On November 17, 1980, four days before the release of Steely Dan’s long-awaited Gaucho, David Breskin entered a rented suite at the Park Lane Hotel in New York City to interview Walter Becker and Donald Fagen for Musician magazine.
“I can tell you I was fucking scared,” Breskin recently recalled over the phone from his home in San Francisco. “I walked in there thinking, These guys eat journalists for lunch.”
Though he would soon be a hot-shit magazine writer—contributing features to GQ, LIFE, and, Rolling Stone—Breskin was then only 22, fresh from Brown University, and still relatively untested as a reporter. “Out of college, I’d written some for the Village Voice and Musician,” he says, “but I had never before interviewed ‘pop stars.’”
What really spiked Breskin’s heart rate that day was his awareness that he would at some point question Becker and Fagen about an extremely uncomfortable subject: the curious similarity between their new album’s title track, “Gaucho,” and a song by the pianist Keith Jarrett called “’Long as You Know You’re Living Yours.”
