Jazz chops, hang-ups, and assholes

In search of the Village Voice classified ad that gave rise to Steely Dan

The cover of the June 26, 1969, issue of the Village Voice

One afternoon last spring, while poring over an issue of the Village Voice that was more than a half century old, I came across a classified ad that struck me as a premise straight out of the Becker-Fagen songbook. 

“Un-discovered, un-established, talented sculptor enjoys Provincetown and the inspiring Cape Cod beaches in winter—only it gets too inspiring and too lonely,” read the small black type. “Need a chick that don’t talk too much, that needs the winter seascape, that will sit for my next work, to come along. Weekends mostly.” 

Such amusingly icky scenarios, and the characters who dwell within them, were Steely Dan’s bailiwick. This one might have been right at home on Two Against Nature, whose Dean & DeLuca mug runneth over with sharply drawn portraits of romantically ineffectual egotists. 

The creepy Cape Cod sculptor was a welcome distraction. For the better part of two days, I’d been tediously combing through the archives of New York City’s pioneering alternative weekly newspaper in pursuit of what increasingly seemed like a classic rock white whale: the 50-plus-year-old classified ad that had become a cornerstone of the creation myth of Steely Dan.

In the sometimes shadowy annals of the Dan, the Village Voice advertisement is considered a kind of sacred foundational text. So why, I wondered, had no one outside the group ever laid eyes on it?

The tale of the Voice ad begins in an unlikely place: Hicksville, Long Island. Guitarist Denny Dias needed to fill a vacancy in his jazz-rock and Top 40 outfit, Demian, whose name was taken from a Hermann Hesse novel published in 1919. Demian’s bass player, Jimmy Signorelli, had decided to leave the group to return to college. At the same time, Dias, vocalist Keith Thomas, and drummer Mark Leon had decided to fill out the group with the addition of a keyboardist. Becker and Fagen, then struggling to make ends meet as songwriters in New York, answered the call. 

“We went out there, took the Long Island Railroad, broke up his band,” Fagen said during a 1977 interview on Los Angeles radio, “by insisting they play all our songs instead of the Top 40 hits that they were playing, which was their only means of gainful employment at that time. Playing in local bars where there were bloody fights and so on, and we wanted nothing to do with that.”

Over the years, accounts have varied concerning what the Voice advertisement actually said. In 1976, the British journalist Michael Watts wrote in Melody Maker that the ad read, “Must have jazz chops. Call Dennis Dias, Hicksville, Long Island.” In his comprehensive Dan biography Reelin’ in the Years, originally published in 1994, author Brian Sweet said it was phrased thusly: “Bass and keyboard player required, must have jazz chops. No assholes need apply.”

As for Becker and Fagen, the pair bantered imprecisely about the ad in the Classic Albums episode on Aja. 

Fagen: We answered an ad in the Village Voice that said, “Must have jazz chops. No hang-ups.” 

Becker: Right. “Keyboard and bass player needed for working jazz-rock combo. Must have jazz chops.” 

Fagen: “No hang-ups.”

Becker: “No hang-ups.”

Among the various recollections, one common phrase stood out: “Must have jazz chops.” It was unique enough that Dias’s ad, I imagined, couldn’t be mistaken for any other.

Now all I needed was an archive of the Village Voice dating back to the Nixon administration. 

The venerable paper, which ceased print publication in 2017, had recently returned as a print quarterly. So I sent an email to Voice editor R.C. Baker, explaining my odd little research project. “This is not a tale I was familiar with,” he responded, with regard to his publication’s place in the prehistory of Steely Dan. Baker recommended I pay a visit to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, which he said would have the issues accessible on microfilm. Seeing as I live 900 miles from Midtown Manhattan, this was not ideal. Nonetheless I went to the library’s website to confirm the existence of the archive. What I discovered there instead was a link to a Google News Archive page that featured scanned issues of the Voice going back to its maiden edition from October 1955. 

Clicking around the archive, I immediately noticed some gaps. For instance, every issue from 1968 was missing. But the collection from 1970 appeared to be complete. According to most reports, Dias placed the Voice ad in the summer of that year. When I asked him which month he believed the ad appeared, Dias couldn’t recall. 

The search began with the edition from June 5, 1970. Once I’d gotten through all of the September issues and come up empty-handed, it was on to the year’s remaining months. That yielded only one promising candidate, from a February edition: an ad for a bass player that included the phrase “no hang-ups.” “Does this one ring a bell?” I asked Dias in a text. “No,” he replied. “It will say ‘must have jazz chops.’” 

I made a second pass through all the summer of ’70 issues. No “jazz chops” to be found. Just a lot of dirt-cheap Manhattan apartments for rent, carpooling opportunities to San Francisco, computer dating companies looking for singles, and a modeling agency desperately in need of “ugly faces.” A man who lived on 42nd Street was trying to track down “a striking and attractive girl amputee, who has one hand and an artificial leg.”

At that point I began to think the ad—and the origin story that surrounded it—might be apocryphal. Or maybe it had simply appeared in an issue from a different year. If the substance of the ad was in dispute, the publication date may have been similarly misremembered. I expanded my search to the summer of 1969. 

The cover of the June 26 issue carried a story that seemed of great importance to the Voice readership: a marijuana shortage that the article’s writer Steve Lerner dubbed “the Great Famine.” (“In the Village, grass is as rare as an air-conditioned apartment.”) As I made my way through the classifieds section, four lines at the bottom of page 53 caught my eye:

Electric Bass player & electric keyboard 

Must have jazz chops, and R&B feel. 

Immediate work. Call Bruce 479-5430 

9–12 A.M., 6–8 P.M.

I texted Dias: “This one seems promising!”

“Yup,” he replied. “Bruce Rothstein was our manager.”

The search had not been in vain. I was relieved. And also puzzled. How had “No assholes need apply” been mentioned without question in virtually every piece written about Steely Dan over the last 30 years?

If Dias had actually included the “assholes” line in the ad, its appearance would now seem highly ironic given the ugliness with which the Demian situation ultimately played out. In later years, while discussing their hijacking Dias’s group, Becker and Fagen themselves admitted that they were the assholes. 

“Truth be told, we kind of took over his band,” Fagen said in the Classic Albums documentary. 

“We wrecked it,” Becker added.

“We started throwing out the other guys and kept Denny,” Fagen continued. “And that is, in a way, the core of the Steely Dan group. Because when we got a job out in L.A., we sent for Denny.” 

Over the phone a few weeks ago, I talked to Demian drummer Mark Leon about the Becker-Fagen experience. “I’m not taking anything away from their genius as songwriters,” he said, “but they were real caustic people. Real sarcastic, and not only in their writing. They would make fun of people, kind of put you down. They were micromanagers, and everything had to be their way.” 

It was unsettling, Leon said, to one day realize his band was no longer his own. He tried to reason with Dias. “I told him, ‘We had a band here. They’re just coming in and mowing us down.’” But by then the guitarist had become enamored with Becker and Fagen’s inventive original songs.

Eventually Leon and singer Keith Thomas got the goodbye look. As would become their MO when relieving musicians during Steely Dan recording sessions, Becker and Fagen got someone to do the dirty work—in this case, Dias. “We were kids,” Thomas told me in a recent interview. “It was hard not to take it personally.”

A few years later, Leon sat in front of his TV and watched his ol’ buddy Denny play guitar alongside the interlopers, who by then had proven themselves as hitmakers. For a time, the Dan could be a tough pill for Leon to swallow. “There’s the whole woulda, coulda, shoulda thing,” he told me. “You say to yourself, ‘Shit, I coulda done that! Why didn’t they give me an opportunity?’” 

Leon long ago moved on with his life. He published an instructional book on drumming in 1971, relocated to Los Angeles in 1973, and went on to become a touring and studio drummer. (He can be heard on guitarist Walt Barr’s great 1979 album East Winds.) Still, our talk had dredged up some ancient emotions, and I wanted to end on a positive note. 

“Look at it this way,” I said, “Becker and Fagen fired a lot of great drummers. You’re in very good company.” 

“That’s right,” Leon said with a laugh. “I was the first in a long line.”

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