Looking back on Steely Dan’s immense success and impact, it’s hard to envision a time when the supremely honed and highly original jazz-rock group weren’t at the top of their game. But when the core duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were starting out, recognition for their talent and approach would take some time – and some getting used to.
Keyboard player Fagen had stumbled across Becker practising guitar in the campus cafe at New York’s liberal arts school Bard College in 1967. Fagen wanted to start a band, but he’d struggled to find a guitarist who could play jazz and blues the way he wanted to, not “like Dick Dale”, as was the trend, he said. Becker was playing a wild blues-based style, and Fagen had “never really heard anything like that”.
The duo soon started writing together and played in various musical configurations. They found incongruous employment as part of the touring band for doo-wop crooners Jay & The Americans, whose lead singer Jay Black recalled his impression of the pair as “yoghurt-skinned” beatniks who seemed to surface only at night. “The Manson and Starkweather of rock’n’roll,” he called them.
Graduating in 1969, Fagen took the duo’s songs to Manhattan’s legendary Brill Building, the hub for popular songwriters and publishers of every stripe, from Burt Bacharach to Lou Reed, Carole King to Ellie Greenwich.
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