"What record company are we on, by the way?" Donald Fagen wants to know. "I'm not kidding."
You can excuse the Steely Dan man's disorientation. Fagen and his partner, Walter Becker, last released a studio album of new material as Steely Dan in November 1980, the month Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term. And that one, Gaucho, had been anguished over for half of Jimmy Carter's administration.
That young woman in "Hey 19"? She'll be 40 this year.
You could listen to Gaucho on your turntable at 33 1/3 rpm, and maybe even on a portable cassette player: The Sony Walkman had been invented the year before. But not on CD – the compact disc was still in the research and development phase. Whether or not to make videos was a non-issue for the stage-shy Fagen and Becker: Cable TV was in its infancy, MTV yet to be born.
But this week they release Two Against Nature, an album that picks up seamlessly where Gaucho left off.
In a large rehearsal studio, the Dan's largish band works through the new material in preparation for PBS and VH1 TV concerts and a soon-to-be-launched international tour, tentatively set to begin in Japan in May.
Upstairs, in a small, cold, bare, dimly lit room suitable for interrogation by secret policemen, the question for Steely Dan is: Twenty years? What's the hurry?
"We approached this record fairly deliberately," Becker says with considerable understatement. "We decided in 1994 or 1995 that we were going to do a record, in no small part because we wanted to continue to tour.
"We didn't want to be playing just old songs. We wanted to have new songs that had been released on records that audiences would be able to hear, songs that we had written recently, rather than just things we'd written in 1976. We wanted to feel playing live and having a band was part of an ongoing aesthetic process, and not just a reprise of a career we had had at one time."
THE FIRST time around, they were allergic to touring, hardly ever played live after 1974 and dissolved as Steely Dan shortly after Gaucho. Fagen went back to New York; Becker retreated to Maui.
During the endless interim of the '80s, Fagen made a solo album, The Nightfly (1982), while Becker intermittently produced records (Rickie Lee Jones, Michael Franks). Occasional Fagen tracks showed up on soundtrack albums, and in the late 1980s he wrote a column for Premiere magazine.
There were tentative gear-ups in the 1990s. Fagen made another solo album, Kamikiriad, produced by Becker. By 1993, Fagen and Becker were touring again as Steely Dan, but the record came ever so slowly. (Becker released his own solo album, Eleven Tracks of Whack, in 1994.)
"We wrote and recorded a lot of things we didn't use, and a tune or two we wrote or finished after the recording process started, so a lot of time was spent working on things that ultimately weren't on the record," Becker says.
Like many Steely Dan albums, there's a thematic consistency to Two Against Nature, even if it is, as usual, a bit opaque.
"There wasn't actually any concept, but I think it's sort of like some of the other Steely Dan records, which were written in the same time period and we were thinking about certain things," says Fagen, 52. "Whatever was in our minds at the time. But there was a commonality of themes: Loss. Decay. Potential rejuvenation . . ."
"However brief, however impermanent," adds Becker, 50.
Friends for nearly 35 years, Fagen and Becker often answer questions simultaneously, ending each other's sentences like a long-married couple that has survived rocky moments to emerge in a mutual comfort zone.
One of the provocative songs on Two Against Nature is "What a Shame About Me." As with many of the new tunes, it's set in New York. A once-ambitious writer is now working in a bookstore, with no illusions left regarding fame or achievement. The sense of loss and decay, as Fagen put it, is palpable, although maybe not personal.
"I think it should have been called "What a Shame About Us," kind of a generational thing," Fagen offers. "It's about expectations."
"Let's face it," Becker adds, "us '60s folks had pretty high expectations. It's not hard to imagine being disappointed in the end."
There are also titillating touchstones to Steely Dan's past. In "What a Shame About Me,"' an old college girlfriend, now a movie star, shows up and suggests getting it on for old times' sake, making believe they're "back in our old school" – a fan-friendly reference to their 1973 track "My Old School."
Becker: "It's sort of an attempt to be somewhat self-referential."
Fagen: "We're just trying to connect, you know. . . ."
Becker: "And trying to acknowledge our own position in all this."
IF "POSITION in all this" means figuring out where they stand in the pop pantheon of the last 30 years, the answers can be as contradictory and elusive as some of their lyrics. After their first three albums, Fagen and Becker were singed by their candle-on-both-ends schedule of recording during the week and playing gigs on the weekend.
Touring was the music business in those days, but Steely Dan ended as a road unit – and as an actual band – after the 1974 tour to promote Pretzel Logic, their third platinum album, which spawned the Top 5 hit "Rikki Don't Lose That Number."
The musical introduction to 'Rikki' – a deft appropriation of a phrase from jazz pianist Horace Silver's 'Song for My Father' – signaled the direction Fagen and Becker found themselves going.
They'd become steeped in jazz as teenagers growing up in the suburbs around New York. Now they were going to mix it with their music. Katy Lied (1975), The Royal Scam (1976) and especially Aja (1977) and Gaucho, all million-selling albums, made Steely Dan's later music an accessory to the plush yuppie audiophile lifestyle.
The entire L.A. studio musician aristocracy was at Steely Dan's service then. The elusiveness of perfection might have tormented Becker and Fagen on the road, but with these players in the studio, perfection was in reach.
"Their expectation from musicians was always very high," Roger Nichols, the Dan's longtime engineer, says. "They'd always come away sweating, playing at 110% of their capability."
Nichols has worked with Fagen and Becker since they were tunesmiths for hire, recording demos in the early 1970s for ABC-Dunhill Music.
"We were all hi-fi freaks," Nichols says. "They didn't have a record deal yet, but I liked the songs. I liked that they were perfectionists. They had a vision; they could see exactly what the finished product would sound like."
Bringing polished jazz musicianship and impeccable arrangements to a pop song structure put Steely Dan in the vanguard of a movement they never wanted to join. Call it fusion or pop-jazz or whatever, but don't blame them.
"You can't always count on the devices, attitudes and conceits that stood you in good stead in 1972 or 1973, or 1978-79, to still have the same impact all these years later," Becker says. "It works in a musical way too: Hearing virtuoso jazz stuff on a rock 'n' roll record in those days had more of an impact. Then that got shunted off into an ultra-tame side of the musical world called smooth jazz, which can no longer be subversive."
Cyber-novelist William Gibson clicked his mouse finger on the distinction a few years ago, telling a British journalist: "A lot of people think of Steely Dan as the epitome of boring '70s stuff, never realizing this is the most subversive material pop has ever thrown up."
The trick, as Becker puts it, is simple: "We try to write things that work on a variety of levels at the same time: A sleek exterior with a turbulent lyric."
However you want to try to pigeonhole Steely Dan – always an unavailing task – there's no question that they are as remote from the mainstream of the record business today as they were back in their first prime time.
"Because," Fagen suggests, "our taste in music goes back so many decades more than most people in music does. We were like moldy figs before we were born."
Their deeply ingrained aloofness makes it all the more surprising that they've accepted (reluctantly) the promotional demands of today's music business, and embraced (wholeheartedly) connecting with their fans on a Web site (http://www.steelydan.com). (The website is still in operation.)
"We sort of looked at the Web site as an opportunity to publish some of the running gags," Becker says.
"It's kind of neat. There's a sense of connection to people in your audience, where you can communicate with them directly in ways other than your artistic output."
Can these once-cranky loners really be doing tours, TV and the Internet, humming, "Reach out and touch," albeit in 7/4 time?
"We can't rely on radio to play us in any wide way," Fagen says. "We're trying to sell records that will let us make more records."
"We were persuaded that the slightly irregular gap between this and our last studio album made it incumbent on us to do things we normally wouldn't consider," Becker says.
"We want this to be a going thing for us. It's a really satisfying job to have in life, and we recognize that. I think we want to make it so that people are aware we're doing this, and give it a fair chance to be heard, and it's not likely that will happen unless we do a lot."
Their label, by the way, is Giant/Reprise.
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