Door County Auditorium Concert Series Fish Creek, Wisconsin Monday, March 8, 2004 7:00 pm
Oconomowoc Community Celebration Concert Series Olympia Village Resort Oconomowoc, Wisconsin Tuesday, March 9, 2004 7:30 pm
Stansbury Theater Lawrence University Thursday and Friday, March 11 & 12 8:00 pm
The 11 large jazz ensemble arrangements featured in “Bodacious Cowboys: Three Decades of Steely Dan” were commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk (German Public Radio for the State of Hessen) Big Band in Frankfurt and were recorded in the summer of 2003. The selections represent a chronological cross-section of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen compositions spanning the recorded history of the group Steely Dan from 1972 to the present.
Vocalist/keyboardist/co-composer Donald Fagen was born in New Jersey and heard American popular standards, Broadway tunes, and swing music as a child. Without formal musical training, he began playing the piano by ear at age 12 and emulated recordings he heard on Symphony Sid’s Manhattan jazz radio program. Frequenting New York jazz clubs as a teenager, he became enamored with the music and the sophisticated images of jazz artists Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk. As a high school student, he played baritone horn in the school band, wrote for the school paper, and began composing his own original songs. His fascination with Jack Kerouac and the Beat Poets led him to study English Literature at Bard College in 1965.
Guitarist/bassist/co-composer Walter Becker was born in Queens and listened to the pop music recordings of the 1950s. His fascination with jazz artist Charlie Parker inspired him to play the saxophone, but he quickly abandoned the instrument and taught himself to play both guitar and bass, immersing himself in blues music and rock recordings. In 1967, he attended Bard to study languages.
Becker was a 17-year old Bard freshman when Fagen heard him playing blues guitar. They eventually began composing and performing together in groups modeled after the rhythm and blues bands of the late 1960s, particularly the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, and Little Richard. “We began writing songs within a day of meeting each other,” Fagen said. Their collaboration reflected mutual fascinations with jazz, soul, and pop music, and their arcane lyrics displayed a common caustic sense of humor and significant intellectual interests. They coined a new bit of slang to describe aspects of their new material and called it “cheesy.”
Becker dropped out of school after three semesters when Fagen graduated from Bard, and the two pursued the music business as a songwriting team. They unsuccessfully attempted to sell their compositions to New York music publishing companies. They landed performing roles as sidemen for Jay and the Americans, but continuous rejections of their original music left them frustrated and disenchanted.
Their friend Gary Katz, who eventually became the producer for their first decade of recordings, paved the way for them to join the ranks of ABC/Dunhill Records in Los Angeles as staff songwriters in 1971. The regular paycheck, the daily focus upon the development of their craft, and ABC funding of their recordings and equipment allowed them to develop a studio band for demo recordings. When they had assembled a substantial body of original compositions, they recorded their debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill in 1972. Suddenly in need of a band name, they hastily selected the moniker of Steely Dan, an object from the William Burroughs novel The Naked Lunch.
Can’t Buy a Thrill was a success and their first single (“Do It Again”) released from the album sold over a million copies. A long string of hit albums followed almost annually throughout the 1970s: Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), Pretzel Logic (1974), Katy Lied (1975), The Royal Scam (1976), Aja (1977), and Gaucho (1980).
Becker and Fagen had never intended to create a band for live performances, focusing instead upon their compositions and studio recordings. The recording company required concert tour appearances to support the commercial albums, and Steely Dan appeared as a live band for American and British tours in 1973. When they recorded their third album, they abandoned live performances and the concept of fixed ensemble personnel in favor of hiring the finest recording studio musicians. All future Becker and Fagen efforts were thus focused solely upon songwriting and recording studio production.
After 14 years of creative collaboration, Becker and Fagen recorded what appeared to be their last album (Gaucho) in 1980 and temporarily parted company in 1981. Fagen released the first of two solo albums, The Nightfly, in 1982 and waited more than a decade to release Kamakiriad in 1993. Becker left New York and moved to Maui in 1982, became a producer for numerous other artists, and eventually recorded his debut solo album, Eleven Tracks of Whack, in 1994.
Relenting to pressures from fellow musicians and fans alike, Steely Dan was revived for consecutive summer world tours in 1993 and 1994, released their first live album Alive in America in 1995, and toured three continents as Steely Dan’s Art Crimes Orchestra in 1996. Becker and Fagen regrouped as a songwriting team in 1997 and returned to the recording studio in 1998. Two Against Nature was released in 2000 and won 4 Grammy Awards for Best Album, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Pop Performance by a Duo, and Best Engineered Non-Classical Album. Their most recent recording, Everything Must Go, was released in May of 2003, and was followed by a successful summer 2003 tour.
“Do It Again” (from Can’t Buy a Thill, 1972) was the first professional record featuring Donald Fagen as solo lead vocalist.and sold over a million copies as Steely Dan’s first hit single. Almost six minutes long in its original form (double the standard 3-minute duration of the typical commercial song), composed in a minor mode with a long repeating phrase, and featuring electric sitar and organ improvisations, it hardly fit the profile of the perfect single release. But radio programmers embraced it enthusiastically and it reached #6 in the U.S. pop charts.
Fagen composed “Bodhisattva” (from Countdown to Ecstasy, 1973) the night before it was recorded. A Sanskrit term derived from Bodhi (enlightenment) and sattva (being), the bodhisattva is translated literally as “one destined for enlightenment.” The composition is “a parody on how Western people look at Eastern religion – sort of over-simplify it,” said Fagen. “We thought it was rather amusing – most people don’t get it.” Fagen appended the basic blues form and substituted fresh chords in the turnaround of the harmonic progression, creating his own 16-measure cycle.
Fagen humorously described “Pretzel Logic” (from Pretzel Logic, 1974) to an unsuspecting interviewer as a story of time travel. “When it says ‘I stepped up on the platform,’ we conceived the platform as a teleportation device,” said Fagen. (Deception, humor, and mystery have long been typical of Becker and Fagen media interviews. When band members were queried by journalists and television/radio program hosts, Fagen once instructed them to “Say anything you want, just don’t say anything that’s true.” Becker once told an interviewer that “Even if we could answer the question, you know that we would lie.”)
The driving shuffle “Black Friday” (from Katy Lied, 1975) was the first single released from their fourth album. Black Friday occurred on September 24, 1869, a day of securities market panic in which thousands of Americans were financially ruined, but the term is now applied to any financial crisis on either side of the Atlantic. The Steely Dan lyrics told of a devious speculator who took the money (“I’ll stand down by the door and catch the gray men when they dive from the fourteenth floor”) and ran to Australia to bask in a life of luxury (“with nothing to do but feed all the kangaroos”).
“Home at Last” (from Aja, 1977) displayed two of Steely Dan’s most memorable instrumental “hooks” -- one a pointed 4-measure piano pattern and the other a cross-rhythmic stepwise line -- that formally bridged the verses and chorus of the composition together.
“I Got the News” (from Aja, 1977) was composed for The Royal Scam sessions in 1976, but Becker and Fagen abandoned its original form. They ultimately revised the composition, changed the lyrics, and expanded the structure to include three distinct formal segments. Fagen again generated a compelling instrumental (piano) hook that framed the lyrics of the opening section.
Becker and Fagen composed “FM” (from Aja, 1977) as the theme song for the film FM. When the Steely Dan album was released, AM radio stations weren’t inclined to play a tune bearing the title “FM,” so Steely Dan snipped the vocalized “A” vowel from the albums’s title song Aja and spliced it into the hook of “FM.” The tune was released as a single, becoming a hit in both the U.S. and England, and it garnered a third Grammy for Best Engineered Recording.
“Gaucho” (from Gaucho, 1980) was inspired by the 1974 Keith Jarrett composition titled “As Long As You Know You’re Living Yours,” and Becker and Fagen publicly admitted their affection for Jarrett’s work. Deciding that Steely Dan had borrowed too liberally from the composition, Jarrett sued them for plagiarism, won the case, and was granted co-composer credit and royalties for all future pressings. Only minor derivations were present, however, and the body of “Gaucho” was a fresh and complex 5-minute form replete with asymmetrical formal sections, angular rhythms, and unorthodox lyrics.
Fagen’s lilting samba “The Goodbye Look” (from The Nightfly, 1982) demonstrated his fondness for Latin music, and it became a popular cover among other jazz musicians (including singer Mel Torme). The lyrics told the humorous story of a political and military skirmish on a Caribbean island (“All the Americans are gone except for two, the embassy’s been hard to reach, there’s been talk and lately a little action after dark, behind the big casino on the beach.”).
“Negative Girl” (from Two Against Nature, 2000), one of Steely Dan’s most complex compositions, employed innovative approaches to commercial melody, harmony, and form. Becker and Fagen constructed angular melodic lines that sounded more instrumental than vocal; they created exotic chords and non-traditional progressions that were atypical of popular music harmonies; and they freely extended and manipulated the song structure.
An unorthodox 3-beat rock groove, blues-drenched melodies, and dark lyrics provided the compelling features in “Two Against Nature” (from Two Against Nature, 2000). Altered jazz harmonies in 3 distinct tonal centers provided instrumental soloists with abundant frameworks for improvisation. Becker and Fagen found their inspiration for the composition in Against Nature, the 19th century French comic novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans’ 1884 declaration about his novel may have humorously captured Steely Dan sentiments about their composition: “It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.”