I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be- Steely Dan, "Deacon Blues"
Coachella is the post-South by Southwest in-earnest start to music-festival season each year. Its organizer, Goldenvoice, shells out untold cash for a lineup varied in font point sizes, one that sets a tone for fest season and makes headlines far outside its native California. It’s a fest-season tentpole that compels inactive legacy acts to reactivate, broken-up bands to get back together and overseas acts that rarely play stateside to make the trip.
This year’s Coachella lineup was a good example of what happens when a youth-driven festival economy meets a nostalgia-driven culture. And Coachella’s most nostalgic (read: oldest, most Boomer Generation friendly) bookings this year are AC/DC, a headliner, and Steely Dan. The latter is particularly bizarre. The Dan became an over-the-hill punchline in 2001, when it was awarded a string of four Grammys including Album of the Year for Two Against Nature in an upset win (beating out Kid Aand Midnite Vultures, among others). It was one of a series of tone-deaf moves by the Grammys to reward Steely Dan more for its career accomplishments, not necessarily Two Against Nature, per se. That the Dan has toured steadily since then—nurturing its legacy with modest gimmickry like multi-night stands and playing its classic albums in sequence, in full—after a long live hiatus doesn’t seem to ingratiate them.
Like no other act at Coachella, Steely Dan test our musical intuition: discordance of music and lyrical themes, songs of transgressive creepitude set what passes for fardley 70's studio jazz to most milennials? It’s just that juxtaposition that makes Steely Dan particularly sinister. Lyrics about incestuous lechers, pedophiles, murderers, drug dealers and other low-down members of society feel more unsettling nestled into inoffensive music—a smooth sheen with an ickiness beneath. Steely Dan are, in fact, dangerous, edgy and cryptic, even (and especially) if its music doesn't sound foreboding. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker may be out-of-touch and casting from their prime, but they’re not boring.
The Cure play a similar trick on listeners, reminding us that uptempo music doesn’t equal upbeat, even if a Cure song can make you feel happy or sing along. Even the Cure’s most beautiful and lush moments musically were not met by happy lyrics, they were moody as hell. There’s an artistic tension here. The way David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti use their music in films has these kinds of tense contradictions as well. Steely Dan is counterintuitive in that way. The Dan always gets brushed off as bland easy listening, yet their influence in indie rock--not exactly all pervasive--is easy to spot when it appears.
Arts & Crafts Records band the Darcys drew from Steely Dan’s inherent darkness in a mostly uneventful-but-noble AJA tribute in 2012. The Darcys deserves credit for attempting to lend some relevance to Steely Dan, with dirge-like takes on 1977’s Aja standouts like "Deacon Blues" and "Home at Last". Annie Clark’s evocations of innocence and sex throughout St. Vincent’s catalog owe a little of its mystique to Steely Dan. The narrator of just about any Steely Dan song could be one of the "bad guys" Clark sings about in the opening lines of "Cheerleader". Lana Del Rey draws from different springs than Clark, but they share some dark Beat-like cues with Steely Dan. The narrator on "Ride", looking for a "full-time daddy" could just easily be the subject of "Hey Nineteen" or the titular character of "Janie Runaway" off Two Against Nature. The Hold Steady has even borrowed the "Charlamagne" of "Kid Charlamagne" as a character of their own.
The Dismemberment Plan indulges in similar musical dorkitude to the Dan, mining similarly weird funky grooves while simplifying and sweetening complex arrangements. Then there’s the legacy of Steely Dan samples in rap music. Kanye West sampled "Kid Charlemagne" off 1976’s The Royal Scam as the hook of "Champion" but he’s only the most mainstream example. De La Soul was arguably the first to do so, sampling Aja’s "Peg" for the hook of "Eye Know" from its 1989 sample-heavy landmark 3 Feet High and Rising. Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz got into legal trouble with Becker and Fagen and "had to cough up a whopping $105,000" according to Vibe magazine over its 1998 hit "Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)" which had an uncleared sample of Aja’s "Black Cow".
"Kid Charlemagne" is a story of a drug dealer on the run. The man called "Jack" in "Do It Again" off Steely Dan’s 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill is a murderer, user and gambler who keeps repeating his same mistakes. "Hey Nineteen" off 1980’s Gaucho is an older man tempting a 19-year-old girl with sex, tequila and cocaine.
And there’s "Deacon Blues", about a self-destructive musician that will "drink scotch whiskey all night long/ and die behind the wheel." Fagen and Becker don’t really embody this seedy rock'n'roll lifestyle in their youth or now in old age; as Fagen asserts in his recent book, they've just managed to stay alive long enough to document it (many of their peers have not). And songwriters are just storytellers. Let’s look past the sound and give Steely Dan more credit than just being Boring Old Men. They’re Dirty Old Men. They play just what they feel.