The Village Voice and the making of Steely Dan
How the alternative newspaper shaped the future of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—and music itself
I’m reading last year’s papers
Although I don’t know why—Steely Dan, “King of the World”
Over a period of four years, the journalist Tricia Romano conducted some 200 interviews for The Freaks Came Out to Write, her stunning, definitive oral history of the Village Voice that was published in February. One of the threads that emerges from the book’s 500 pages is how often the alternative newspaper, throughout its nearly 70-year run, has not just chronicled culture but helped to shape it.
“Our philosophy was you do not hire an expert,” says Richard Goldstein, who began at the Voice as a rock critic and later rose to executive editor. “You hire someone who is living through the phenomenon worth covering.” Because Goldstein and the other Voice writers had their ears to the underground, they frequently exposed readers to new currents in the counterculture: psychedelic drugs, street art, punk rock, hip-hop, independent film. The paper published some of the earliest major stories on the Velvets, Patti Smith, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Spike Lee, and countless others.
The classified advertisements that kept the paper in the black also became a kind of platform for offbeat cultural exchange and connection. “People found their lives through the Village Voice,” says Jackie Rudin, a longtime advertising staffer, “whether it was a partner, or a job, or an apartment.”
Or a band.
In 1972, Paul Stanley placed a classified ad in the Voice expressing a desire for a lead guitarist “with Flash and Ability.” That’s how Ace Frehley found his way to Kiss. Max Weinberg ended up as the drummer in the E Street Band backing Bruce Springsteen after answering a Voice ad in 1974 that specified “no jr. Ginger Bakers.” Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie were in search of a drummer in 1975, when they took out an ad in the Voice classifieds that described their ideal candidate as someone with “freak energy.” “There were 60 applicants. It was insane,” Harry recalls. “Some of the craziest people in New York.” Clem Burke, who ultimately landed the job, says, “Famously, they really liked my shoes.”
Though it goes unmentioned in The Freaks Came Out to Write, the Voice was also critical to the musical fortunes of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. In 1969, the then struggling songwriters replied to an ad that led them to a Long Island band called Demian. The group’s lineup included a guitarist by the name of Denny Dias, who would become an original member of Steely Dan, and the singer Keith Thomas, who would contribute lead vocals to some of the early Becker-Fagen demos such as “Old Regime,” “Soul Ram,” and “Let George Do It.”
In the spring of 2022, I went searching for the long-lost Voice classified ad that gave rise to Steely Dan—and I found it, after days of scouring the paper’s archives with the assistance of Dias. The story that resulted is reprinted here for those who may have missed its original publication at the nascency of Expanding Dan in January 2023.
Jazz chops, hang-ups, and assholes
In search of the Village Voice classified ad that gave rise to Steely Dan
By Jake Malooley
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.”
Um, yeah, okay, but NO! (Oh, and I, too, bought “The Freaks Came Out to Write”—fun!!) I’ve enjoyed what else you written. But here, I think you’re giving waaaaay tooooo muuuuch credit to otherwise, yes, creditable “The Village Voice,” which I DOUBT they’d credit to themselves, for the “making” of ANY of those bands.
Yes, sure, ads were placed and seen and replied to, but that’s no different than, in later decades, via Craigslist; or, assigning credit to a local school in Liverpool for siting in a neighborhood that thus brought together (some of the) mates who would then soon become Beatles (or for that matter, crediting likewise “The Cavern” rather than the lads themselves for the Bee-AT-les incarnation, iteration(s), and future “Fab Four” successes); or, crediting Kesey’s “Acid Test(s)” for the genius of the Grateful Dead (though, wait a sec, YES, Kesey does(!) deserve some more credit here for that cosmic-of-coincidences, as the Dead launched via those tune-in-turn-on-drop-out sessions—certainly more than “The Village Voice” for, as per your hypothesis, crediting an ad(?!?!!) for the “making” of bands.
I don’t intend any of that too—or even at all—harshly; only that I’m gobsmacked by your assertion. Might as well credit the music store that found Weir connecting with Garcia, rather than Garcia or Weir or the simple fact of geography and topography that led a couple dudes who wanted to play music to meet up at that one-of-any venues. Again, all due praise to “The Village Voice”—but for goodness’ sake!—the paper was not, nor never claimed nor pretended to be, IMPRESARIOS. And if they ever did, well, that’d be the posturing of poseurs. :-)
They may have been shits, but they could write.