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"Compelling and revealing."
—The Washington Post
“What enthralled me, and still does, is how the Dan’s happily seditious lyrics are wed to the complexity of the music. Most of the writers here understand that. . . . Becker and Fagen were notoriously tough interview subjects, and didn’t grant audiences often, so Hoskyns has managed to corral the best of the best. The pair’s biting humor comes across in the finest moments. . . . If I was teaching a class in writing about popular music, this would be one of the required textbooks.”
—Dwight Silverman, The Houston Chronicle
“Steely Dan saw the rottenness of the era ahead of time and staked a claim to a land that we would all eventually occupy. . . For a Dan fan, it’s fascinating to read about what the critics were hearing, which was a combination of baffled satisfaction, baffled ambivalence, and baffled displeasure. One thing that is consistent . . . is how different the Dan sounded from everything and everyone else. . . . Hoskyns has judiciously gathered a lot of perceptive thinking, especially admirable because of how unmusical most rock critics are and how complex the Dan’s music is.”
—The Brooklyn Rail
‘Like true English majors in love with words, Becker and Fagen knew the value of a story with indelible characters. Their songs' socially astute portraits of various strangers, gauchos, daddies, losers, alienated curb holders and unrehabilitated returnees stay with us the way a good piece of literature does.”
- Sibbie O’Sullivan, The Washington Post
I was aware of the Jazz-influenced, Rock Band Steely Dan when it came on the scene in the early 1970s mainly because of my close association with pianist Victor Feldman who played various acoustic and electronic keyboards as well as doubling on percussion on some of the band’s albums.
Their sneaky and sometimes salacious lyrics amused me, although if truth be told, I didn’t always catch all of the socio-cultural allusions and references, but I always respected their informed literary bent and the overall quality of their music.
They used excellent horn players like Chuck and Steve Findley, Slyde Hyde and Plas Johnson, fine guitarists like Larry Carlton, Dean Parks and Walter Becker who more than held his own on guitar and on bass, as did Donald Fagen on keyboards along with the aforementioned Feldman and Don Grolnick, and some of the best groove drummers around including Steve Gadd, Bernard Purdie and Rick Marotta.
Basically, I took the music as it came and enjoyed the group’s recordings. The fact that they didn’t tour wasn’t a surprise to me because the guys they used in the band couldn’t afford to be on the road and away from their studio incomes for any length of time and because, as I had been told by Victor Walter and Donald had a very particular way of making the music “in the studio” with its recourse to instant alteration and modification of the music’s final sound.
What I wasn’t aware of was the amount of dissension amongst the Rock purists involving the use of Jazz elements in the music of Steely Dan.
I mean, c’mon, most Rock is based around 3-chord turnarounds and a backbeat on 2 and 4 and these guys were dissing musicians who actually understood theory and harmony, could read music and play it in a variety of keys and rhythmic configurations?!
After reading Barney Hoskyns - Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion [New York: Overlook Press, 2018] I learned that there’s more to it than the simple dichotomy in points-of-view that I thought was involved.
The author, Barney Hoskyns is the co-founder and editorial director of online rock-journalism library Rock’s Backpages - www.rocksbackpages.com - and author of numerous books including Across the Great Divide, Waiting for the Sun, Hotel California, and Lowside of the Road. A former MOJO correspondent, Hoskyns writes for Uncut and other publications, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone and GQ.
Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion [New York: Overlook Press, 2018, 319 pages, $27.95] is the ultimate anthology of Steely Dan, one of the defining and best selling rock acts of the last half-century.
At its core a creative marriage between Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Steely Dan has sold over 45 million albums and recorded several of the cleverest and best-produced albums of the 1970s ― from the breathlessly catchy Can’t Buy a Thrill to the sleekly sinister Gaucho ― making them one of the most successful rock acts of the past fifty years. More than ten years after their break-up in 1981, they returned to remind fans of how sorely they had missed their elegance and erudition, subsequently recording Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go during the following decade, touring continuously, and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Major Dudes collects some of the smartest and wittiest interviews Becker and Fagen have ever given, along with insightful reviews of―and commentary on―their extraordinary songs. Compiled by leading music critic and writer Barney Hoskyns, Major Dudes features contributions from Chris Van Ness, Steven Rosen, and the late Robert Palmer, and pieces including rare interviews and reviews of Steely Dan’s early albums from Disc, Melody Maker, and Rolling Stone.
With an afterword examining the musical legacy of and memorializing the late Walter Becker, who since his passing Rolling Stone has heralded as the “brilliant perfectionist behind one of rock’s most eccentric bands,” Major Dudes is the most comprehensive anthology of Steely Dan ever compiled and will be the centerpiece on every fan’s shelf.
Here are three additional reviews of Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion from Down Beat magazine, Elmore magazine and The Washington Post.
HOW THE DAN DIVIDES US - Eugene Holley, Jr., Down Beat, September, 2018
“When Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist, lyricist, composer and member of the award-winning Steely Dan, died of esophageal cancer last year at age 67, it marked the end of an extraordinary four-decade career and a 50-year friendship with pianist and composer Donald Fagen. Becker's unfortunate demise makes the publication of Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion (Overlook Press) an important and timely book.
Edited by British music critic Barney Hoskyns — editorial director of the website Rock's Backpages and author of a number of books, including Joni: The Anthology—this collection consists of 40 reviews, interviews, profiles and essays published between 1972 and 2017 in publications ranging from The Los Angeles Times to New Music Express.
The book is full of insights into Becker and Fagen's career, especially their early years as songwriters at Manhattan's Brill Building (one of their songs. "I Mean To Shine," was recorded by Barbra Streisand); with the pop group Jay and the Americans; their first group in Los Angeles with guitarists Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Denny Dias and early lead vocalist David Palmer; and their first albums, including Can't Buy A Thrill, Countdown To Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic, which gave the world the Latin-lilted "Do it Again" and the dreamy "Dirty Work,"
A 1974 piece, originally published in CREEM magazine by Wayne Robbins, who went to school with Becker and Fagen at Bard College, yields a rare, first-hand assessment of their time as undergraduates.
"Whenever there was a social function that demanded a cheap rhythm section, we were there," Becker told Robbins with astonishing humility. But the influence of jazz was gaining ground in their music, as evidenced by The Horace Silver-basslined "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and Phil Woods' alto madness on "Doctor Wu." Some were not pleased. John Ingham wrote in his review of Katy Lied that he was "ambivalent" about it. In contrast, Ian MacDonald's review of Pretzel Logic, which included Duke Ellington's 1927 "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," exerted that the recording "exhibits far more range, depth and flexibility than its forebears."
Of course, the jazz influence reached its zenith on the Dan's 1977 Grammy award-winning Aja. which featured Victor Feldman's deft Fender Rhodes improvisations on the funky opening number "Black Cow," the shifting, moody melody of "Deacon Blues" and the title track, with tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter's galactic solo buoyed by Steve Gadd's vivid and volcanic drumming. In Dylan Jones' 2014 GQ piece, he praised the LP as "the best album of all time."
In cruel counterpoint, Rolling Stone reviewer Robert Palmer infamously wrote that the Dan's follow-up release, Gaucho, which yielded the funereal funked "Babylon Sisters" and the gospel-grooved "Time Out Of Mind," sounded like it was "recorded in a hospital ward." One could make the case that the taint of jazz and r&b in the Dan's music still divides fans and critics.
Because of Becker's personal issues— which fueled his move to Hawaii—the Dan was shut down, seemingly, for good. But after Fagen and Becker released solo recordings of their own, the group resurfaced in 1995 with Alive In America, chronicling their first tour in years. Two Against Nature followed in 2000 and was honored with a Grammy for album of the year. Their final release together was the prophetically titled Everything Must Go, released in 2003.
In David Cavanagh's obituary published last year in Uncut, Fagen described his late friend and collaborator as "smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter... and hysterically funny." Cavanagh aptly eulogized Becker as "one of the most fascinating individuals in post-war American music."
Indeed, as this compendium shows. Steely Dan's jazz-tinged melodies and harmonies, edgy themes, sarcastic lyrics and meticulous, marathon studio sessions stretched and reshaped the boundaries of pop. rock and jazz. And in doing so. the band became a unique force of its own, beyond categorization.”
Ordering Info: www.overlookpress.com
Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion Edited by Barney Hoskyns
By Melissa Caruso, Book Review Music News in Elmore Magazine, June 18, 2018,
“Steely Dan: The band that was too cool for touring, too cool for the Grammys, too cool for the Rolling Stones, and too cool for Top 40 hits. They placed Duke, Miles, Debussy, and Coltrane on pedestals, which isolated them from the hippies at their alma mater, Bard College in upstate New York. They fused jazz and pop in unprecedented ways, and placed quality well over commercialism, garnering them the title “rock’s most obsessive nit-picks.” They cared only about the music and could give two shits if they were photographed on the red carpet or at some ritzy Hollywood hotel party.
Having both grown up on the East coast, Fagen and Becker listened to local jazz radio programs like Symphony Sid. In order to keep the lights on, jazz stations played a lot of Latin jazz from the ’50s and ’60s, and those influences are evident on the Dan’s impressive catalogue. But before Steely Dan came into existence, Fagen and Becker cut their teeth as session players along the eastern seaboard and tried selling songs as staff writers around the Brill Building and later at ABC-Dunhill (the latter thanks to an auspicious friendship with Gary Katz), but their lyrics were far from the upbeat Supremes’ 45s that dominated the airwaves of the late ’60s and early ’70s as evidenced in the Grassroots’ rejection of their song “Tell Me A Lie.” Barbra Streisand, however, ended up recording their song “I Mean to Shine” in 1971. They spent a year and half backing up Jay & the Americans on a couple tours, got a feel for the giant stages of Madison Square Garden, but Fagen and Becker always planned on having their own group. At night, when the ABC-Dunhill building was empty, Fagen and Becker would sneak in and lay the foundation of what would become Steely Dan.
On their first record, Can’t Buy A Thrill, Steely Dan was comprised of what seemed like permanent members, including Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, whose chops can be heard on the brilliant guitar solos of “Only A Fool Would Say That” and “Midnight Cruiser,” but eventually let him run off with the Doobie Brothers. Fagen and Becker preferred to hire session musicians instead of having permanent bandmates for their records, and that in itself is a testament to their longevity. Steely Dan was never a band per-say, rather a concept. In that case, Steely Dan could never be dismembered.
On the one hand with Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion, you’ve got archived reviews and interviews on Steely Dan that can be dug up if you have access to your uncle’s crate of 1970s copies of MOJO and Rolling Stone—or the internet. On the other hand, you’ve got a collection of some of the wittiest interviews Fagen and Becker have ever sat down for juxtaposed with a collection of the sharpest commentary from music journalism’s top dogs (Barney Hoskyns, Dylan Jones, Robert Palmer, Sylvie Simmons) that weave together the interesting saga that is Steely Dan. My only reservation? Two female writers among the Steely Dan Companion’s 33 contributors.
Sit poolside and in conference rooms as Fagen and Becker’s esoteric humor attempts to throw off naive journalists, learn about that time Keith Richards banged on their hotel room at 4 a.m. blasting Katy Lied, and impress your friends with your encyclopedic knowledge of Fagen’s recording techniques, like how he discreetly hung a microphone from the ceiling at Studio 54 during one of Steve Rubell’s business parties to achieve the party noises heard on “Ruby Baby” only to toss the recording (that obsessive nit-pick), and then throw his own party where “a lot of people got very drunk, and we got our party noises,” Fagen says.
The first time Steely Dan were invited to the Grammys, they declined because the invitation requested that they “wear beautiful clothes.” “They wanted me to come dressed like Cher!” Fagen says. They never toured because hitting the road would interrupt their energy in the studio. One need look further than Aja—the album that garnered acceptance from the National Recording Registry—to understand how vital continuity is. Performing in venues added another obstacle: The Dan’s sound was too complex for big arenas and they did not want to risk losing an audience to muddled reverberations.
Because of their idiosyncratic sound—with its intricate chord changes, high-register harmonies, and immaculate exteriors, other musicians have found it difficult to cover Steely Dan’s discography. However, plenty of hip-hop and R&B artists have sampled their songs in the last two decades decade. Ice Cube samples “Green Earrings” on his “Don’t Trust ‘Em”; Beyonce blends “Black Cow” on her J’Ty remix of “Me, Myself, and I”; Hit Boy/John Legend tie “The Boston Rag” on “WyW.” Fagen points out that he and Becker usually gave the green light to hip-hop artists who requested to use parts of the Dan’s music; however, when Kanye West requested to sample “Kid Charlemagne” on his 2007 single “Champion,” it was an immediate no. Though the additional income was appealing, “neither of us particularly liked what he had done with it,” Fagen says. Consequently, Kanye wrote Fagen and Becker a handwritten note: “I love your stuff, and I really want to use it because it’s very personal thing for me.” And with that, Fagen and Becker had a change of heart.
Hoskyns divides Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion into six sections that follow Steely Dan’s trajectory, but perhaps the most interesting sections are the final two, titled “Stand-Up Rock ’n’ Roll: The Return of Steely Dan” and “Grey Eminences,” which find Fagen and Becker coming to terms with their age, their adaptations to the 21st century (recording for CD versus vinyl) before concluding the collection with a poignant essay on the late Walter Becker by Uncut writer David Cavanagh.
“A lot of people think of them as the epitome of boring ’70s stuff” writes novelist William Gibson; yet the truth is, they have been accepted without the glitz, fancy clothes, and the Billboard hits. They are Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Major Dudes who exemplified that intelligence was to be regarded with skepticism in the realm of rock ’n’ roll. What music critics called bitter and cynical, Steely Dan called funny. It’s difficult to imagine where we’d be without their sardonic perceptions of society; perhaps we’d be stuck in a world of pink bubble gum. Either way, it was the Dan who were the ones laughing all the way to the bank.
—Melissa Caruso
How Steely Dan made its mark on music — and shaped an American cool By Sibbie O'Sullivan writing in the Jul 13, 2018 The Washington Post
It’s been nearly five decades since Steely Dan released its breakthrough hit, “Do It Again.” (Are you humming it now?) Few would dispute the band’s influence or popularity — all told, it has sold more than 40 million albums worldwide — but with “Major Dudes,” Barney Hoskyns delivers a 300-page block of solid evidence of the musical and lyrical brilliance that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the originators of Steely Dan, unleashed on the world beginning in the 1970s.
The book — featuring essays, reviews and interviews about and with Fagen and Becker — covers the duo’s pre-Dan years through their solo careers and ends with Walter Becker’s death in 2017. It shows how the band was shaped by American radio and television in the 1950s and early ’60s, before escaping the suburbs for Manhattan. There, Fagen and Becker imbibed jazz and took on a Beat-infused style of dress and attitude. After playing college gigs at Bard, they toured with Jay and the Americans and then relocated to Los Angeles, where they perfected their “brand of ruthless cool,” a style that made their albums, from “Can’t Buy a Thrill” (1972) to “Gaucho” (1980), instant classics.
Unlike a straight biography about the band — or even a memoir — “Major Dudes” filters the group’s rise through its interaction with journalists. As such, it offers a more critical take. The interviews are compelling and revealing (if at times repetitious), showcasing Fagen and Becker’s secluding habits and snarky put-ons. Becker, especially, is fluent, funny and prescient. One statement, from a 1976 interview with Michael Watts, in the magazine Melody Maker, stands out. Watts asks Becker whether their music might “be generally symptomatic of the times” Becker answers, “In terms of cynicism? Oh, I dunno. I don’t think these are particularly cynical times. You just wait to see what’s coming up! I’m inclined to think that things are going to become far more pessimistic.”
Readers expecting opinionated writing from rock journalists won’t be disappointed. In his review of the 1975 album “Katy Lied,” John Ingham writes, “When I first received this album, it engendered dispassionate dislike, but the more I play it, the more I become merely ambivalent.” Another critic mentions the band’s “gang-war instrumental break,” and another that “the band doesn’t exactly look like they jumped out of Modern Romance magazine.” Writing about Fagen’s 2014 memoir, “Eminent Hipsters,” Ian Penman says the book is “actually ‘On the Road’ with Alvy Singer.’ ”
Fagen and Becker’s lyrics have been described as cynical and sinister, and the artists themselves as “sociopaths masquerading as benign dictators,” a reference to their perfectionist methods in the studio. Regardless of whether one agrees with these assessments, Becker’s prediction about the future was correct. The lone shooter in “Don’t Take Me Alive,” from the band’s 1976 album “The Royal Scam” has, sadly, become a regular headline today.
The interviews also uncover a great deal about the influences that shaped Fagen and Becker’s art. Fiction was a big one — both on the style and content of their songs. As young men, Fagen and Becker read the iconic writers of the ’50s and ’60s: John Barth, Terry Southern, Thomas Pynchon, Herman Hesse and, of course, William Burroughs. When singing, Fagen says he becomes a song’s “character,” or acts as the “narrator” of a particular story. The song “Everything You Did,” also from “The Royal Scam,” stings like a Raymond Carver three-pager.
I think, too, the surreal novels of Nathanael West, another author the duo admired, must have influenced their work. West’s collection of freaks, cons, cowboys and unpredictable women in his 1939 “The Day of the Locust” predates Steely Dan’s own collection of freaks, cons and gauchos by 33 years. Even Fagen’s desire — comic, perhaps — to write a song about the Congress of Vienna seems to echo West’s fantastic scene involving a failed Hollywood reenactment of the battle of Waterloo.
Unfortunately, the book, which unfolds chronologically, loses momentum (and possibly the reader’s patience) by needlessly repeating already-stated facts throughout the text. We understand that Fagen hearing Becker play blues guitar in an empty room at Bard College in 1967 is the second-most important howdy-do in rock history — July 6, 1957, St. Peter’s Church, Woolton, Liverpool being the first — but that doesn’t mean we want to repeatedly read about it.
That said, “Major Dudes” does effectively show how Fagen and Becker soaked up, skewed, and reformatted American images, habits and mismanaged dreams and made a groove out of them. In their songs, the “old, weird America” — to piggyback on Greil Marcus’s phrase — becomes the new, weird America, shining forth in urban present-tense, and on into the future, even into other worlds. Although some readers might fault “Major Dudes” for its dearth of longer essays that place Fagen and Becker in a wider cultural context, the book does give us plenty to read and think about. I have no doubt we’ll be thinking about and listening to Steely Dan until “California tumbles into sea.”
Sibbie O’Sullivan, a former teacher in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, has recently completed a memoir on how the Beatles have influenced her life.
Thank you for including my review in your blog!
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