September 3rd. There I was, still trying to get my head around Sam Shepard dying — my mind swirling with memories of 16 year old me smoking Old Gold cigarettes in a Chuck Yeager A2 mil-spec USAAF jacket, reading “Motel Chronicles” and chewing Beeman’s Gum, imagining myself in a dusty bar on the Mojave or in New Mexico, wishing I could be that understated, monolithic, quietly cool. I wanted to be Sam Shepard. More specifically, I wanted to be Sam Shepard in “The Right Stuff.” But I was far too batshit. I was Chris Orbach. A little overgrown intellectually, maybe, but way way behind emotionally. Sometimes chatty and nervously stupid, most other times quiet and sullen. I would be amused to find out decades later that this was perceived by many as some sort of sexy “mystique”. I could have cashed in on that a thousand-fold with the girls..that is, if I’d had any idea of it at all..and if living more or less alone with a mom whose alcoholism was steadily progressing, combined with frequent visits from my older brother's food-stealing friends hadn’t made my day-to-day feelings of low to midgrade dread so palpable — and the body trying to contain them so unwieldy. Seeing “The Right Stuff” at 16 (and saving up for that now long-dead A2 jacket) gave me a kind of outer armor to negotiate some of that madness. So, recently, for weeks, thoughts of Sam Shepard have been coming and going, swirling like tumbleweeds in one of his mythic desert towns in my head, and here I’ve been, trying to reduce them into some sort of jive memory think-piece. And, while trying to make sense of all of that?
BOOM.
Walter Becker dies.
NO. I’m STILL not over Prince and Bowie. “Walter Becker?? Really?” (looks up at the universe, mutters) “…bastards…”
Musically, my youth makes zero sense without Steely Dan. My knowledge of them came to me, like so many musical things, from my gentle, (mostly) tolerant, and very hip older brother, Tony. It was through his learning to play the saxophone that led him (and by osmosis, me) to straight-ahead jazz, soul, funk, ska, blues, and (with the help of our dad’s career in Broadway musicals) the old plate of chestnuts, The Great American Songbook. Tony fumbling through “Embraceable You” in the stairwell of our old place put as much spin on my musical tastes as anything I was hearing on the radio or the street. But I remember very clearly being 9 years old and 16 year-old Tony playing this new record. It had a dark cover, and I remember the LP being SEE-THROUGH and BRIGHT RED. It was Steely Dan’s “Aja”, and over the years the music on that LP and soon all their others were listened to ALL THE TIME. Later transferred to many worn-out cassettes, later still re-bought as a CDs, and played and played and played. I realize now that if my outsides were patterned after Shepard, the place between my ears was solidly the territory of Fagen and Becker. I may have been an acting student at the High School for Performing Arts, but I was in my heart, a deeply frustrated musician, with some fat undiagnosed ADD. When I wasn’t ruining Shakespeare, my surgically attached Walkman almost always had Steely Dan on it. I will never forget the time someone I was way too scared to talk to walked by as if I were invisible, right as I was hearing the lines “Any world that I’m welcome to/is better than the one I come from.” This, accompanied with a long pull from a cigarette, some black coffee, and maybe a cheap bodega apple pie made such moments tolerable. I forgot that I was a sad kid with a messy bookbag. I was part of something cool. I knew who Wayne Shorter was and who Larry Carlton was and who Steve Gadd was and who Chuck Rainey was and who Bernard Purdie was. And I knew what badasses they were. And look — if you liked The Clash and Madonna, good for you. Enjoy the daylight. I was happy in the dark. I may have been out of the loop — but I was in the pocket.
I wouldn’t “come out” as a singer-songwriter until years later. Clunkily, with several double-screwdrivers under my belt, in a bar called Finian’s Rainbow on St. Marks Place. A damned good country singer-songwriter named Bob Woodruff made me do it, and on the phone a couple of days later he said to me “Hey man, you’re a singer-songwriter.” He had such a commanding presence I was in no position to argue with him. All those years beating pianos by ear, teaching myself guitar by chord diagrams from Beatles songbooks, and all of that iffy poetry in college came together into something. The fact that I’ve never been successful with my music made me, for some time, judge the quality of my own tunes a little too harshly. After years of chasing my own tail, and living under the long shadow of my own fear, I think I have enough clarity now to see that some of them have some merit. Probably. Maybe. Well..If they do, it’s with a little bit of a debt to Steely Dan. Years ago, they seemed to be telling me that it was okay to be off, to be weird, to keep some mystery. And that it was necessary to embrace ALL of your influences — musical, literary, cinematic — and throw them into songs. Don’t be afraid of those ninth chords, elevenths, thirteenths, major sevenths. If the melody wants them, let it have ‘em. You want to write a head-bobber about a dream you had involving you and Juliette Binoche stuck in a Jean-Luc Godard movie about Paris after the apocalypse? Have at it. You want to write an Elvis Costello-esque tom-tom heavy barnburner about a Powell and Pressburger movie? Knock yourself out. A roots-rock anthem about an obscure three-cushion billiard player? Go ahead. As long as YOU get it, and YOU like it. If THEY don’t? Fuck ‘em.
That sensibility? All Steely Dan.
Years ago, my old friend Peer Bazarini, whom I co-wrote some tunes with for a little while, learned Steely Dan’s “Haitian Divorce” on guitar. The two of us sang it repeatedly and practically collapsed laughing while doing it. It was so much fun. The bridge begins with the lyric “At the GROTTO..” There in his old room, we belted that line out so hard we were just crying. We were having so much fun that as the song was coming to an end, we decided to sacrilegiously go back and do the bridge again. “THE GROTTO!!!”, Baz shouted at just the right moment, and back to the grotto we went.
Steely fucking Dan. What were some of those tunes even about? Who even cared? The beauty of their vagueness and indecipherability was that they left you free to imagine what they might have been about, or, perhaps even more enjoyably, what they were about TO YOU. Sometimes, vivid imagery would come up for me. The song “Aja” put visions in my 15-year old head of crazy things like a lost soldier in Vietnam who’d gone awol in a village, finding a lover there, and hiding out from the bombs and death of war…spending days floating down a river on a sleepy barge. Wayne Shorter’s saxophone forcing a giant red sun up over the horizon, time-lapse style, as he brings that amazing tenor solo home, in silhouette on a high cliff. Steve Gadd’s solo at the end marking the return of the bombs and chaos, from which there was never any real escape…what?? This couldn’t have been anything close to what was on Becker and Fagen’s minds when they wrote the sucker (I don’t think) but it’s some of the stuff I saw in my young head, staring at the ceiling fan in the living room with headphones on, like Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now.” That was part of the fun. Steely Dan didn’t openly dictate what you were supposed to think about their tunes, which left you free to dream.
Years later, my ears would mature, my technical knowledge would deepen, and I would find new appreciation in the ways they layered guitar and keyboard parts, the way the vocal harmonies moved and danced. The way the horn section pads would glide in and out so perfectly. But that sense of being taken somewhere never left.
It was a thrill to see them go back on tour in 1993. The faceless, spotlight-shunning studio rats were TOURING!! This was for me the musical equivalent of Willie Wonka coming out of the factory, or DB Cooper being found. Well, damn…we HAD to go!!! I saw them at the Garden with the likes of Drew Zingg, Cornelius Bumpus, Peter Erskine, and other very very serious people in their new band. Walter Becker was already the more “talky” the two, and I found his banter wonderfully cynical and entertaining, just like his writing. I was saddened when, during that show, people walked out to take bathroom breaks when he sang one of the songs from his solo record. I know, most people where there to hear Don sing those great old tunes, and didn’t have the patience for anything new. Walter’s singing voice may also not have been as empirically good as Don’s, but it was his, and I thought it was worth hearing.
[Years later, I see Donald Fagen on the street. It’s one of those rare occasions that I actually have a guitar strapped to my back. I see him, see that it IS him, and in a mere couple of seconds, four things happen:
1. I immediately start beaming, like a kid seeing an ice cream truck. Here he is! Purveyor of my favorite tunes, architect of so many immense musical moments. Lucky me!! MY HERO!!
2. He immediately SEES this in me, and, wide-eyed with genuine horror, as if recoiling from a hot stove, every fiber in him seems to say, “Oh sweet fucking Jesus god, NO NO NO, not ANOTHER no-name musician telling me how he grew up with my music…if he stops me, I’m gonna have to be nice to him, or at least not KICK him in the shins…oh fuck fuck fuck..and what if someone ELSE notices and it becomes a THING??? Jesus, for the love of god and pharmaceuticals, NO NO NO. PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE!!”
3. I immediately see this in HIM, and, having enough respect for his space and inner peace, I keep on my way, and though I give him a nod and a bright smile, I say nothing.
4. A sense of immense gratitude pours forth from him (or so I imagine) as if he’s saying, “Whew. Dodged a bullet. Thanks for being cool.
After that, hundreds more listens later, I would see Steely Dan two more times live, at The Beacon Theater in NY. During the tenure of the second time I saw them there, I happened to be on the upper west side and I ran into their then current lead guitarist, Jon Herington, on the train. He was heading to the Beacon to play another Steely Dan show!! Jon and I had a few mutual friends on FaceBook, and between that and my admiration for both his playing and who he was playing with, I got up the courage to strike up a conversation. He could not have been nicer.
So Walter Becker has moved on. I hear he had a difficult childhood, and made the best of it with the help of music, and certain substances. Whatever demons he wrestled with, you got the sense that he made peace with quite a few of them as the years went on. At the last show I saw, he was now the ever-talky, gregarious hip grandpa, who had forgotten more cool shit than you would ever know, and, while he might razz you a little, he’d be more than happy to take you by the hand, sit you down, and say, “dude, LISTEN to this.”