1990, Age 18. "Deacon Blues," from Aja, by Steely Dan.
My friend Noelle hates Steely Dan. I just learned this yesterday.
"The Dan" are one of those acts I have been waiting to hear in concert for years. They have never played West Virginia and I found out last May that they were playing at the Clay Center - literally within walking distance from my house. Exciting stuff.
I've been a fan since I was 18. This was some years after they were popular, of course, as kings of the FM dial. I knew a few of their songs, maybe, but had never really paid attention to them until my freshman year of college.
I was a saxophone major in a studio that was incredibly talented and pretty tight. Our freshman class was good, but we were in awe of the upper classmen. They had serious chops. Scott Gumina. Bob Maxon. Scott Brockmeyer. Marty Ojeda. These dudes were serious bad-asses in our opinion.
We practiced all the time. If you went into the bowels of the CAC anytime, day or night, you could hear saxophones. Scales. Patterns. Ferling etudes. Bach suites. French recital pieces. Mouthpiece exercises. The Omnibook. Transcriptions of Coltrane, Dexter, Sonny Rollins. New music. Lots of new music, some of it too weird for other studios, but we played it all.
And these dudes had ears. Ears like you wouldn't believe. You could play drop the needle and they'd tell you in three seconds if were Bird or Sonny Stitt. Hell, they could tell you if it were Marcel Mule or Sigurd Rascher. They were some obscure motherfuckers. Bob Maxon had perfect pitch, the first person I ever met who did, but they could all hear. They taught me how to listen.
They taught me a lot actually. I once asked Scott Brockmeyer what his practice routine was and he said, "First, I get a case of beer. Then I go up in my room and get out my horn. Then I practice and drink and when I can't feel my fingers, I stop." Good ol' Brock.
Listening was a big deal. You were expected to listen twice as much as you practiced and you were expected to practice a lot. Thursday night was masterclass with David Hastings and Curtis Johnson, our professors, and still two of the most incredible teachers and musicians I have ever met. Unlike other masterclasses, ours weren't always about critiquing other players. Some nights, Hastings would come in with some book he was reading about art or education or something and just read passages to us and ask us what we thought. Some nights, we'd just listen to music. Those nights were the best.
After masterclass, some players would stay and practice. Sometimes there'd be a recital to attend or maybe someone had a gig downtown. Or, we'd just head to someone's apartment and put on records and listen for hours. I was introduced to some great music on those nights. Coltrane's My Favorite Things. Tenor Madness. The Brecker Brothers' Heavy Metal Bebop. Anthony Braxton playing all kinds of out shit. Ornette's Free Jazz. Wayne Shorter's JuJu.
They were some esoteric cats, too. They would do some out kind of things on occasion. At least, it seemed out to me at the time. In retrospect, I think they were just having fun.
One day in my first spring in Morgantown, I was down in a practice room playing tenor. I didn't have an alto yet. I was probably working on some Ferling etude at something like 1/4 speed, because I had crap technique compared to everyone else in studio. Then I hear someone banging on my door. It was Marty Ojeda.
Marty was a cool dude. He was also from Logan County, which I have to admit did not jive with my idea of a cool dude. In my mind, Logan County residents were hillbillies. The problem with my idea was that it didn't hold water when I met Marty. He had serious chops. And serious ears. He was first chair in the Wind Symphony and lead tenor in Jazz Ensemble I (I think. This was all some years ago.) He was a great player. He sounded like Lenny Pickett. I just learned who Lenny Pickett was that year. So, Marty was banging on my practice room door. I opened it.
"You wanna go fly a kite?"
" . . . what?"
"You wanna go fly a kite?"
"Uh. Sure. Let me put up my horn."
Now, this was not the type of invitation I was accustomed to getting. I don't think I had flown a kite since I was ten. But when a senior saxophone major asks you, a freshman saxophone major, if you want to go fly a kite, you accept. I thought it might be some sort of "Zen and the Art of Kite Flying"-type of exercise which might have applicability to my playing.
So, I put up my horn and got in Marty's car. We drove across the street to the Coliseum parking lot to fly our kites. I can't remember what kind of car he had, but I remember being duly unimpressed. He did have a cassette player. Steely Dan was playing.
"You like the Dan, man?"
"Who?"
"Steely Dan! You like Steely Dan?"
"I don't know who that is?"
"What?! You've never heard of Steely Dan? They did 'Reeling in the Years.'" He sang a few bars. I remembered that one. "They are musicians' musicians. All good musicians like Steely Dan."
That was enough for me. I took him at his word. I started buying Steely Dan records, which in 1990 was easy enough. It seemed that everyone was getting rid of their vinyl that year and everyone was getting rid of their Steely Dan. The first record I bought was Aja at the Princeton Record Exchange in New Jersey. I paid $1.00. Wayne Shorter plays on the record. Wayne Shorter, who played with Miles and co-founded Weather Report. I bought them all eventually. I own the entire SD discography and I can honestly say that I think every single record is great, even The Royal Scam.
I've learned over the years that not everyone likes Mssrs. Becker and Fagan. I remember some lame George Carlin bit about how he hated people who had "Baby on Board" stickers on their cars. "Are these the same people who listen to Steely Dan?" he asked. I never thought that asshole was funny.
They've been blamed for a lot, including inspiring young rock and rollers to invent punk music in protest to the slick production and complex harmonies evident on most SD records. No doubt about it: it's music for people who like to listen. I don't mean that as a criticism of anyone. I certainly don't mean that if you like to listen you must like Steely Dan. I just mean that they require some attention to really appreciate.
The music itself is the main thing. They riff on standard forms of course - Fagan and Becker had fantasies of being Brille Building tunesmiths. But they play with them. "Bodhisattva" sounds like it's going to be a 12-bar blues shuffle, but has this fun extended turn-around. Nothing too crazy. And a lot of the tunes push radio time limits. This was definitely a band for album-oriented rock, or rather album-oriented jazz-rock. The harmonies are fun for anyone who plays jazz. A little modal, some typical substitutions, the infamous "Mu major chord" (essentially an add 9 major triad voiced in a particular way).
The lyrics keep me coming back, too. I was probably listening for years before I even knew all the lyrics to one song. I once got into an argument with a friend who insisted that the refrain on "Hey Nineteen" went, "Look where they go, the fine tooth numbing-uh . . . " Honestly, with Steely Dan, I wouldn't be surprised if those were the lyrics. Songs about incest, pedophiles, porn, prostitutes, California drug kingpins, upper Manhattan cougars (before they were called that), alcoholics, Moonies and Charlie Parker. They favored the American underbelly for song topics, but what could you expect from a band named for a fictional dildo imagined by William Burroughs? You will not find, "I'm down on my knees, I'm beggin' you please," in the SD oeuvre.
I dig a lot of the songs. Some of them speak to me a lot more now that I'm older. Sometimes I like music that makes me feel young, but sometimes I like music that acknowledges that I have been around a bit. I've seen some things and not all of them are good. I'm even responsible for some of them. These are songs for losers and I can really dig that some days. "Deacon Blues" is easily my favorite:
They got a name for the winners in the world, I wanna name when I lose.
They call Alabama the Crimson tide . . . call me 'Deacon Blues.'
I connect a lot more to that music at 39 than I did at 18. Things are different. I'm more broken and more familiar with that dark side of life. Everyone I knew when I was 18 is different, too. David Hastings and Curtis Johnson have left WVU, just like all of us. Brock is dead. Marty Ojeda is back in Logan County, after spending years gigging in Nashville. He's a band director down there. He missed the concert last night, partly because he had band camp. And I'm . . . whatever I am.
I feel like that a lot these days. I did yesterday, thinking about going to the concert. I spent the day posting lyrics to my Facebook. Those lyrics bring out Dan-haters, and I know a lot of them. Noelle told me that Donald Fagen has no sense of humor and that having good players on your record does not make a band good. That's okay. Noelle is good people and a good musician, too. My friend John's wife tolerates all of his musical forerays (this is a man who is as likely to put on Burt Bacharach, the Louvin Brothers or Coltrane's Ascension), but will leave the room if he puts Steely Dan on the turntable.
Those lyrics bring out the SD fans, too. My friend Mark may be as big of a fan as I am. We've traded thoughts about the music and favorite lyrics. We even talked about getting together and writing some music a la Fagan and Becker one of these days. Maybe we will, if I ever learn to work the saxophone . . . play just what I feel . . .
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