This is the day of the Expanding Dan
A world you're welcome to.
Welcome to Expanding Dan, a newsletter about Steely Dan, featuring original interviews, oral histories, audio stories, and more transmissions from the ever-expanding Danverse.
This newsletter is reported and written by me, Jake Malooley, a veteran journalist, record collector, occasional DJ, and inveterate Danfan. “Dirty Work,” my oral history of recording with Steely Dan, was published by Wax Poetics in the magazine’s November 2022 issue. I’m also serializing it for Expanding Dan subscribers.
In this post, I’d like to share the origins of the publication, and give you a sense of what you can expect to see here going forward.
As with so many of the adventures I’ve had in my career as a journalist, this newsletter began as an idea for a magazine story.
One day early this year, in the dim no man’s land between the holiday hangover and the first buds of spring, it occurred to me that a monumental anniversary hung on the horizon: come November, Steely Dan would turn 50. The semicentennial of the band’s 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, seemed like the perfect excuse for some sort of sweeping retrospective.
It could be that I was searching for a socially acceptable reason to dedicate months to full-on Dan immersion. Over the past two decades, I’ve spent far too much time listening to, and thinking about, the music of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. But somehow it never seems to be quite enough. A work-related excuse to fall farther down the wormhole held a definite appeal.
At the same time, I was all too aware of the inherent challenges. For the great majority of the last half century, Steely Dan counted only two elusive men as core members and sole songwriters. (“Donald and Walter and a bunch of studio musicians,” as session guitarist Dean Parks put it to me in an interview.) Their allergy to journalists is nearly as well established as their reputation for studio perfectionism. In 1994, the British journalist Brian Sweet published the 200-plus-page biography Reelin’ in the Years without a single original on-the-record word from Donald and Walter. Well, except for the one late-night phone conversation, during which Walt advised Sweet “to carry on as if Donald and I were dead.” His guidance is, sadly, no longer completely hypothetical: in the course of being treated for esophageal cancer, Walter died at the age of 67 in 2017.
Soon I began to think that the collective nature of Steely Dan—what Walter liked to call “the expanded band concept”—could actually be a narrative asset if I were to tell the story in the form of an oral history. So far as I knew, a wide-ranging oral history of recording with Becker and Fagen had never been published. I’d previously done a handful of oral histories, none of them quite as sprawling. To do this one right would mean interviewing dozens of musicians, engineers, technicians—and Donald, too, if he were game.
Sitting in front of my record shelf, I pulled all of my Steely Dan LPs and jotted down the names of every person listed in the credits. There were the OGs such as guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. Then came the studio legends: bassist Chuck Rainey, drummers Bernard Purdie and Rick Marotta. Farther down on each album were less recognizable names—assistant engineers like Lenise Bent and Tom Greto and Marti Jane Robinson. I would talk to them, too. I would talk to everyone.
A few Dan notables, like Michael McDonald and Timothy B. Schmit, employ publicists with readily available contact information. Most of the people I wanted to interview do not. I felt a small jolt of excitement every time I discovered a musician’s web 1.0 site with a still-active aol.com email address or, better yet, the person’s direct phone number. Some I found listed in the phone book. More often, I leapfrogged: Larry Carlton connected me with his old pal and fellow guitarist Dean Parks; Carol Gadd passed along my message to her drummer husband, Steve; the Dan’s 1970s live-sound engineer Stuart “Dinky” Dawson led me to Denny Dias, who I’m happy to report is alive and well and working as a computer programmer in Los Angeles.
Early on, I spoke with Steve Khan, the guitarist whose first-rate playing can be heard on Aja, Gaucho, and Donald’s first solo album, The Nightfly. Khan couldn’t have been aware that I still harbored uncertainty about whether the hours of work I was putting in would amount to anything. But during the interview, he said something that became the project’s lodestar: “It’s lucky you’re catching us when we’re still alive,” Khan told me. “Sadly, life catches up, and when people pass away all those memories and stories are gone.” I wondered if, in that moment, he was thinking about some of the Dan’s dearly departed: engineer Roger “The Immortal” Nichols; keyboardists Victor Feldman, Paul Griffin, Joe Sample, and Don Grolnick; guitarist Hugh McCracken; drummer Jeff Porcaro; vocalist Clydie King; among others.
As I came to find out, some of the session players who were once as close as siblings had, for one reason or another, drifted apart over the years. On a few occasions, I found myself at the behest of some renowned studio musician helping old friends reunite. Rick Marotta wanted to get back in touch with fellow drummer Jim Keltner but had lost his number. “Peg” soloist Jay Graydon wanted to know how he could reach out to Chuck Rainey. And then there was the Dan’s longtime producer Gary Katz, who somehow still keeps up with almost everyone from back in the day. When I mentioned to him that I would be speaking with Rainey the following day, Katz said, “Chuck is still one of my closest friends. I spoke to him yesterday.”
Once I’d accumulated a critical mass of interviews, I sent a pitch to Wax Poetics, which felt to me like the story’s right and proper home. The crate-digging music magazine had relaunched in 2021 following a publishing hiatus and change in ownership. Editor and cofounder Brian DiGenti quickly gave the story a green light, but he had one question: “Has Fagen agreed to an interview?” At that moment, he had not—and, privately, I worried he never would.
Then, one day in the late spring, as Steely Dan was gearing up for a summer tour, I received an email with the subject line “from d fagen.” “hi jake,” the message read. “what’s happening?” Initially, I was convinced a friend was trying to punk me. Not so, as it turned out. By then, apparently, I had shaken enough trees, or finally jostled the right ones. Perhaps one of the guys I had talked to put in a good word for me with the boss man? Honestly, how exactly it happened is still a mystery. The important thing was that Donald was in.
What exactly was it, I wanted to know, that kept him and Walter pushing for perfection where other artists might have settled for good enough and called it a day?
“It would just be too sad to put in all that time and energy,” Donald explained, “and end up with a shitball album.”
At long last, I felt I had the story in hand. My first draft weighed in at a corpulent 50,000 words—enough for a small book but far too much for a magazine feature. After a few days of painful surgery, I’d managed to slim the piece down to a little over 10,000 words. (That version appears in volume 2, issue 4 of Wax Poetics.)
Cut for space were Steely Dan stories I’d not seen or heard anywhere else, accounts from Los Angeles and New York studios brimming with new and surprising details, entertaining digressions, affectionate trash talk, and even some dirty jokes. In my mind, this excised material was too compelling to leave on the cutting room floor forever. That’s when the seed was planted for the newsletter you’re currently reading.
In the course of working on the Wax Poetics story, I also made some exciting discoveries that didn’t fit within the narrative flow of the oral history—previously unreported information about everything from the band’s foundational Village Voice classified ad to the cover design of Aja to the Gaucho-era erasure of “The Second Arrangement.”
Aside from the obvious nod to “Deacon Blues,” the publication’s name (at the risk of getting too literal about the whole thing) alludes to the sense of being swallowed up in the vastness of the ever-expanding universe of Steely Dan, which encompasses not only rock and jazz and R&B music but also literature and film and a certain sneering comic perspective on the world.
My intention is for Expanding Dan to be a space where I can consistently publish the kinds of stories I want to read for an audience that’s equally enthusiastic. In this format, I’m able to incorporate audio and video, interact with a community of readers, and host special events. Ultimately, it’s about sharing the things I know and love, with those of my kind.
What you can expect
Interviews | Donald Fagen, Michael McDonald, Gary Katz, Elliot Scheiner, Denny Dias, Chuck Rainey, Bernard Purdie, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Steve Gadd, Rick Marotta, Dean Parks, Larry Carlton, Steve Khan, Jay Graydon, Tom Scott, Rob Mounsey, Elliott Randall, Timothy B. Schmit, Bill Schnee, Lee Ritenour, Jim Keltner, Ed Greene, David Paich, Chris Parker, Randy Brecker, Bernie Grundman, and so many more
Plus: Conversations with Steely Dan–adjacent artists such as early Becker-Fagen collaborator Linda Hoover, one-album wonder Dane Donohue, Barney Hurley of 1990s yacht revivalists Samuel Purdey, and the Dan-loving duo behind Young Gun Silver FoxOral histories | Deep dives into key moments in the Steely Dan timeline, constructed from new interviews with musicians, producers, and engineers: Katy Lied and the dbx debacle (with Denny Dias!), the recording of “Aja” (with Steve Gadd!), the invention and application of Wendel (with all the salty drummers from Gaucho!)
Audio stories | Short pieces blending first-person storytelling with music: Michael McDonald on how a random New Year’s Eve gig at Universal Studios with future members of Toto led him to Steely Dan; Elliott Randall on playing the solo on “Reelin’ in the Years” and turning down offers to join the band; Elliot Scheiner on how the quickie dissolution of his marriage inspired “Haitian Divorce”; Jim Keltner on precisely how he ended up playing a trash can lid as a ride cymbal on “Josie”; Jay Graydon on the dirty joke that had Donald and Walter in stitches
Danfans | Conversations with notable SD heads: Oscar-winning director Peter Farrelly, comedian from hell and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Richard Lewis, Brazilian musician and AOR superfan Ed Motta, Los Angeles funkster and DJ Dam-Funk
Gone to the Movies | Explorations of the Steely Dan cinematic universe: tracking down the rarely seen You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat; the making of the Aja episode of Classic Albums, with commentary from the filmmakers
Tracks of Whack | Playlists of Dan and Danesque tunes—AOR, city pop, real jazz, fake jazz, and fake-fake jazz—selected by Expanding Dan interviewees
Defend Your Steely Dan Thesis! | A surprising amount of academic brainpower has been spent interrogating the Becker-Fagen oeuvre. The researchers behind Dan-related dissertations and journal articles try to explain what, exactly, they’ve uncovered deep within the Caves of Altamira.
Miscellany | Non-Dan (but still Dan-ish) digressions I may occasionally indulge: analog audio technology, terrestrial radio, midcentury-modern architecture and design, the films of Michael Mann, Hawaii, TV, books, magazines, the NBA’s cocaine era, among other whims
Why you should subscribe
As a paid subscriber, you’ll get every new edition of Expanding Dan sent directly to your inbox, access to the archives, plus invitations to special events such as subscribers-only talks with guests from the Danverse.
I’m asking the Substack minimum: $5 per month ($60 annually). Every subscription directly supports the labor—hours of reporting, interviewing, transcribing, writing, and editing—required to bring you original journalism about the so-called Manson and Starkweather of rock ’n’ roll.
Glad to be here!
This is exciting stuff. I'm so glad I found out about this project.