Reeling In The Years

The Age

Friday September 14, 2007

Craig Mathieson

After nearly 40 years, perfectionist rockers Steely Dan are touring Australia with

a band, and they are happy, writes Craig Mathieson

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first encounter between Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The pair, who met at Bard College in New York when Fagen heard Becker playing blues guitar in the student lounge and decided that he had to introduce himself, went on to form Steely Dan, a development that would produce a legacy of timelessly sophisticated pop music and an unlikely succession of memorable singles. Walter Becker, however, has a different take on those four decades.

"I understand Don better now than when I first met him, but he was pretty inscrutable back then. He didn't say very much and he had a very unusual reputation," recalls Becker. "Both he and I have probably become more comprehensible and coherent people in the last 40 years, although the two of us would probably have to live another 200 or 300 years to make any real progress. We've only come some little way from the swamp of our own bizarreness."

Becker is in Boston, where the American leg of Steely Dan's extensive touring schedule is unfurling. Shows end at 10.30 or 11pm and the now 57-year-old tends to retire to the hotel afterwards to watch television or browse the internet. They're both still "night people", notes Becker (Fagen's acclaimed 1982 solo album was titled The Nightfly), just not quite as outgoing. Becker looks positively avuncular these days, although Fagen retains a hint of their '70s look: heavy-lidded, serious graduates of the counter-culture, the kind of artists who named their band after a slang term for a sex toy in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

The pair's Australian dates, where they're backed by a 10-piece band, signal the first time they've toured the country, reflecting both the change in circumstances and attitude that's come over them since their heyday. During the '70s they wanted to concentrate on the studio, where they increasingly used jazz players as session men and laboured to perfect their audio output.

"It's more fun to play live now and much more comfortable and better organised," Becker readily agrees. "The band play extremely well every night and on top of that they don't hate us."

The nadir of Steely Dan's touring misadventures was in 1977, when they could only manage one rehearsal for shows intended to support their just-released set, Aja. By the end of the rehearsal the various musicians Fagen and Becker had corralled had begun comparing their pay rates and a mutiny promptly broke out. The tour was abandoned, which didn't annoy the pair greatly as it was a contractual obligation to their then record company, ABC Records (no link to the Australian broadcaster).

Steely Dan and ABC engaged in an increasingly litigious relationship throughout the late '70s, culminating in ABC (which had become MCA) lifting the price on 1980's Gauncho, the pair's final disc for the label. Given the difficulties they had with record labels when the industry was at its peak, Becker is not wholly sympathetic to the music industry's current struggle with illegal downloading.

"They've been hoisted on their own petard," he observes. "The prevalence of computer in modern life has created circumstances that are very challenging for the music industry, and for which they're not responsible, but they've dealt with it so badly. If Apple hadn't come along with iTunes, the record companies, they wouldn't have got as far as they have in terms of selling music online."

Becker is a firm fan of the MP3 format and believes that the best facility for storing, sorting and playing music is the hard drive of a computer. But he's also alarmed at the sound quality of paid downloads and worries that the artistry of some recordings - including Steely Dan's - literally can't be heard by a new generation of music fans.

"I think it's a real problem. Among other things you end up paying for an album and it's not even CD quality. Another problem is that the audio circuitry in most computers - which is what people generally still use to listen to downloads - is not that great," explains Becker. "Computer hard drives are an excellent source of music, but people are still paying too much for even less quality. Manufacturers have to make the products so you can hear the music properly."

Having forged a reputation for studio perfection, Steely Dan's most recent album, Everything Must Go, partially forwent using a digital set-up, instead returning to the analog world of two-inch tape. It was recognition of the overly intrusive studio culture that has been fostered by digital recording.

"The best thing to do when you have a band of musicians is to have them play music," Becker explained. "If you're dealing with computers and digital audio it's very tempting to stop the process and start editing and tweaking immediately. Basically if you have four or five good musicians you've got a tremendous amount of computing power - no Mac with ProTools can match the musical understanding of a group of good musicians. People tend to focus on what you can do with computers, as opposed to what you can achieve with people."

Steely Dan play Rod Laver Arena next Thursday

© 2007 The Age

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