Sometimes I forget that Steely Dan never played Saturday Night Live. In my head I can even hear the voice of longtime announcer Don Pardo quivering, “Musical guest—Steely Daaan!” This, I suppose, is my own private “Mandela effect” moment—a false memory that nonetheless feels real.
The only way I can explain this peculiar delusion is that over the years the worlds of Steely Dan and SNL have mingled in many and various ways:
Before he was the breakout star of the the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, Chevy Chase attended Bard College, where he happened to play drums in a band alongside his classmates Walter Becker and Donald Fagen during a 1967 Halloween party at a student residence called Ward Manor. “Chevy looked like a frat boy who’d wandered onto the wrong campus, but he was professional, talented, and compulsively funny,” Fagen writes in his memoir, Eminent Hipsters. “He kept excellent time and, at least that night, didn’t embarrass us by taking off his clothes or doing any of his Jerry Lewis bits.”
