On the Road Again: Steely Dan
On the Road Again, USA TODAY's spotlight on artists on tour, this week looks at Steely Dan.
They're back, Jack, to do it again. For an act known to avoid playing live during its commercial heyday, Steely Dan has been a touring mainstay recently, hitting the road during eight of the past 10 years. Backed by a 12-piece band, the duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen will play 21 dates on its Rockabye Gollie Angel Tour with Elvis Costello and the Imposters, beginning Monday at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colo. "The conditions are much better now than they were in the '70s," Fagen says. "We don't have to stay at tiny motels in Lincoln, Neb., during a blizzard."
Which one's Stevie? During the touring days of the '70s, the band often came on stage to the introductions of a truck driver named Jerome Aniton, who, at least for a while, thought he'd been hired to drive for a guy named "Stevie Dan." Becker and Fagen included one of Aniton's rambling, inebriated intros on a 1974 live recording of Bodhisattva that appeared as the B-side of the 1980 single Hey Nineteen. "That was probably the single aesthetic decision from the '70s I don't have any regrets about making," Becker says.
No, we can't play together. Becker and Fagen once shut down a proposed tour when musicians in the backing band discovered some of them were being paid more than others. "These were master musicians, because they were the only guys that we knew of who could play it properly," Fagen says. "We were paying them quite a bit of money to do this, but we weren't paying them all the same money." Becker says he and Fagen knew they had to cancel once the difference in the paychecks became known: "Rather than live through the entire disaster in slow motion in front of the eyes of the world, we decided to cut our losses and go back to the drawing board."
Lone Star magic. Steely Dan played no shows between 1975 and 1992, though the duo released four albums during that time. The new, more tour-friendly Steely Dan era began Oct. 25, 1991, during an unannounced Fagen set at New York's Lone Star Roadhouse. Becker attended the show, and the pair wound up performing three Steely Dan songs — Black Friday, Josie and Hey Nineteen. Becker swears he went to Fagen's show with no intention of performing with him: "I wouldn't have worn a sweater if I had known I was going to be on stage."
Having fun with Elvis on stage? During a 2011 Australian tour, Steve Winwood regularly joined Steely Dan to play the title track from the 1974 album Pretzel Logic. Fagen and Becker say they haven't discussed doing a similar collaboration with Costello. "When we start doing shows, we'll probably talk about if we want to do something like that," Fagen says. Costello, however, has been known to cover the duo's Show Biz Kids, and he included 1973's Countdown to Ecstasy on a list of "500 albums you need" for Vanity Fair in 2000.
Fever dreams. An extended residency at New York's Beacon Theater has become a regular part of a Steely Dan tour, with each show highlighting a different album or theme. The duo is set to play eight nights there in October — no matter how they feel. "The last time we played the Beacon, I got sick," Becker says. The fever came on during the first night and had gotten worse by the second. "All the lights seemed way too bright. I wasn't exactly hallucinating, but it was very strange. It seemed like there was a big, starry firmament above the audience and the stage that we were gazing into that I hadn't noticed before."
A killer band. During the early '70s, Fagen and Becker played keyboards and bass, respectively, in the touring band of Jay and the Americans, known for '60s pop hits such as Come a Little Bit Closer and This Magic Moment. Jay Black, the group's frontman, nicknamed the two young musicians "Manson and Starkweather." "To him, we looked like cult killers," Fagen says. Becker says he learned two important lessons during his time with the group: First, "get a receipt." Second, "If the pants for the band uniforms are corduroy, you don't wash them in hot water. I particularly remember that Donald's shrank pretty mightily."
Bizarre bills. If the combination of Steely Dan and Costello seems like an odd pairing, it's not nearly as strange as some early-'70s bills on which Steely Dan appeared. When singles Do It Again and Reelin' in the Years became AM-radio hits, Fagen says, "we used to open for almost everybody — a lot of heavy-metal bands, Frank Zappa, Elton John, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, the James Gang. It was a very different cultural landscape on the road. It was pretty chaotic, and we were young."