Steely Dan's steeliest drummer
Keith Carlock on 20 years with the band
Forget the legend of “Peg” and its legion of rejected guitar soloists. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen always came down hardest on their drummers.
“They would often burden the drummer, detail by detail: ‘Add this on the hi-hat. Do two snare hits on the chorus in the second bar,’” longtime Steely Dan session guitarist Dean Parks once told me. “The drummers were carrying a heavy psychic load.”
Over the last half century, Becker and Fagen recorded albums and performed live with some of the world’s most adored stickmen: Jim Gordon, Jeff Porcaro, Bernard Purdie, Steve Gadd, Rick Marotta, Ed Greene, Jim Keltner, Peter Erskine, Dennis Chambers, Ricky Lawson, among others. Many of the studio players came away with stories of doing take after take, only to leave with a nagging fear that, after all that toil and sweat, their performances may not actually end up on the album.
Among the pantheon of Steely Dan drumming heroes, Keith Carlock is the undisputed ironman endurance champion. In a job that once seemed to be a revolving door, he has become a monolith. The band’s sole touring drummer for the last 20 years, he holds the distinction as the only drummer after the original lineup’s Jim Hodder to appear on every song of a Steely Dan studio album, 2003’s Everything Must Go. He plays on eight of the nine tracks on Fagen’s 2006 solo album, Morph the Cat, and serves as the lone drummer on Becker’s second and final solo album, 2008’s Circus Money. All that is to say nothing of Carlock’s work with the likes of Christopher Cross and Toto.
As anyone who has witnessed a Steely Dan live show over the past two decades can attest, Carlock is as precise as he is powerful. In a 2003 issue of Modern Drummer, Becker hit upon what makes the musician the Platonic ideal of a Steely Dan drummer:
The predominance of programmed grooves, of playing along with a click rather than generating your own time, has changed the way musicians hear rhythm and play it. Shifts have occurred in where people feel the beat and how explicit or implicit certain parts of the time are. That’s been a problem for us, because we’re trying to recreate a kind of rhythmic feel that predates the drum machine era, where it’s really a feel generated by the players, something that has a swing and a lope to it and still has hypnotically steady time. With Keith, everything he tried to play worked in that way. He also began with a good idea of where a tune was supposed to go, and he got better as we played it. He actually made this whole thing possible. There have been points in sessions we’ve done previously where we had to switch drummers or we couldn’t get the track or something like that. But Keith is a quick study, and his groove is just as good at the end of the day as it is at the beginning.
As he was preparing to depart his home in Franklin, Tennessee, for New York City to begin Steely Dan’s current tour with the Eagles, Carlock spoke about being scouted by Becker and Fagen at a dive bar, the intense pressure he felt while recording Two Against Nature, and how he manages to leave his imprint on classics such as “Aja.”