At a rehearsal for the New York Rock and Soul Revue in 1992, Donald Fagen had just kicked into Steely Dan’s “My Old School” on his Fender Rhodes when he heard something amiss. The maestro signaled to the band to stop and yelled across the stage to the keyboardist Scott Healy, who was a substitute on Hammond B3 organ that day and would soon join the house band for the nascent Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “He said that I was rushing,” Healy recently recalled. “And I was.”
Fourteen years later, Healy found himself seated across from Fagen once more, this time as a journalist on assignment. In the first of his few feature stories for Keyboard magazine, Healy spoke to Fagen in February 2006, on the eve of the release of Morph the Cat, the final installment in Fagen’s so-called Nightfly Trilogy.
“I remember the interview well, because I was so nervous,” Healy told me the other day. “He really lit up when I started asking about jazz and his influences.” Keyboard had arranged for a Rhodes to be delivered to the room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City where they met, giving Healy the chance to go deep on music theory with one of his heroes. “That was my favorite part,” he says. “I felt we were connecting about this stuff, and I asked him questions that I’d always wanted answered regarding Steely Dan chords and harmony and how he approaches playing the piano, and also his unique approach to chord voicings and sounds.”
I’ve long considered Healy’s piece one of the most distinctive Fagen interviews, because it captures two pros talking shop. A few weeks ago, I reached out to Healy to ask if he had held onto a recording of the conversation. After some searching, he sent me a photo of a RadioShack microcassette tape. On the label, he had scrawled Fagen’s name in pencil. He kindly digitized the 20-year-old tape and agreed to share the audio with Expanding Dan.
“I ended up playing with Donald again in Woodstock, when he started showing up at Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble, where I was playing a lot. I think it was 2009. He was really into playing the blues,” Healy said. “Now I’m living in Woodstock, and he’s living right above me in Bob Dylan’s old house, where he’s been for years.”
