The best Steely Dan stories from Michael McDonald’s memoir
Cocaine misadventures with Walter Becker and more from the forthcoming book What a Fool Believes
Somewhere back in his long ago, Michael McDonald was curled up in the fetal position on a steel cot in a Los Angeles County jail cell. Nineteen years old, he had come to California from his native St. Louis with dreams of recording an album. Instead he quickly accumulated a criminal record, as one run-in with law enforcement followed another.
“This time,” he writes in his forthcoming memoir, What a Fool Believes, “I was pulled in after falling asleep in a booth at Du-par’s pancake house following a 48-hour marathon party-for-two with a female friend, walking the tightrope between a cocaine binge and copious amounts of Jack Daniel’s.”
Written with McDonald’s actor-comedian-memoirist friend Paul Reiser, the book chronicles McDonald’s bumpy journey from L.A. club musician to Steely Dan touring member and studio ace to hit-making Doobie Brothers revivalist to pervasive background vocalist to chart-topping solo artist to silver-haired elder statesman of that curious subgenre now known as “yacht rock.”
Throughout 300-plus pages, the 72-year-old spares no one, himself included. We come to see McDonald as a not-so-sentimental fool bedeviled by alcohol and drugs, a strangely detached young man often runnin’ down the wrong road, a showbiz kid uncertain of his own talents even as he ascends to rarefied heights. The result is something of an anomaly among rock memoirs—a riveting read mercifully free of self-aggrandizement and convenient half-truths.
What a Fool Believes won’t see publication until May 21. If you can’t wait that long, here as a kind of preview are the 17 most entertaining Steely Dan anecdotes McDonald shares in the book.
Preorder What a Fool Believes (Dey Street Books).
McDonald and Walter Becker once teamed up for an ill-fated drug deal
An entire chapter is given over to the tale of “Michael and Walter’s Not-So-Great Adventure.” “Our plan was simple: we would buy about a half ounce of some of that exceptionally pure cocaine from our old friend Roy and cut it in half, which would still be much better than most coke on the streets of L.A.—the idea being we would not only make some easy money (selling only to our friends, completely under the radar) but end up with a fair portion of blow for our own recreational consumption, free of charge,” McDonald writes. “What could possibly go wrong? Well, true to form, of course we snorted most of it before even getting around to cutting it, let alone selling anything.