A few days after Walter Becker’s death in September 2017, the Minneapolis radio host Ron “Boogiemonster” Gerber mourned as only he could. He got behind a microphone on a Friday night at community-run KFAI-FM and dedicated an episode of his long-running weekly program to Steely Dan. “Everything I play tonight,” he told the listeners of Crap From The Past, “would not have been possible without Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.”
As he often does on the cult-favorite show (tagline: “a graduate-level course in pop”), Gerber scoured the archives of American Top 40, rounding up numerous clips of iconic disc jockey Casey Kasem introducing the chart action of some of the band’s biggest singles: “Do It Again,” “Rikki Don't Lose That Number,” “Black Friday,” “Peg,” “Deacon Blues,” “FM (No Static at All),” “Josie,” “Hey Nineteen,” and “Time Out of Mind.”
It is deeply funny to hear Kasem, with that apple-pie voice, cheerily introducing a song about chasing the dragon. But it’s also a testament to Becker and Fagen’s mastery of the Trojan horse technique—their artful smuggling of subversive narratives onto the meatball American airwaves under the guise of glossy, toe-tapping jazz-rock. In his intro to “Hey Nineteen,” for instance, Kasem gives the song’s actual content a wide berth, opting instead to go on a tangent about the album’s title, Gaucho. He invokes “those colorful cowboys who ride the Argentine Pampas, herding steers and catching varmants with their spinning bolas.” Anything, one supposes, to avoid the potentially uncomfortable truth: Hey, kids, here’s a banger about the perils of macking on younger women!
During his intro to “FM,” a DJ substituting for Kasem gets a bit closer to the less sunny realities of Steely Dan. “Ironically, with all their success, they remain an antisocial group,” he says. “They don’t go to parties. They don’t appear on TV. Walter seldom ventures out of his home. And Donald says that they both have ‘a direct, one-to-one hostile attitude toward fellow members of the [human] race.’1 Lighten up, Donald.”
Between the AT40 clips, Gerber sprinkled in some odds and sods: versions of “Do It Again” mashed up with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”; Barbra Streisand’s recording of the pre-Dan Becker-Fagen tune “I Mean to Shine”; even some Steely Dan soundalikes: the Kane Gang’s “Motortown,” Ween’s “Pandy Fackler.”
Gerber had so much material, in fact, that he ceded the majority of the following week’s Crap From The Past episode to another dose of Dan-related shenanigans, including a few more Kasem gems. Talking about Fagen’s first single off The Nightfly, Mighty Casey offers a deadpan description of the International Geophysical Year that is hilarious because it sounds like Kasem is smiling when he says, “I.G.Y. oceanographers came up with the theory that the earth is expanding and bursting at the seams!” The follow-up episode also includes additional selections from latter-day Dan disciples, including Toy Matinee and Danny Wilson.
In the early to mid-1990s, Gerber lived in Tucson, Arizona, while studying for his PhD in optics from the University of Arizona. He loved listening to an adult album alternative radio station that put Steely Dan on frequent rotation. Then abruptly the station switched formats. The event helped inform what Gerber humorously refers to as “the one postulate that I know to be true in the world of radio. . . . You can’t make any money playing Steely Dan records on the radio. I don’t know why that is.”
Gerber, for one, gets no bread from playing Steely Dan on the radio. He works a day job as a patent agent for a Minneapolis intellectual-property law firm. He also has published two books, including Between The Songs: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Radio Magic, or: Stuff I Learned from Hosting Crap From The Past for Twenty-Five Years. Recently we corresponded about his Steely Dan shows, and he graciously agreed to allow Expanding Dan to recirculate them. Here I’ve merged the two episodes—from September 8 and 15 of 2017—into a single file with a running time of nearly four hours. As Gerber says toward the end of the September 15 show, “That’s a lot of Steely Dan stuff!”
Bonus: Casey Kasem’s classic temper tantrum over a dead-dog dedication (outtake from AT40’s September 14, 1985, episode)
“Recluse Rock,” Janet Maslin and Dewey Gram, Newsweek, August 23, 1976.
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