Editor’s note: Last month Substack rolled out a raft of upgrades to video newsletters. That’s why I’m recirculating this short about Michael McDonald’s Steely Dan origins. When I first sent out the post in February, subscribers had to go to Dropbox to watch the video. Now you can see it in context without awkwardly migrating to a third-party site. And to those who’ve subscribed over the last ten months, this might be altogether new to you. Enjoy!
Suddenly, there it was: the Voice. Deep, smooth, unmistakable. A tone that could melt diamonds or soothe large beasts.
I’d heard that voice in action countless times—on records by the Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, and, of course, Steely Dan. And now it was coming through with a resonance that was testing the low-end capacity of my phone’s puny built-in speakers.
At the time, Michael McDonald was preparing to hit the road with the Doobies as part of the band’s 50th anniversary tour. His schedule, I’d been told, was tight. “Try to keep it on time,” the publicist said.
That would prove to be an impossibility. For Michael McDonald, aside from being one of the most distinctive singers of his generation, is also a talker of the highest order. In answer to my very first question—“How did you come to join Steely Dan?”—he spoke uninterrupted for nearly the entire scheduled length of our interview.
I wasn’t complaining.
The story McDonald told was full of vivid details, compelling twists, and moments of self-deprecating humor. It involved the 1970s NBC medical drama Emergency!, Stevie Wonder, marijuana, and future founding members of the rock group Toto. Eventually he found his way to the doorstep of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who figured out how to use his voice as a novel harmonic instrument, kicking off McDonald’s side gig as one of the most ubiquitous male backing vocalists of the ’70s and ’80s.
McDonald spun the tale of his journey to Dandom so cinematically that I knew in real time it deserved to be more than just text on a page. And it certainly didn’t hurt that everything he said emanated from that magic larynx.
Michael McDonald on how he joined Steely Dan