Jazz and confrontation

On a rare bootleg tape from 1977, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen can be heard bringing their spiky comedy routine to Los Angeles radio.

In the small hours of Sunday, June 26, 1977, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen made a rare public appearance. During a program called Captain Midnight on the Los Angeles radio station KPFK 90.7 FM, they lifted the veil on Steely Dan’s forthcoming album, treating listeners to impromptu premieres of “Black Cow” and “Aja,” as well as cuts from some of their favorite jazz records. Along the way, the pair delivered their barbed, comic double act, live and uncensored, on listener-sponsored airwaves.

A Q&A by L.A.-based music journalist and critic Richard Cromelin that he culled from the extraordinary broadcast ran shortly thereafter in The Los Angeles Phonograph magazine. Ten years later transcripts were published in the first three issues of Metal Leg, the Steely Dan fanzine founded by Brian Sweet. But audio from the program has scarcely been heard—until now.

Recently Mr. Sweet, author of the essential biography Reelin’ in the Years, kindly agreed to allow Expanding Dan to publish the bootleg tape he acquired decades ago. The running time is just short of 100 minutes. Beginning to end, it’s a riveting listen.

From the moment they arrive at KPFK’s studio in North Hollywood, Becker and Fagen are on the offensive. “I’m just in a hostile mood tonight,” Fagen says at one point, “what can I tell you?” The primary target of their semi-performative ire: Cromelin, who was co-hosting the show alongside Melody Maker’s Harvey Kubernik and the deep-voiced Captain Midnight himself, Steve Tyler. By that time, the journalist and his reclusive subjects had a history, including five formal interviews. In a 1974 Los Angeles Times concert review, Cromelin lauded Steely Dan as “America’s most inventive band.” In other pieces, he included what may have been perceived as borderline ad hominem jabs.

“Walter Becker has the round clean face of a malevolently impish 13-year-old smart-ass,” Cromelin wrote after talking to the duo for a New Musical Express feature in April 1975. “Donald Fagen’s chiseled face looks as if it has permanently clamped itself in that grim expression in order to support the weight of his eyebrows.”

Such descriptions, stingingly accurate as they may have been, seem to have left Messrs. Becker and Fagen miffed. On top of that, Cromelin had written an item for the L.A. Times in September 1976 headlined “Steely Dan Ready to Hit the Road Again.” That premature piece touched off months of tedious speculation; Becker refers vaguely to the story “causing lawsuits.”

Thus the stage was set for a kind of on-air battle of wits. Cromelin and Kubernik go out of their way—apparently in the spirit of impish fun—to dig out obscure Becker-Fagen compositions that the songwriters hoped had been forgotten. Those include “Dog Eat Dog” from the 1971 film You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It, the soundtrack of which Becker refers to as “dog meat.” The co-hosts even throw in a couple of Steely Dan covers that they must have known would make their hypercritical guests cringe.

“Richard feels this will be a great embarrassment to us,” Becker says, “but I doubt it.”

“We’re beyond humiliation at this point,” Fagen deadpans. 

For their part, Steely Dan’s principals pounce on every opportunity to take the piss out of KPFK. They call the station “Mickey Mouse” and “gimcrack,” even as they sincerely introduce records by Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, and Charlie Parker. “That was Bob Dorough with a Miles Davis group of the ’60s, with a solo by Wayne Shorter,” Fagen says, prefiguring his turn as radio DJ Lester the Nightfly. (Unfortunately, a significant portion of the music played that night was not retained on the tape.)

Throughout the broadcast, an air of bookish antagonism pervades the studio, cut through with Becker and Fagen’s wry, staccato humor. (Is there anyone else in the history of rock who could turn the ten-dollar word contumely into a running punch line?) And for the coup de grâce, there’s a clown car of callers, many of whom sound even more lit up than Becker.

“Becker and Fagen liked their sardonic banter,” Cromelin told me in a recent interview, chuckling at his recollection of the program. “They were just being funny in the way they were always funny. I don’t think there was a lot of malice there.”

The true malice would come later. In a 1991 L.A. Times piece anticipating Fagen’s return with Kamakiriad, Cromelin described Becker as a “baby-faced sadist.” Fagen responded in a letter to the editor that the characterization must be wishful thinking on Cromelin’s part. “Your place next time, Dick,” he wrote. “I’ll bring the thumbscrews.”