Donald Trump on Donald Fagen, and more from SNL's James Austin Johnson
The comedian explains how terrible hash and L.A. traffic made him a Danfan.
Steely Dan never played Saturday Night Live.
The closest approximation we have is Donald Fagen performing “I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)” alongside Patti Austin and David Sanborn on the eleventh episode of Night Music, the late-night Sunday jazz showcase produced by Lorne Michaels from 1988 to 1990.
Then, for more than 30 years—nothing. Until last May.
During the ceremonial SNL curtain call, host Selena Gomez stood on the stage of Studio 8H and bid the audience good night. At the edge of the screen, over the shoulder of musical guest Post Malone, a svelte man in glasses could be seen excitedly bouncing up and down, waving his arms in the air. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and a black baseball hat whose blue stitching read “An Independent Station: WJAZ,” the “J” styled like a saxophone. It was, of course, a nod to Fagen’s 1982 solo album The Nightfly, whose title track unfolds from the perspective of a wee-hours disc jockey.
“I’m as big a Donald Fagen fan as I am a Steely Dan fan,” says James Austin Johnson, who had copped the hat from the music podcast Jokermen. “The Nightfly is probably my favorite among all the Steely Dan, Fagen, and Becker records.”
Over the phone recently from his dressing room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where he regularly transforms into Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the 33-year-old comedian discussed the subtle differences between dad rock and “stepdad rock,” the Sunken Condos song that should be an SNL sketch, and Trump’s hottest Steely Dan takes.
You became a dad a little over a year ago.
That's right. We moved to New York for SNL while my wife was six months pregnant. I don’t recommend doing that. That was one of the meaner things that fate dished out for us. But it has ended up great. The baby’s name is Homer, and he’s very happy and healthy.
You’ve been a fan of Steely Dan and Bob Dylan and other so-called dad rock for years. Did actually becoming a dad make the music hit differently?
Yeah, it does feel like an older, more mature thing. I was raised in a conservative Christian family in Tennessee, and my dad is a big Chicago guy. So I call Steely Dan “Evil Chicago,” because Chicago is toothless Steely Dan. The niceness of Peter Cetera and the earnestness of his romantic relationships are much more my family’s style than Donald Fagen singing about partying with a 19-year-old. The same goes for the lyrical content of, say, “Kid Charlemagne”—what is life like for a famed LSD dealer in the Bay Area? My family doesn’t find that very relatable.
In high school my big musical obsessions were Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Wilco. That stuff all feels more “dad” than Steely Dan—which, to me, is more “stepdad.” Steely Dan is for divorced men, and specifically divorced college professors having inappropriate relationships with teacher’s aides.
I’ve never considered the differences between dad rock and stepdad rock.
Yeah, I do believe Steely Dan is stepdad rock. If you listen to Wilco, which truly is dad rock, Jeff Tweedy is a man laying bare his faults and saying basically, “I hope you still love me, even though I lied to you.” And then Steely Dan is like, “Fuck yeah—I lied to you. I’m on drugs, and the luxury hotel that you invited me to in the middle of the night wouldn’t let me up the elevator!”
“Gaslighting a woman is a fun game I play!”
Yes, exactly. Stepdad rock!
How did you get into Steely Dan?
I was a young comedian in Los Angeles. I had just moved there, and I’d only ever lived in Tennessee. So I’m this new guy in L.A. trying to get used to the lifestyle, hanging out with a crowd that didn’t grow up in conservative Christian circles the way I did. I was just this dumbass in my early 20s, who would tag along with my more established comedian friends to their shows in Hollywood, sit backstage in these nasty theaters, and drink the comics’ beer. I wasn’t even booked to perform in the shows! And there I was on my third or fourth can of Bud Light that was fully intended for the comics. People would look at me like I was crazy. At one point—and I wasn’t drunk, though I was definitely not in my right mind—I walked up to Donald Glover, who was just becoming a popular musician, and I was like, “So, when you made that music video, was that, like, cool?” I was just this embarrassing guy my comedian buddy was driving around L.A. and introducing to these famous comics. I’d always end up sucking the cool out of the room.
Flash forward a couple years—some friends and I were sitting around talking about music you can play for everybody, the kind everyone agrees on. My buddy was like, “Any of the Steely Dan records are crowd-pleasers.” I was like, “Isn’t that elevator music?” And he said, “Right, there’s a reason it’s elevator music—it makes everyone feel good.” Still, I was skeptical. But then I went to Northern California, where I’d been booked to perform at a wine country comedy festival in Healdsburg, California. The guy who invited me, Cory Loykasek, who was then on a TBS series called The Dress Up Gang, didn’t have the budget to pay all 20 comics. But many of Cory’s friends were marijuana growers. So I was paid in a giant bag of weed.
The currency of Northern California!
For about three months, I was fishing through all the leaves and stems and seeds trying to find the nugs to grind up and smoke. He also gave me a big bag of these nasty little black balls of terrible hash. Written in Sharpie on the bag, it said “COOKING HASH.” I didn’t know anything about drugs. I’d smoked weed once or twice before and was curious about it. I knew listening to music while high was really fun. During one of my first experiences with weed, I’d found my roommate’s stash, smoked it, and listened to the first Haim record on a Bluetooth speaker. I was high out of my mind, standing in the kitchen in my underwear, and going, “This music is sooo good.” In any case, I didn't know what to do with cooking hash. Later on, I was at an open mic, and someone who was much more of a drug guy was like, “You can just smoke hash out of a chillum.” He handed me what I later learned was a crack pipe and showed me how to roll the little snot boogers of hash into a snake shape and coil them up at the end of the pipe. It was the absolute lowest-quality hash. You’d get high for maybe eight minutes and then have the worst headache of all time for about four hours.
Back then, all I had was a tech job in Mar Vista, a big bag of rapidly decaying cooking hash, and very little money. That is precisely when I started listening to Steely Dan. For about a month, I would finish work at my depressing tech job, smoke cooking hash out of a crack pipe, and sit in my car in the parking garage of the tech company, waiting until 7 or 8 o’clock when traffic would die down. This, to me, is the perfect environment to have Steely Dan become very meaningful. Of course, I got into Aja, and I loved Katy Lied. My favorite album quickly became The Royal Scam. I had heard the Kanye song that sampled “Kid Charlemagne,” so hearing the real song for the first time was mind-blowing. When I first heard the song “Gaucho,” I realized that I had been a version of that character—I’d been the embarrassing, too-drunk friend of the cool guy.
You had been the heel.
And I didn’t realize everyone was laughing at me. People wanted to drop me on the side of the freeway. I’m so lucky that my friends didn’t get rid of me, even though I was incredibly embarrassing. To me, “Gaucho” is still such a sad song because I lived it.
So that’s my story of the year I fell in love with Steely Dan. It was miserable, but totally appropriate for a 24-year-old. Incidentally, that same year, I also lost my virginity.
Big year for you!
Very late, but I became a slut—and I also got to see Steely Dan at the Hollywood Bowl for the first time.
Donald Fagen has said that when he and Walter were writing songs, their intention was to make each other laugh. That doesn’t sound dissimilar to the writers’ room of a comedy show like SNL.
Oh, yeah. Everyone’s doing bits at SNL. The cast and writers are working on characters, and I feel Steely Dan is so much about characters. I don’t really get a lot of Donald from his songs. His songs have personality, but he’s not preaching in any way. It’s more storytelling. The songs are all these character-driven tales. And that feels more SNL than probably a lot of other writers’ rooms, because at SNL people are always talking about characters. You do a silly voice, and everybody starts chipping in: “OK, who exactly is this character?” The jokes come from the character. And Steely Dan is all about character—what happens to a specific weird guy.
Is there a certain Becker-Fagen song that you think would lend itself well to an SNL sketch?
“Haitian Divorce” is really funny. I can see that as a Heidi Gardner thing. But my first thought is “The Goodbye Look” from The Nightfly. It has such funny images in it—Cuba being overthrown, the Colonel in the sun with his stupid face, the prospect of being menaced behind a big casino on the beach. Now that I say it out loud, it sounds more dramatic than funny. But I just love “The Goodbye Look.” That’s one of my favorite songs ever. “The New Breed” from Sunken Condos—the one about a man coming to terms with the young guy that’s become his wife’s preoccupation? That feels very SNL to me. I imagine that I would be styled like present-day Donald Fagen and do something really stupid at a party because my wife’s boy toy is actually cool as hell. That definitely feels like an SNL sketch.
You’ve said “Jack of Speed” is in your top 10 Steely Dan songs.
I love the groove. Becker and Fagen love writing about drug addiction because they’re very much an offshoot of the Beat Generation. And so much of that was just about doing heroin and reading Ferlinghetti and shit. Some great jazz came from heroin. I love the Velvet Underground, and I love Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and, of course, I love Steely Dan. But I will say that I typically find drugs to be incredibly boring, unpoetic, and just kind of sad and exhausting. I’ve known too many artists who purposely mess up their lives with drugs because they think that brokenness and sadness is necessary to make great art. To me, there couldn’t be a more boring creative philosophy.
That’s what's so weirdly funny about “Deacon Blues”—the wannabe jazzman narrator romanticizing perishing in a drunken car accident.
The judgment about it is right there. Fagen and Becker seem to be pointing out the bleakness of it.
You were on SNL when John Mulaney hosted. He’s been outspoken about his love of Steely Dan. Did you two get a chance to geek out?
I've only barely gotten to know John, but I know we have that shared interest to discuss. I went and saw The Oh, Hello Show, which stars John and Nick Kroll, and they have a fake Steely Dan song in it. The closest I got to relating to John about our jazz-rock appreciation is when he hosted SNL last year, and I brought a music-related sketch to the table read. I’ve been trying to get this character on SNL for a couple of years. It is a Weekend Update bit based on Rolling Stone senior writer David Fricke. It’s this guy who slowly, pedantically overexplains what music is. [David Fricke voice] “So, I’m Donald Fagen, and I want to make a record. Where do I start? I get a studio. I get a band together. I write some songs, OK?”
Fricke was in every VH1 documentary.
Exactly. Every rock doc! So I brought that to the table read. And the thing is, SNL is hip. A lot of the cast and writers are, like, 25. So when I bring a David Fricke character to the table, the reference is lost on most people. That said, John Mulaney laughed big and hard at the first 30 seconds, mainly because he was so psyched that I was dragging David Fricke. I’m just not cool enough or famous enough yet for them to let me do David Fricke on SNL. Maybe at some point down the line.
In addition to being a Steely Dan fan, you also love Todd Rundgren. Are you aware of the Rundgren-Fagen collaboration “Tin Foil Hat,” about Donald Trump?
Nope! But I’m going to have to check that out, because you just named the three guiding lights of my art. [SNL cast member] Sarah Sherman is also a big Todd Rundgren head. I’m no Trump expert, but I’ve watched a lot of tape of him, and I feel in touch with his psyche.
Have you given any thought to what Donald Trump’s take would be on Steely Dan and Donald Fagen?
[Trump voice] Well, you know, with Donald, Donald is somebody who, you know—and by the way, he’s so ugly. This is somebody who you could never put in a music video. It’d have to be a pretty lady. Because if you put him up top, I mean, he’s gonna look like, it’s gonna look like some kind of, you know, like the guy who comes out at the library and he’s got a marionette and he’s doing Hamlet or something like that. He has this thing about the pretty ladies, because they gotta put somebody up—you know, the “Tomorrow's Girls” video. I mean, look at Rick Moranis and look at those beautiful girls in their summer dresses. They couldn’t even get—Rick Moranis is a step up from Donald Fagen! That’s how you know who he is.
In regards to Steely Dan and with regard to Donald Fagen, I think we need to be looking into Kamakiriad. You know, I’m very good friends with Morph the Cat. And you know what? Sunken Condos is so underrated. Nobody likes Sunken Condos. And I said, “What about the Letterman performance of ‘Weather in My Head’? You completely forgot about the Letterman with ‘Weather in My Head.’” And I told him, “You shouldn’t even do that. You should do ‘Cousin Dupree’ or something. I don’t think you should do something from the record. I mean, you’re Donald Fagen. Don’t promote the record, promote yourself. Do—I don’t know—do ‘Rose Darling.’” But Donald never takes my calls. He doesn’t take my calls anymore.
And we don’t even have Becker anymore. But how big of a loss is that? I mean, Becker was still taking guitar lessons while they were recording, you know, “Snow-Blind” or whatever the hell it is, “Snowbound.” So, you know, with Becker, you’re not even getting that much. Is Donald pulling the entire raft? Becker is so much dead weight. I think he was much more concerned about growing sugarcane than he was ever about noodling. So thank god—thank god they had access to that one guy. You know, the guy who’s got the hair—he looks like Brandy Carlisle. Whoever the lead guitarist is, thank god they got him, because who’s gonna play “Bodhisattva”? It’s not gonna be Becker doing “Bodhisattva.” I don’t think he’d be able to keep up with that.
I lost it at "You know, I’m very good friends with Morph the Cat."