the world (and then there’s me, never an addict to anything but cigarettes for many years in my misspent youth)–I have to put up some Dan music (or Donald Fagen stuff, which is basically the same as SD) to appease the cultists once in a while.

So here’s a couple vids from Fagen’s great “Nightfly” album, his ode to the old days –and more.

(For Steely Dan devout fan “Louie Louie,” way up there in his West Virginia cabin this weekend. Too bad you can’t be a member of the Dan Lan Cult Club but getting up at 4 a.m. every morning when so many of us are going to bed at that dreadful hour disqualifies a lot of Steely Dan fans. I’ll see if we can make you an honorary member but can’t promise anything.)

Less a band than a concept, Steely Dan was one of the most advanced, successful, and mysterious pop units of the 1970s. Combining pop hooks with jazz harmonies, complicated time changes and cryptic, often highly ironic lyrics, the band sounded like no one else. Because of the perfectionism of founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the outfit rarely toured, and toward the end, was composed almost entirely of session musicians, while Becker and Fagen began to play less and less on their own albums. Producer Gary Katz became Steely Dan’s “third member,” as much because of Becker and Fagen’s insistence on pristine sound quality as for Katz’s role in forming the band. With Becker and Fagen fronting a version of Steely Dan that toured to great success in 1993, they proved that their long-lived cult was very much alive. And the 2000 release of Two Against Nature resurrected the band as a viable recording unit, and also won Steely Dan several Grammy Awards.

Meeting in 1967 at Bard College in upstate New York, Becker and Fagen played in amateur bands, ranging from jazz to rock to pop to progressive rock; one — Bad Rock Group — included future comedian Chevy Chase on drums. Becker and Fagen began composing together and toured from 1970 to 1971 as backing musicians for Jay and the Americans under the pseudonyms Tristan Fabriani (Fagen) and Gustav Mahler (Becker).

— From The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

And finally . . . some great horn work here, with Mike McDonald on lead vocal . . .