Classic Albums—Steely Dan: Aja . . . now with a commentary track!
Producer Martin R. Smith discusses making the 1999 rock doc that is studied like the Zapruder film.
“I’ve basically been able to make programs about my record collection,” the documentarian Martin R. Smith tells me when I reach the 67-year-old by video conference at his home in London. “They say never meet your heroes. But I did, and it worked.”
Smith was a supervising producer on Peter Jackson’s 2021 series The Beatles: Get Back. His filmography includes docs about Roxy Music, Genesis, the Jam, and Blur. But he says the fondest memories of his career are connected to the decade or so he spent at Isis Productions, where he worked on the TV docuseries Classic Albums. The program was spun off from a 1992 episode of The South Bank Show about the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, featuring George Martin behind the mixing console, working the faders, peeling back layers on the album’s multitrack tapes.
Classic Albums would become a refreshing alternative to the lurid tabloid entertainment of VH1’s Behind the Music. Smith produced, directed, or oversaw episodes on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Lou Reed’s Transformer, Queen’s A Night at the Opera, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Damn the Torpedoes, Rush’s 2112 and Moving Pictures, Motorhead’s Ace of Spades, Nirvana’s Nevermind—and the list goes on.
His favorite of the bunch remains Steely Dan: Aja, on which he served as line producer. The documentary about Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s 1977 masterpiece first aired in late 1999, helping reintroduce the public—especially the British public—to Steely Dan on the eve of their comeback record Two Against Nature. Danfans have since studied the hour-long doc as if it were the Zapruder film, in recent years mining Becker and Fagen’s comic banter at the mixing desk for memes. (“Sorry babe,” one musician tweeted, “the Steely Dan - Aja Classic Albums documentary stays on during sex.”)
Smith affectionately recalls the two-day shoot at River Sound, Fagen’s former studio in New York. “They put the band back together,” he says. “This was the joyous, wonderful thing.” On one of those winter days, Becker, Fagen, and guitarist Jon Herington ran down songs with a selection of rhythm players who appeared on Aja: Paul Griffin on keys, Chuck Rainey on bass, and Bernard Purdie on drums. The semi-private reunion concert stands as something of a rarity for the series. “If the band weren’t still going, they often weren’t talking. And it was just fantastic being in the studio while all these guys turned up,” Smith says. “It was like a dream come true.”
One day last week, Smith and I rewatched the Aja episode together and discussed the details of its creation: the other Dan album he initially wanted to cover, the fine art of filming seagull B-roll, the reason “I Got the News” was banished to the end credits, whether the raw footage could one day receive the Get Back treatment, among other things. The result is an ersatz producer commentary, which you can view at the link below.