Before Steely Dan, there was Demian
The history of the pre-Dan jazz-rock band, as told by the guys booted by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen
I’ve always been fascinated by rock ’n’ roll casualties. The Pete Bests and Jason Evermans of the world. The members who washed out on the eve of a band’s breakthrough. The so-called “nearly men.” The footnotes to history.
That’s why I wanted to talk to drummer Mark Leon and singer Keith Thomas. Along with guitarist Denny Dias, they were founding members of Demian, the short-lived Long Island jazz-rock group that prefigured Steely Dan. When Demian’s bass player left to return to college in 1969, Dias took out a classified ad in the Village Voice in search of a bassist and electric keyboard player with “jazz chops, and R&B feel.” The ad was answered by two young songwriters then living in Brooklyn, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.
“We liked some of the material,” Fagen said of Demian’s original songs, during an interview for the Classic Albums episode on Steely Dan’s Aja. “It was early fusion-type material, before there was jazz fusion.”
But Becker and Fagen had not schlepped out to Dias’s parents’ house in Hicksville, New York, to play Demian’s songs. And they were not about to join them in gigging around the local bar scene, playing Top 40 covers for peanuts. The pair had a literal binder full of innovative original material, and they needed a band to bring their compositions to life.
“And then, one by one, we realized that there was a deficiency in certain of the players that wasn’t quite up to the standards,” Dias says glancingly in the Classic Albums documentary. Even though three decades had passed at that point, the memory makes him fidgety. That’s probably because those certain deficient players happened to be his close childhood friends, Leon and Thomas.
Demian soon fell apart. But when Becker and Fagen landed a deal with ABC/Dunhill out in Los Angeles, they sent for Dias. Meanwhile, Leon and Thomas watched as their old friend went on to make significant contributions to some of the most popular and enduring music of the 1970s.
In recent weeks, I spoke with Leon and Thomas, who are now in their mid-70s. I wanted to know more about their band, their experiences being among the first of many musicians fired by Becker and Fagen, and what it’s like to occupy the margins of a massive success story such as Steely Dan. What follows is the history of Demian, in their own words, plus the band’s never-before-heard demos.