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.