Their music promised some kind of arcane insight into how this men’s world actually worked, but it was bound up with dysfunction, regret, and disgust. The avatars of its world were the same teens I was bullied by and alienated from. I doubt I’m the only proto-pater that had an analogous reaction to dad rock back in the 1970s when it was still just for kids. New York Times critic Lindsay Zoladz neatly summed up this paradox a few years ago, “I am a discerning, feminist-minded millennial woman. Mann collapses the songwriter with the song’s speaker, but then, who wouldn’t-musically, lyrically, and performatively, Becker and Fagen adamantly blurred (and sharpened) the edges between their world and that of their songs. “Their lyrics are great,” Aimee Mann sums it up, “even though they’re clearly jerks in most of the songs”. For that very reason, they formed a bridge to an alien but omnipresent world. I mean, there must have been female fans-I know for a fact that my older sister had a copy of Katy Lied because she donated it to my collection when she moved out-but it’s a safe bet they were either fellow travelers or statistical anomalies.Īs scholar Michael Borshuk put it in his introduction to a special issue of Rock Music Studies last year, Steely Dan never made space for female listeners in their music. If he’s still a fan, he’d fit comfortably into Pamela’s archetypal idea of the fan base. Unlike the progressive rock, punk, and New Wave music friends I’d make in another couple of years when my family moved from the suburbs into the city, Gerry was straighter than straight, with three obsessions I can remember: becoming a pilot, Steely Dan, and X-Men comics. When my friend Gerry introduced me to Steely Dan albums around 1977, when we were both 14, I recognized only three songs: the top 40 hits “Do It Again” (#6) and “Reelin’ in the Years” (#11) from their 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” (#4) from their third album, Pretzel Logic (1974). I doubt it would have helped to tell her that Donald Fagen had been an English major at Bard College after all, he had graduated, but Becker had dropped out. In this world, most of Steely Dan’s output played as much like apostasy as its 21st-century dad band/yacht rock label did for my cultured friend. Unless you were a top-40s nobody, the only choices were FM radio conformity or punk rebellion. You grow up white in the heartland, read too much Rolling Stone (the only manna in the desert for a neophyte music geek back then), and you find yourself between a rock and a hard place. The reaction wasn’t so different back in the late 1970s. She made a suitably disparaging comment, I confessed I was on my way to join them, and she looked at me and repeated, incredulously, “Steely Dan?” The hotel bar was full of aging white guys like me getting a drink before the show. By coincidence, an academic friend from out of town was staying across the street, and we met for a drink at her hotel. I got tickets for the penultimate night when they were playing Countdown to Ecstasy in its entirety. Back in October 2016, the year before Walter Becker died, Steely Dan did a ten-night residency at the storied Beacon Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
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