Interviewing Steely Dan was never a gimme.
The trouble, as dozens of journalists would learn over the years, was that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had a tendency to treat on-the-record conversations as a venue for their two-man comedy routine. While their bits were often very entertaining, reporters could be left wondering how they were going to cobble together a coherent story from a bunch of inside jokes, arcane literary references, and cryptic half-answers.
As a result, truly candid interviews with Becker and Fagen are relatively rare. However, the Dan men were inclined to dial down the highbrow smartassery if they perceived the person sitting across from them with a tape recorder as something of an intellectual equal. That, I believe, is why David Breskin’s Q&A with Becker and Fagen from Musician in 1980 is the gold standard. Breskin was unmistakably sharp, and his knowledge of jazz ran deep; Becker and Fagen couldn’t peg him as some rock-rag hack who was going to ask, for the umpteenth time, “Was Chevy Chase really in your band at Bard?”
You can sense a similar meeting of the minds in Hank Shteamer’s 2008 interview with Becker for Time Out New York, which was conducted two weeks before the release of Becker’s second and final solo album, Circus Money. Seated on a couch at the S.I.R. rehearsal space in New York City, where Steely Dan was preparing for its Think Fast summer tour, Shteamer proceeded to ask Becker a bunch of exceptional questions: What can you do on a solo album that you can’t do with Steely Dan? Why is the West such a fruitful theme in your songwriting? When did you discover that the demimonde was an attractive world to draw from?
Mr. Shteamer was kind enough to digitize and share with his fellow Expanding Dan subscribers the never-before-heard recording of his 70-minute encounter with the guitar-playing half of Steely Dan. Despite some audible background commotion and a couple spots with minor tape speed issues, what’s clear is that Becker recognizes he’s talking to a professional music scribe whose curiosity isn’t going to be satisfied by canned answers. The 58-year-old opens up to an uncommon degree about his desire to write and record music apart from his longtime collaboration with Fagen; his feelings about Steely Dan being lumped into the then-novel yacht rock category with the likes of Christopher Cross (“somebody who’s probably the furthest from where we are”); and how the experience of hearing his and Fagen’s subversive jazz-pop on mainstream radio is “the greatest thrill that you can possibly have.”
