Steely Dan backing track

Steely Dan backing track.

Once upon a time, there were two boomers, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who both grew up in slightly different parts of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. That being said, the neighborhoods they were from should not be confused with the Manhattan of Broadway shows, Wall Street, Greenwich Village and Harlem. The streets of their youth, though just a few miles from these wonders, were for the most part, placid and suburban.

Nevertheless, like many folks back then, they were afflicted with a needling agitation just below the surface of everyday reality. This was, at least in part, because of the Cold War and the constant, looming threat of a global, nuclear holocaust.

Unlike many schoolboys of their place and time – the late 1950s and early 1960s – Donald and Walter liked to read literary novels and listen to jazz records. Sports, not so much. On the other hand, like many American boys of their time, they had a healthy enthusiasm for baseball, baseball players and Topps bubble gum, the gum that came with baseball cards in each package: Flip ‘em, scale ‘em. trade ‘em, collect ‘em.

Music, though, was the thing. Before they were out of high school, Donald had taught himself jazz piano and Walter had become adept at both bass and guitar.

After meeting as students at Bard College in upstate New York, they began writing songs together on the piano in the common room of Walter’s dormitory. By then, in addition to jazz music, they had independently become enamored of Chicago blues, soul music and, to an extent, the vibrant subculture that embraced the British Invasion, Bob Dylan and, as the Cohen brothers have put it, the “new freedoms”. All these things, plus, for good or ill, a natural, shared drollery, were already apparent in their music and lyrics.

When classmate Terence (Boona) Boylan scored an album contract with Columbia Records, he asked the boys to join his session band at Jerry Ragovoy’s midtown Manhattan studio, the Hit Factory, where they got to work with the legendary drummer Herb Lovelle and listen to the “Ragman” tell funny stories about his life in the music business.

In 1968, the duo found cheap digs in pre gentrification Brooklyn, on President Street in Park Slope, where they sat around on ancient, shabby couches and plotted their assault on the music business. Amazingly, they soon got a gig touring as part of the backup band for early sixties hit makers Jay and the Americans. The group had a production company, whatever that is, in the famous Brill Building, a once vibrant hive of songwriting talent that had now transitioned into a decadent phase. Working with the group on the road and in the studio, the boys got to hear Jay and the fellows tell some even raunchier, funnier stories about the music business and also meet some actual gangsters.

One of the Americans, Kenny Vance, managed to place one of their tunes on a Barbara Streisand album that featured songs by the new, groovy generation of writers. Donald and Walter also played sessions for Vance’s Brooklyn crony Gary Katz. By the early seventies, they had worked with many top NYC session pros including drummer Buddy Saltzman, bassist Chuck Rainey, pianists Paul Griffin and Artie Butler, and guitarists Elliot Randall, Dom Troiano, Ricky Zehringer (later Derringer) and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. The boys had come a long way from lower middle class suburbia to an even lower, hustler-class existence in the now extinct and forgotten commercial studio culture of midtown.

In 1971, with the city degenerating into a vile Gomorrah of debt and porn, the lads relocated to sunny Los Angeles where Gary Katz, now an A&R man for ABC/Dunhill Records, had secured them a sweet though under-paid job as staff songwriters for the label, one of the last to employ house writers to develop material for the artists on the roster. At that time, ABC was concentrating on “singles acts” aimed at the pre-teen and teen markets with artists such as Tommy Roe, The Grass Roots and Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds. Officially tasked with writing pop tunes for these artists, Donald and Walter secretly began to the assemble a band to act as a vehicle for their “special material”. With Katz’s help, they began to import players from the east coast.