Between recording dates for the album that would become Gaucho, Steely Dan producer Gary Katz carved out nearly three hours for a remarkably candid conversation with Denis McNamara, a host on the Long Island radio station WLIR-FM. The program that resulted aired in three parts in January 1979. Metal Leg, the Steely Dan fanzine, first published a transcript of the interview in a 1991 issue, but the audio of Katz’s appearance has not been available until now.
In the first part, presented here, Katz discusses meeting Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the move from New York to Los Angeles, and the creation of the first three LPs. “I didn’t like everything that we did,” he says bluntly of Can’t Buy a Thrill, “nor did Donald and Walter. That’s just the way it happened.”
It’s interesting to see, through Katz’s eyes, the evolution of Steely Dan from a hastily assembled rock combo to prime studio craftsmen recording at their own pace, budgets be damned.
“We started to take advantage of the fact that we had success on the first one, and we weren’t gonna be rushed through it,” he says of working on Countdown to Ecstasy. “We started to—I guess for ourselves—set a mode of working that would wind up the way it is now, which is very meticulous, and given a choice of having it sound right or wrong, we make it sound right, and that takes some time. … [B]asically what we do is make records as a full-time business, much the same way a filmmaker makes a film or an author writes a book. I mean, that’s what he does for a living. Time’s not of the essence. When it’s done, it’s done. And in the course of making the kind of albums we do and having our own set standard, they take quite a while, and it becomes expensive in studio time.”
Best of all: McNamara solicits Katz for stories on specific songs, and he mixes in plenty of needle drops along the way.
In Part 2 of the interview, Katz talks about Katy Lied and The Royal Scam. Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter! This piece is part of the series “From the Archives of Brian Sweet,” in which Expanding Dan joins forces with the author of the definitive Steely Dan biography, Reelin’ in the Years, to explore his extensive trove of unpublished and rare interviews.
