On October 17, 1977, three weeks after Steely Dan released Aja, production began on the film FM. Centered on a rebellious crew of DJs at the Los Angeles radio station QSKY, the Universal Pictures project was under the direction of John A. Alonzo, the esteemed cinematographer of Vanishing Point, Harold and Maude, and Chinatown. FM would be among what Rolling Stone in 1978 described as an “oncoming crush of rock films,” which also included the likes of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thank God It’s Friday, American Hot Wax, and that year’s highest-grossing film, Grease. At a time when freeform radio was flourishing and vinyl sales were at their historical peak, the six major studios all had musical film projects in the can, in progress, or in development.
“Hollywood, along with the rest of the civilized world, was scared when rock & roll first rumbled onto the scene,” Ben Fong-Torres wrote. “But now rock & roll has become respectable. Which means it’s making money, in box-office grosses and soundtrack albums.”
To assemble the all-important soundtrack to FM, Universal partnered with the most influential manager in rock, Irving Azoff. As a first-time executive producer, the 30-year-old Front Line Management chieftain gave the studio access to his formidable stable of artists: the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett, Dan Fogelberg, Boz Scaggs, among others. He arranged for the filming of live performances by Buffett and Linda Ronstadt. He convinced Tom Petty to make a cameo. And he looked to one of his newest clients, Steely Dan, to write and record the title song.
This was not the first time Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had been asked to compose for film. A few years earlier, while doing business as the Original Soundtrack (which included guitarist Denny Dias and drummer John Discepolo), Becker and Fagen wrote and performed the music for Peter Locke’s now-lost 1971 hippie experiment You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat. Tapped for FM in the wake of Aja, they still had enough gas in the car to deliver “FM (No Static at All),” a funked-up doozy featuring a ripping tenor sax solo from Pete Christlieb, who was fresh off of “Deacon Blues,” and a sumptuous string arrangement conducted by legendary maestro Johnny Mandel. The song is a quintessential Steely Dan Trojan horse: into a Hollywood studio picture celebrating the power and promise of the FM airwaves, Becker and Fagen slipped a gentle critique of late-’70s radio as an aphrodisiac for the undiscerning masses.
