Walter Becker was my friend, my writing partner and my bandmate since we met as students at Bard College in 1967. He was smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter. He was cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny.”
— Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen in his tribute to his brother from another mother Walter Becker, who died last year age age 67
Hello, rockers.
I desperately need some cool Music Therapy.
You probably do, too. So I’m here to serve us both with a Happy Friday song from my era, one sure to get your Jitterbug leg shaking.
Longtimers here at The Cult of the Jitterbug know that I’m a lunatical fan of that Dynamic Duo that was the inimitable Steely Dan.
The World’s Most Dangerous Duo: Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.
(AN ASIDE IS IN ORDER: As Dave Berry would say, “I am not making this up”: Years ago I was the co-founder and self-appointed chaplain of an online Fan Club called the All-Night Underground Steely Dan Fan-Land Cult Club, comprising, as I used to say, graduates of the some of the best drug and rehab clinics in the world. Many members were fragile people — several were Vietnam vets — who sent me private prayer requests and asked me all kinds of great theological questions. I think there were 11 members at its peak. For a couple of years, Steely Dan brought us together in a strange, holy community in cyberspace before the small but intense community fizzled out.)
I’m still mourning the death of Walter Becker. I can’t imagine the grief his brother by another mother, Donald Fagen, is working through, even as he and his Steely Dan Band continue to be the musical road warriors that Becker/Fagen and their select, precision musicians always were.
Steely Dan’s great body of work contains songs and lyrics that are, by turns, dangerously dark and edgy, uplifting and funny as hell; sad and sweet; nostalgic and cutting-edge.
Their music can be pessimistic, raw and cynical, or so upbeat and optimistic (and ironic and witty) as to be just finger-snapping groovy, baby.
Much of the always idiosyncratic music is subversive. They did take the name “Steely Dan,” an underground word for a dildo, from a William Burroughs novel.
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(Imagine, if you will, an episode of the Beaver:
BEAVE: “Gee, Wally, what’s a Steely Dan?”
EDDIE HASKELL: “It’s a Superman thing. Beat it, ya little twerp.”)
Sometimes an enigmatic Steely Dan song is all the above wrapped into one.
Donald Fagen released a lot of songs on solo albums inspired by his personal point of view, which was informed in a comfortable, middle-class, suburban upbringing.
But even Fagen solo songs with the Fagen POV were produced by Becker. He grew up in a rotten, abusive home, which gave him a hard-nosed, cynical POV.
Yet their POVs meshed as perfectly as their perfectionist musicianship. They were two intellectual renegades, both drawn to great, cutting edge art in music, literature, films and life’s theatre of the absurd.
Donald Fagen’s moody Nightfly album, “with jazz and conversation and sweet music — from the foot of Mount Belzoni.”
I love Donald Fagen’s hit from The Nightly album, “New Frontier.” It’s inspired by those growing-up years of his in the fifties and early sixties. I’m the same age as Fagen and Becker and that was my own era.
It was a time in which so many of us grew up in with our little transistor radios playing “Elvis, or somebody else’s favorite song,” with our pillows over our heads, long after the lights were turned out.
I can relate to everything referenced in Donald Fagen’s “New Frontier”:
— America’s ludicrous, irrational response to the Cold War and nuclear bombs;
— the limbo rock fad;
— the pioneering cool jazz of Dave Brubeck (Steely Dan’s idol and inspiration);
— and the yearning of a small-town or suburban middle-class white boy to take in the bright lights of the wicked city.
Maybe more than anything else, I can relate to the duo’s boyhood infatuation with a mostly forgotten Hollywood sweetheart — the Queen of the Prom who had a slightly dangerous edge — with whom all of us adolescent boys were infatuated (I guess that’s the right word): Tuesday Weld.
A smart, terrific actor beginning in childhood, she received a Golden Globe in 1960 as “Newcomer of the Year.”
OY! Even the name was perfection:
TuesdayWeld.
Tuesday Weld and David Janssen in “The Fugitive.”
Anyway, the boys of Steely Dan would never have vomited a commercial song as poppy and sentimental as “Penny Lane.”
As much as I love The Eagles and the cynical and often edgy Don Henley, Becker and Fagen would sooner have stabbed themselves in the eyes with drumsticks than put out an atrocity as awful as “There’s a New Kid in Town.”
Or worse, a song like “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat” for an easy paycheck from Hollywood. (I could never change the radio dial fast enough.)
Below is the video version of “New Frontier” with the lyrics, and lots of images of Tuesday.
Don’t let em take your mind.
Read Rolling Stone’s obituary of Walter Becker here.
See the Steely Dan Websites here.
And for bonus listening … another weird, witty and wonderful Dan classic …
Get your fez on: I want to be your Holy Man.
