As the typhoon of media attention has no doubt made you aware, the so-called last Beatles song, “Now and Then,” was released today. It got me thinking about (big surprise!) Steely Dan’s relationship to the Fab Four.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—the Lennon-McCartney of jazz-rock, if you will—would often hold up the Beatles as the prime example of a touring band that left the road behind and successfully transformed into a purely studio-bound recording entity. Becker and Fagen also leaned on the Beatles to defend their employment of session players, a practice frowned upon by some ’70s rock purists.
“That cold stigma about studio hacks is nonsense,” Fagen told Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe in 1977, shortly after the release of Aja. “You can get studio musicians to sound exactly like a rock & roll band.”
“We don’t feel it’s something to be ashamed of,” Becker said. “The Beatles did it quite a bit, by their own admission. A lot of things Eric Clapton played … everyone thought it was George Harrison.” (Though he’s not credited on the White Album, Clapton overdubbed lead guitar on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”)
And then there was the time Beatles producer George Martin crossed paths with Steely Dan. He happened to be in an adjacent recording studio as they finished mixing the song “Aja” and was invited over to have a listen. As the band’s longtime engineer Elliot Scheiner explains in the audio short above, the "Fifth Beatle” responded with remarkable indifference to the Dan’s journey through time and space.
For more on the song “Aja,” read “Double helix,” the oral history of how Steve Gadd and Wayne Shorter launched the title track of Steely Dan’s 1977 masterpiece into outer space.
The Fifth Beatle was not impressed with "Aja"