Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your two major dudes of minutia. I'm Alice Tigel because any major dude will tell you, and we are those major dudes. That's one of the best ones yet. I am Jordan Broun Tog and I am floored by that. I just trying to think of how many Steely Dan references I could cram into this. Um much likely you owe the charmer under me. I don't know. We could have gone with kings there, we could have gone with dirty works. I guess all my references are very um can't buy a thrill heavy? Oh yeah, bodhy satvas of of boring facts. Wow, that's okay, Wait, punch that one in. That's also very good. Well, folks, as you may have greened from that preamble, we are talking about one of the best albums from one of the best bands of a very specific ilk, A truly high water mark of musicianship, songwriting, craft and studio production from a band who named themselves after a sex toy in Naked Lunch. That's right, folks, we're talking about Steely Dan's Asia. I personally love Steely Dan. Took me a long time to do it, though, kind of verboten in the punk rock circles that I cut my proverbial teeth in. Um. This is like a third hand story. There's this guy in a record shop in Brooklyn. Shout out to human Head Records. Everyone, if you're in New York, Human or check them out on discos. I think they're also on discogs. Anyway, this guy told me this story about he had a friend of his. I guess who would um go into record stores by Steely Dan records. I guess I can't buy a thriller one of the ones that was like cheaper before, like the vinyl boom and you know, everything costs now, but like back when you could get Steely Dan records for like three to five dollars, and he would pay for them at the counter, pull them out of sleeve, break them in half, and leave them on the counter and walk out of the store. So that is the prevailing mood how people view Yep, that was the that was the mood. But I mean, that's horrifying you frankly, I mean, well, now I'm hook line and sinker. You know, the jazz nerd musicianship and the laser focused production and songwriting are just the perfect foil to the densely literate and missing thropic. They're so mean fake, it is so so mean. And you know, the discerning too much information listener will pick up a thread that I of about being just heinously bitter towards like being a musician in late stage capitalism where there's no damn money and no resources to do anything, and and me and the other hand who played bass in your band just happy to be there. Well yeah, I mean, but but for some reason, like where I get mad at like David Crosby for being like, I'm blew through seventy million dollars in the like the eighties and now I'm piste off. I don't have any money like that rankles me. But for some reason, Steely Dan, I'm like, it's perfectly cool that you spent a week searching for one guitar solo while burning through l a's top guitarists and just telling them nope, not it next like that's hilarious to me. No one will ever get to make records like that again, I guess, I guess maybe you could do it in your in your living room if you're not special care about making friends, I mean like Capital Studios, Like you're like, yep, they just costing us five dollars a day. Well yeah, yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, I don't know, I trusted for inflation. Uh what about you, buddy. I just I'm stunned that there was ever a pier when you weren't a massive Steely Dan devotee. I mean, it's a couple of jazz dorks with chips on their shoulders and an unlimited budget. I mean that just seems like I just assumed you were jealous of anything. I mean, jeezus, Well, yeah, it's that. It's very much that good. I loved Steely Dan since I was in middle school, which, as you can imagine, it may be immensely popular in two thousand one. Um. I yeah, I think I heard um reeling in the years on like old these radio, and that led me to check out their greatest hits and then do it again pretty constant. Yeah, yeah, like the war Horses, and then going to their greatest hits and then going through my dad's record collection at that point and seeing that he had most of the records, and oh, yeah, I love this stuff so much. I mean I remember listening to kids Charlemagne and Deacon Blue those or something and thinking, oh, like, this is what perfect music sounds like. I you know, it was incredible. I gotta say, as I got older, the precision almost started to grade on me, ever so slightly. And I feel like that's a common criticism for Steely Dan's detractors. It's almost sterile, Yeah, exactly. That's why I can buy it through, because that's when they're like young andy, Yeah, my really, My only knock against them is that it's just the sterility. And I mean this is not a new observation. I think there's a New York Times critic Robert Palmer who said that Steely Dan's music sounded like it had been recorded in a hospital ward, which is a great disc Asia in particular, I think it's just so smooth and clear that I get sometimes kind of a bit of the Uncanny Valley vibe from it, which is somewhat offset by Donald Fagan's voice. And it's hilariously specific lyrics which I feel like, oh, underappreciated, way too often. We'll talk about them in this episode. Um, I'm reminded of this quote from Roger dal Treat, which he says in like basically every documentary that he's a talking head, and um, it just sums up his approach to music. Give me a bum note and a bead of sweat any day. And obviously I love Steely Dan and have for many years. But sometimes I do have the sense that you don't hear the sweat, although it's obviously there again, like you said, spending a week to cycle through all the top session guitarists in l A just a nail single solo, But more often I hear the cocaine. Um, I mean I just assumed that they're gacked out of their minds in this era. I actually don't know much about their Well. I think that their producer did say that it was a drug free zone, so I don't know. Well, I think I think Fagin at one point talks about I think the biggest stress on their like partnership was Walter Becker uh opioids. I thought, I forget what he struggled with substance abuse during the show era I don't know what I was reportedly heroin his girlfriend overdosed in their apartment. Yeah, good lord. He was hit by a taxi in nineteen nine? Was that what started it? Did he have painkillers for recovering from? What's wild? Damn? Anyway? Well, from the mind boggling array of twentieth century music royalty involved in these sessions, to the amount of days the vocal is spent perfecting a single two word phrase on this record, to Asia's surprising second life as a treasure trove of hip hop samples. Here's everything you didn't know about Steely Dan's Asia Asia Jin Asia Jin like origin m h anything there? Yes, and talking about Steely Dan, we are yes Dan talking about Steely Dan. We're really talking about the partnership between guitarist Walter Becker and singer keyboardist Donald Fagin. Becker and Fagan played together in a variety of bands while at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, New York, one of which was called the Bad Rock Group and Chevy Chase on drums. There's this amazing Rolling Stone profile from seven by Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone, and he asked him about Chevy Chase, and Don Fagan just says, we don't remember him, which begins one of the many through lines of this episode, which is Donald Fagan being mean to people in the most subtle way. They later moved to Los Angeles staff writing for ABC Dunhill Records, and then you know they just you mentioned earlier that they had formed as a live band. They discard the band and they begin this habit of just being like, well, who are the best people at these respective instruments in the country, and how can we get them onto this record and break their spirits. It's very Phil Specter esque when he would just have people play for hours and hours and hours to break down any shred of individuality. And they're playing, Yeah, I'm just imagining hardly army now in the studio being like, damn it, maggot, take that solo again and lean last song and mix a lady tonality you've been samp just it's a flat seven, flat nine maggot um. Anyway, they wrote a song for Barbara Streisen that came out before Can't Buy a Throw came out before any of their records. I mean to Shine. Do you know that you strike me as a Streisan guy. Yeah, yeah, that was uncalled for Enemy of the Pod Barbara Streisen. Two is Can't Buy a Thrill, which is just jam packet bangers. You've got to do it again, dirty work, King's Reeling in the years, Brooklyn's the charmer under Me that record establishes them is just this incredible songwriting team. Um. They were able to just sculpt bands, shape bend bands to their will. Um. And one of the biggest I don't know if he's unsung, but one of the biggest here is is this founding member Denny Diaz on guitar, who technically was one of the founding members. He put an ad nineteen seventy in the Village Voice reading looking for keyboardist and bassist. Must have jazz chops, bulls need not apply. Yeah right. Also for on this time is Jeff Skunk Baxter, just one of the most tremendously facial haired guitarists of this time and also a missile defense contractor for the government. I love that so much afterwards. Yeah, it's like if Michael McDonald was like a c I, a spook, like destabilizing South American governments. Just garrett ing Banana Republic dictators and being like, oh, I'm just sort of amazed that anybody in the music industry could get security clearance and pass a background show, right, Like, Yeah, I gotta gush about Reel and in the Years That solo by Elliott Randall, uh is just incredible. According to I forgot if it was Becker or Fagan, there was an even better one that he did before the tape was rolling. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's it's perfect, it's perfect. It's notably um one of the few things that Jimmy Page has ever said complimentary about rival musicians. Jem Page and Robert Plant were both big Little Feet fans, but Jimmy Page has gone on like repeatedly on record as being like, the Relent in the Year's solo is like my favorite guitar solo of all time. That makes sense. He's an Excession player. I feel like he would appreciate that. I don't know. Elliot Randall, the guy who played it, would later describe his experience working with Steely Dan instruction what instruction? The only constant would be Walter Becker coming over to me right before the assistant hit the red button and saying play the Blues Elliott, There's was a tweet that came out right around they Get Back documentary that was, like, I need an eight hour documentary of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker chain smoking at a mixing console and just telling session guitarist Nope, that's not it anyway. They followed Can't Buy a Throw with Countdown to Ecstasy Pretzel Logic. Katie lied in the Royal Scam before arriving at today's topic, nineteen seventy seven's magnum Opus Asia. Uh. They had stopped touring in nineteen seventy four because they simply did not like it, and they didn't tour again for nineteen years. It was basically the same approach taken by the Beatles and Brian Wilson, who, it must be noted, by the time they stopped touring, had way more hits than Steely Tan. Yeah. But yeah, I guess they just wanted to become a studio entity. Once a journalist asked Donald fag and how they'd managed not to tour, and he said, easy, we fired all the roadies so we couldn't go. I think XTC two right when I almost feel like they just period. I recommend everyone watched the I mean, man Classic Albums is such a weird bummer to me that I feel like that series goes on and off streaming constantly. Like I remember there was a point where they were on Prime and I watched all of the I watched this on YouTube. Anyway, the Classic Album series are incredible. The Steely Dan Classic Albums episode is and must watch and in it, Donald Fagin says, around the time we made Asia, we figured out what it was we sort of wanted to do musically. We realized we needed session musicians who had a larger palette of things they could do, who were also good readers, because they were coming in cold. To that end, Asia's liner notes basically read like a yearbook superlative page of mid century jazz, R and B soul icons l A session vets. Let's just run them down, uh and again I'm only using their biggest accomplishments as a calling card. These guys Wikipedia pages are incredible drummers. Paul Humphrey played on Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye. Also played with iconic jazz guitarist West Montgomery. Shortlist of the greatest tenor saxophone players of all time, John Coltrane shortlist of the greatest jazz bassis of all time. Charles Mingus he this guy replaced Buddy Rich at one point, and he was the drum over the Lawrence Wolk Orchestra, which is feels like kind of a come down after I named all those other things for six years. That's true. Uh. Steve Gatt the True Drummers drummer. Among his many many accomplishments is the drum intro to Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover by Paul Simon. The guy is like he's played with. Every famous musician of the twentieth century has been quicker to name people he hasn't played with. Bernard Pretty Pretty. Ah. I can't say enough great things about Bernard pretty Pretty. He's one of the most famous sessions of all time. He created the Pretty shuffle, which has been adopted by everyone from John Bonham on Full in the Rain to Toto for Rosanna. Uh. There's a great story that Donald Fagin tells. In the sixties, Bernard Pretty would show up to a session with two signs that he would set up on either side of his drum kit. One would read you've done it. You hired the hit maker and the other would have his name on it. Bernard Party. The problem was with him, as Fagan explained to Don Bright, hopped in the extraordinarily perhaps to its peril, comprehensive thirty three and our third entry for Asia. His first or second take would be perfect, So while everyone else was still figuring out the changes, Bernard would put on his overcoat and say that's it. I'm going home. Just overdub the other guys. It's funny because, uh, Jeff Berner at Brooklyn's Studio G who I've worked with, had been in sessions with Bernard Purdy and he was like, that guy costs a song and he does not like doing second takes. That's incredible. Wow. He also claimed to be the ghost drummer on early Beatles tracks like pickening up Ringos parts, which seems like a croc Yeah, if you, if you? If you're like the kind of dork. And I say this as one of them who has spent time on the Steve Hoffman forums, which is like almost certainly the greatest repository of like white guy boomer musicians in the world. Hashtag Rick Patto patto um. It makes Twitter look like a land of civil discourse. Let me put it back. It is just I mean, the people are still arguing about Bernard Purdy, who I guess has just claimed to drum on everything. Um. But yeah, I mean you should just look up some videos of him because he's hilarious. Have you seen the one where he's explaining the pretty shuffle and he's like, and then I discovered some air in my high hat and then he starts singing his drum fills. Oh hey ha hey ha ha. Anyway, but it's it's a triple and halftime, right, triplets and halftime. That's what basically what burke with all the little um, yeah, you put all the little ghost notes in the in the snare and anyway, we're barely through drummers. Rick Moroda another legendary session player who's played with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Wayland Jennings. This guy also composed the music for Everybody Loves Raymond One Degree of Separation between Steely Tan and Everybody Loves Raymond. Ed Green played with Three Dog Night, Dizzy Gillespie, Jeff Beck, Diana Ross. Can be heard in some of Barry White's biggest hits. Jim Kelt probably the most famous session drummer of the twentieth century. Uh, just look at his wikipage. My favorite Jim Keltner anecdote is that also in the Classic Album series, I think it's Tom Petty talking about it, they were recording Refugee and they were just like banging their heads again. Or maybe it's Jimmy Jimmy Iovini who talks about it. Either way, they were like getting frustrated trying to record Refugee and they were like, ah, you know, this song still needs something else, and one of them, frustrated, they like opened the door of the control room and they step out in the hallway and Jim Keltner standing there with an egg shaker, which is the little auxiliary percussion thing that's filled with like little beads, and he's just but yeah, yeah, exactly. He's sitting there there in the hallway and he's like, you know what, that song really needs a shaker part, And damn it, he was right. So they brought him in and he plays the shaker part, and Refugee sells seventeen million copies or whatever. Um Keltner gets his day, right. I was just gonna say, yeah, yeah, Also in the Asian cut Cozy Keltner plays a garbage candle it as percussion um buried somewhere way in the mix. You can hear it soloed At one point on the On the Classic Albums thing, Fagan I think in the thirty three and the third says it was his idea. He said we were in awe of him, so anything he wanted to do was good. We didn't even think about it. We just said, quick, get Jim Keltner garbage candled which, yeah, when Jim Keltner asked her garbage can you bring? You bring the man a garbage candleid. Listening on the Classic Album's doc, listening to Becker and Fagin like dissect the tracks at the mixing board, it's really amazing all the weird sounds that they have in there that you don't hear, and then when you hear them isolated, you're just like, what the hell is that? But then they explained why they put it in there, Like there's this one part in I think it was PEG where they had this little really high trebling synthesizer. Yeah, that sounds like like a like a child's toy or like something that would be played in like a Mall on the seventies, like over like a mus act track. This is weird sound and you hear it isolated, like what the hell is that? Not only do I have I never heard that in there, but also why would anyone ever think to use that? And they explained, well, we thought that the horn parts needed a little more high ends. We put it on there to make it a little brighter, to make it It's just it's it's like an artist who puts shade or something to emphasize well, it's like, I mean, you know what I'd say. It's like it's like Rothco like coming up with his own chemically unique washes to put paintings where it's like, yeah, that's like six parts egg white to three parts Elmer's glue and one part airplane glue and then just painting it over all his stuff. And people today are still like how the how do you do that? You know, they're big, like it just doesn't look the same. And that's the thing about this record is that, like it was for I guess a long period of time, the preferred demo album in high end stereo shops, like if you went in to buy like a six thousand dollar morants, amplifier or whatever. Someone would slap on Asia and be like, you really hear Jim Keltner's trash can pard on this? Uh. Chuck Rainey plays bass on this is a real testament to Chuck and Rainey. You're gonna have to bleep so much of this. I just get so excited about Steelee Dan. It was a real testament Chuck Rainey. He's like one of the only bassists on here, I think maybe the only. It's like him and Becker, possibly best known for his long association with the Wreatha. Franklin the guy has played on over a thousand recordings. It's like him and Ron Carter and Milt Hinton, who are like the most recorded bassists of period. Full stop Um the peg story that's in classic albums. Uh. He thought the song's chorus needed a slap bass part and Fagan and Becker, possibly because slap bass was kind of coming into vogue at the time. This is like right after I mean, slap bass really only dates back to Larry Graham and Graham Central Station with with Sly, but also around this time you're getting Brothers Johnson stuff. Louis Johnson is like a huge slap bass guy. So it was kind of coming into vogue around this time, and of course Becker and Fager and we're like, no slap bass. So when Jock Rany's solution was was to put up like a like an Iso studio partition, yeah, studio partition, and turn on a rotating chair stool slightly away from them so that they couldn't see his hands from the control booth and play the slap bass part as he wanted. I mean, you can tell you can hear it through I'm sure the studio headphones, Like it's obvious he's doing slap bass. But did you get on Josie right, I know that's a that's a slap bass part. Maybe that was an authorized slap based part. Rainy is amazing. Um. I don't really understand his right hand technique. If you just like google his some of his YouTube videos, he just does unreal um. Yeah, and he's on. Another great example to watch him work or hear him work is the Aretha Franklin and the Amazing Grace keyboards. Donald Faken plays a lot of keys on the record, but my god, dude, they have Victor Feldman, who wrote one of the most famous mid period Miles Davis song Seven Steps to Heaven. He's on that record. He also plays percussion. He plays vibraphone and that is his extremely prominent shaker part. Undo it again. Uh. One of my but possibly my favorite Victor Feldman story is that during a session for the Royal Scam on the Sun Green Earrings, they relegated him to playing a container of salt as a percussion part for an entire day. It seems like a punishment. Well that's I think. In the Vulture, there's like a Vulture article about Seeley dam where they say it was a punishment because he was playing too quote out earlier and so they were like, play the salt shaker, um, come back and you chilled out. Other keys men include sessionist Don grol Nick, guy named Michael o'martian who has won three Grammys, did the arrangement for We Are the World and he played the accordion part on Billy Joel's piano man Um. A guy named Joe Sample who founded the group Jazz Crusaders, played with a bunch of people and you can hear his compositions on the Weather Channel apparently for many years. And Paul Griffin who played with King Curtis and also is on Highway sixty one and Blonde on Blonde and your beloved American Pie Guitar. Wise, we have Jazz Shred extraordinarire's Larry Carlton, Lee Rittenhoer, Steve Kahn, and Dean Parks, along with multiple Grammy winner Jake Graydon, who, as far as I can tell, is the only guy on this list who have also made an appearance in the comic strip Dunesbury in what context? No idea, It's just a note as Wikipedia page. I don't know, I don't know. What do you expect me to have read? Dunesbury in the past twenty years, the first comic strip to win a Pulitzer. Expect more from You're a highly literate guy. Oh wow? I was always more of a far side guy. And Calvin Hobbs, how does he Calvin at caltan Hams not winning like a Nobel prize whatever? Uh. Larry Carton in particular was tasked with um he would get the demo tapes from Fagan and Becker and UH basically transcribe a lot of these parts into studio ready charts the other musicians, which sounds like a thankless job on horns. You've got to remember the Blues Brothers. Tom Scott wrote the arrangements for this record in two weeks. Pete christ Leeb who plays saxophone and Deacon News in one take after arriving at the studio after already taping The Tonight Show which he was a member of the band, And legendary Jasmine Wayne Shorter, who played in Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet, which will never cease to astound me that Miles Davis had two bands so good that they are referred to as the First and Second Great Quintets, respectively, which also makes him the second Miles Davis sideman to appear on this record. Um also a guy named Plais Johnson Jr. Also known as the tenor saxophone soloist on the Pink Panther theme. Jim Horne of the Wrecking Crew played with Dwayne Eddie, George Harrison, John Denver on pet Sounds and also That's Right Yeah, and also played the iconic flute solo on Canned Heats Going Up the Country. Do Do Do Do Do Do Uh? Twenty year veteran of The Tonight Show band Bill Perk, a trombonist named Dick Hyde, who, aside from having one of those insane yeah Dick Hide, but one of those insane Wikipedia entrwes. But he also won four m VP Awards from the Recording Academy, like the Grammys. You didn't know, didn't know you could do that any one of four times? Maybe him the sixth Man Award. A veritable army of backing vocalists, including the aforementioned go O a t of late seventies early eighties soft rock vocalist Michael McDonald, Timothy B. Schmidt of the Eagles is on this uh X I capt Vanetta Fields, ex motowner and backup session war horse, Shirley Matthews, and clydie King, who I didn't know anything about and then googled or Bob Dylan's then girlfriend Susan Ross alleged that clydie King was this secret wife of Dylan and mother of two of his children. Do you know anything about that? I know nothing about that has been I think it was just I don't want to go and there was just in the tabloids or anything, but it's just it's just funny at me. Anyway. Gary Katz worked with legendary producers and songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. What are the Lieber and Stoler greatest hits? Jordan's locomotion, I know, know the locomotions. Um, Golfin King, Yeah, sorry, I mean hound Dog, Kansas City, Yakety Y Acts, Searching, Young Blood, Bunch of Elva stuff, jail House Rock, God, King, Creole. I think they did stand by me. Yeah, I mean tons of songs. Cats also parallel career is an A and R guy. He signed jim Crocey, Shaka Khan and Rufus. Jimmy be signed Jimmy Buffett. Also Prince Dire Straits, Christopher Cross and Ricky Lee Jones to Warner Brothers. That's mind boggling. Um. In that Rolling Stone piece, Cameron Crows the relationship with Cats continued as like a way of a setup, and Walter Becker says, why shouldn't it he has a mustache? Uh. In the thirty three and the third book, another perhaps unsung aspect of Cats as contributions were the fact that he could play this variation of the card game Rummy called Tonk that I guess the black studio musicians like new and they were uh fagin and Becker were like terrified of by their own admission quote terrified when like Chuck Rainey and Bernard pretty pretty came into the studio and I guess Gary Katz was like, no, we're gonna play Tonk and like really broke the ice. I love that anyway, with all of that talent at the extremely finicky Becker and Fagin's disposal, it is no wonder Asia took over a year to make, with five months spent on mixes alone. I would eat a bullet separate mixes right, something like that over five months them forced ABC to reschedule the release date three times. One of the session guitars, Steve Kahn, later said that in order to get a track green light, it had to get there okay from Becker, Fagan and producer Gary Katz, and he said to get a track past all three of them was next to impossible. If too liked it, one with v to it just to exercise his own a sense of authority. That's what you get for having an odd number of guitarist Dean Parks were called the shape of these recording sessions. For the Classic Albums episode, he said, we would have six hour sessions to three hour sessions with a lunch break in between. We'd rehearse for the morning session, and I would have the distinct feeling that we would never get a take with this band. It would never happen, the song would probably not end up on the album, and it was all going to be failed. Pause. We'd go to lunch, come back and everything was in place, and we get a lot of really good takes, which is basically how I feel every workday between my lunch break and after. Uh. Drummer Rick Morata said, you gotta love them. You go in there and you're just really good friends and you'll play and you try to get into it, and you'll say that's really good, and then the next day somebody else is doing it, a whole other band. It wasn't like they played musical chairs with the guys in the band. They played musical bands. A whole band would go and a whole incredible other band would come in. Can you imagine what a box set, like a true box like a Brian Wilson Smile Sessions type thing would be with this, with all the different incarnations of the bands playing all these songs. Because on the classic albums thing they have they still have those takes saved. I guess somewhere in the alts they're like, there could be a year of this stuff, um sure type thing like after Sagan goes God. Leavitt Our told Bright out amongst session players in l A, working on Steely Dan's stuff was a very big deal. You'd see guys at other sessions and they'd be asking did your solo make it? Um? But apparently they were never the axe men for this. They would always delegate the responsibility of telling these guys their solo didn't make it. Two cats um, I guess would soften the blows by like chatting them up about baseball and then at some point dropping in the bad news, like how about the Dodgers this year? By the way, the thing you spent six hours on is not making the cut. Uh. Dire Straits guitarists and vocalist Mark knop Fler is frequently cited by the middle aged white guy readership of Guitar World is one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Did not have a good time when the band asked him to play Time out of Mind from Gaucho. He recorded ten hours plus of guitar work only to have about fifteen seconds of all of that make the songs introit. Honestly, that sounds like the correct ratio for Steele A. Dan. He described the experience as quote like getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boots and I say, good, I hate dire straits. That's one of that. One of your spicier takes. Speaking of Gaucho, is rumor that Jeff Purcaro is drummer for Toto, another widely widely well regarded session drummers in history. He drums on the title track. That take is supposedly cut together from forty six separate takes. How do you comp a drum track from forty six takes? How long is the song? Gaucho can't possibly be that? What is it? Three cuts per second? Five thirty two? I would assume they're playing the click track. Wow, Yeah, good god, I mean see, this is what I mean. It almost seems like their songs are perfect, to the point where it almost seems like AI or something like. It's it's a little unnerving at points. Steve Kahn, who plays rhythm guitar and peg, told Newsweek, having the money and the power of guaranteed sales is a license for abuse. He's correct. What they might waste on one or two days of recording to get a single track, most artists like me could make an entire record for that. He is correct. I love that they spent all this money, like hundreds of thousands of dollars in the seventies, so more like millions in today's dollars, while steadfastly refusing to tour. It's no income stream back in the day, the profit I mean, nowadays everybody makes their only money on core. But back in the day, with tour and merch, yeah, back in the day was inverted. You would make all your money from radio and record. I guess they actually considered touring Asia and got as far as rehearsals right before uh, and then they just scrapped the whole idea. Fagin later said, we had four thousand dollars worth of musicians in the room, guys who wouldn't go out on the road for Miles Davis literally, and they were committed to doing this, and we meeting, he and Becker left the room together and said, what do you say you want to can it? And we both said yeah without thinking twice icons as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, we'll get to PEG. Well, we're getting to pay right now. The band went through somewhere between five and eight guitarists. Accounts differ just for the solo on PEG, which wind up being played by Jake Graydon uh Donald fake until Newsweek, a rare display of shame. We were embarrassed for them and for us. We felt silly spending all this money for this one brief blue solo. And then I think we talked about this later. They listened to some of the out takes for the guitar solo in the Classic Albums documentary and just just voices dripping with contempt. I mean, it's like they still, thirty years later at that point, twenty years later, at that point, still hate what they're hearing. This is a silly aside. But Jay Grayden, the guy ended up finally playing the right PEG solo, had a great quote about modern recording software, and this is in the Newsweek piece we've cited. Uh Zack shonan Felt did an amazing job reading a piece just about the guitar solo in hagg It's great Jake Raydon said, now you can make anything perfect in pro tools, but back then there was no help man. Before pro tools, there were pros amazing. Rick Derringer of U and who'd coup fame and hang on Sloopy by the McCoy's. He was another candidate, an engineer on these sessions. Elliott Shiner told Newsweek for the aforementioned article, Rick Derringer was there for about three or four hours. We got something out of him. The minute he left, some thing that a shakedown. Yeah right. He was strapped to a chair, We put car battery up to his nipples, and he played this guitar solo for four hours. Anyway, the minute he left, Walter looked at me and said, erase it. Remove it from the earth. That guy. Um. I said, okay, you never questioned it. Um. Apparently someone told Dar Injured this was a technical istue issue, because in that Newsweek article he says something about like, oh yeah, I heard the tape was corrupted or something. Multiple times he says it. But immediately after him in that article, the engineers quoted and saying they tried to get what they wanted out of Rick and they didn't. So I erased it. So Rick Deringer, if you listen to too much information, I'm sorry to break it to you, but they just really hated your guitar sol at what's the problem with the tape? J Grayden said, He's solo took four or five hours to nail down. God love him. Yeah, as we mentioned earlier, you gotta watch this classic album's documentary and watch Becker and Fagan go through. I think they only play like two or three of the out takes, and they don't they don't name who's playing, right, No, but I mean diplomatically, well, this as close to diplomacy as they get. Side note, I love Donald Fagan has the John Waters mustache. He was some reason. It's like John Waters, like pervy younger brother who's really into chazz and like zoot suits. But during this like either're playing all these rejected solos and just like the eye contact between the two of them, like you can tell they're just they wanted so badly to rip it apart, and Fagan says, won't you hate if someone did this to you that? So finally they get to the version that wound up on the record, and Becker says, and then Ja came in and did the solo with absolutely no difficulty whatsoever, brutal. There's a great line about this in Winston Cook Wilson's incredible retrospective piece for Spin for Asia Anniversary. He said, like their hero Duke Ellington, Fagan and Becker needed the identity of individual soloists to create their finished canvas, but within quite specific and refined structural limits. The duo, however, was not as good with people as Allington, but they didn't have to be. From the safety of the studio booth, they could just say, try it again as much as they needed and scraped the solos they didn't like. After the fact. They were described somewhat more bluntly in Dylan Jones piece for g q u K as fundamentally sociopaths masquerading his benign dictators. Incredible. In the same piece, Becker said, we just kept adjusting our standards higher and higher. So many days we make guys do thirty or forty takes and never listen to any of them again, because we knew none of them were any good. But we just kept hoping that somehow it was just gonna miraculously get good. Guess Becker was our Fagan I think was so fastidious and fussy that people call the mother behind his back in the studio. Um for Michael McDonald, who's soaring multi tracked vocals, are the pillowy clouds that drape the chorus of Peg having to be stuck in the booth for hours overdubbing his own voice into dense harmonies meant to mimic the hordon section voicings of big bands, clearly an experience that still haunts him. Absolutely. My single favorite section from that Classic Albums thing, which people on YouTube greed because they've just cut it out as an edit, is uh, Facon goes let's check out his high part just to embarrass him, and Beggar just goes cool. So they just solttle bit clickdong on pig buck do you pig come buck um. Yeah, it's wild, man. I mean, it's not even like barbershop stuff. It sounds like horn sections. Yeah, it's like four way close harmonies. It sounds like those old like old radio show jingle type stuff from the forties or old silver screen era backing, which is appropriate because it's all about like a faded broad like a silver screen silver state silver age. What am I trying to say it's all about silver screen era? Yeah, yeah, so that's the theory. So the theories that it's about Pagant Whistle, who was according to Hollywood Babylon lore, she threw herself off the h in the Hollywood sign because she couldn't get any work in the twenties or thirties. I forget. And the likely apocryphal coda to this is that she had an offer letter for a new part waiting in her mailbox at home that came like right after she left to go on this this fatal journey. But yeah, given those old tiny harmonies, that sounds is like something out of a nineteen thirties or forties musical or radio jingles. I wouldn't doubt it, even though I guess Celia dan Of denied that it was written about a real person. Yeah, there's Donald Fagan will always arrive to puncture your misconceptions. And as of who was saying, there's no hidden meaning. We just wanted a dotted half note for that spot, and peg was short enough to fit with the music. They wear their soul lissness on their sleeves. I appreciate that. Funnily enough, given that theme, The song was used as the theme music for a celebrity paparazzi segment by Entertainment Tonight on their televised show. From that's I cannot imagine how that would fit. But that's really funny because in the Dylan Jones piece for g q UK I mentioned a moment ago they Becker and Fagan actually cite old school television music as one of their many influences. And it's actually a really illuminating passage in this piece which maybe goes some way and explaining why they're so finicky with their music and what exactly it was they were looking for when they were recording. I think this is Fagan talking. He said, we were interested in a kind of hybrid music that included all the music we'd ever listened to, which is a high bar. So there were always a lot of TV music and things in there. It was very eclectic, and it used to make us laugh. We knew something was good if we would really laugh at it when we played it back. We liked the sort of fox Lux sound of the fifties. There was just something very funny about it. I grew up in a fox Lux household, and it was a very alienating world. So for me it had the opposite effect. Music is supposed to relax you, but it makes me very anxious. Thought that was a very interesting insight into what motivates them creatively. I think he said multiple times he's like, I like real jazz and fake jazz. I guess he's talking at music when he says that music. When he says that, UM, that classic albums thing is so funny because if you watch him play piano, he has such a ridiculous, weird piano technique. He raises his arm up to like he shoulder to like drop it down and play these right hand parts. Um, which I guess it's actually I read something where he talked about how much he idolized Ray Charles, and in specifically the he said specifically the physicality of watching Ray Charles play piano, where he was like, I'd never seen someone put their whole body into playing music that way. It's a weird digression. Um. In the thirty three and the third book, Bright helped pins down the rhyme scheme of PEG. There's double verse in that as and I gotta really push my face up against my monitor. Read this A B C C d B, A E, C C D E. I think I said that right well in Deacon Blues versus one in three are A B, C, B D E F F E. Just in case you thought they were overly hard on the instrumentalists. I also love in Deacon Blues there's a part in that classic albums where Fagan just goes, this was when I was singing a little like Jerry Lewis listening to his own vocals, and Becker just goes, Yeah, that was a very fertile period for you. It's their Their friendship is so like heartwarming. Their partnership is so heartwarming to me because it's just like these two guys who could clearly never aside from I guess their wives, like never met anyone else they could bond with, and everyone just talks about them being able to like finish the other sentences and obviously having this tremendously like fertile, you know, musical partnership. But yeah, it's cute. It is a is you know. I mean, for all their technical virtuosity and brilliant songcraft, I feel like their lyrics are almost underappreciated, or at least the least appreciated of all their other gifts. I feel like these were two beat Nicks who studied English at Bards, so clearly they were extremely literate, intellectual guys. And the journalist Chris Morris said in a piece for Variety, quote the art school Dan Maestro's drew in a wealth of literary inspirations for their lyrics, which dealt heavily in subterfuge and misdirection in the manner of a times square three card monty game. I thought that was such a great intriguing way to put that. Their lines are as sarcastic and biting and vicious as any punk lyric. Fagin later said, we write the same way as a writer of fiction would write, assuming the role of a character and considering their named after a dildo. And William Burrows novel The Beats obviously loom large. But Fagan was also a big sci fi nerd. He was a member of the science fiction book club in school, which is adorable, and he identified with people who use sci fi as social satire, people like CM corn Bluth or A. E. Van Voight or Alfred Bester was his favorite um and these were a lot of these writers came out of the socialist movement of the thirties and use their writing to criticize society. And you can kind of see the sci fi influence coming out on something like the opening lines of the title track Asia Up on the Hill. Can you do a Donald Fagan? I actually can't. I didn't have one of these prepared. Disappointed. Uh, up in the Hill, They've got time to burn. There's no return double helix in the sky tonight throughout the hardware. Let's do it right, I mean, that's sounds like what that sounds like. But see because William Gibson, who is the acknowledged father of the cyberpunk subgenre of sci fi, I think, has multiple Steely Dan references. Yeah uh, I mean yeah, good luck figuring out what those opening lines in Asia me and even the opening line of Deacon Blues this is the Day of the Expanding Man. That's supposed to be a reference to Alfred Bester's book The Demolished Man. And then another influence in Steely Dan's lyrics. You have the black comedy of authors like Terry Southern who did The Magic Christian and Candy, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, and especially Vladimir Nabakov. Uh familiar to most people as the author of Lolita, and he shares Steely Dan's fascination with unreliable narrators and creeps and perverts and obsessives who perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to justify their poor behavior. Bobakov's books are portraits of humans driven insane by passion. I mean Humbert. Humbert's probably the best example of that in Lolita. And you also have the Beats influence, with the junkies and the criminal elements. It's all dark stuff. I mean, you've got a little bit of Bob Dylan in there. In fact, I think Fagan lives or at least lived in Bob Dylan's old house and Woodstock and Uh. Steely Dan of often cited the musical satirist Tom Lair as a major influence. He was a pianist satirist in the fifties and early sixties, and he would have songs like Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, the Old Dope Peddler, and also a song about the nuclear apocalypse called we Will All Go Together When We Go. I feel like all those sound like Steely Dan song titles and National Brotherhood Week, which writes, it's just a litany of racial prejudices, the refrain of which is and everybody hates the Jews. I mean, I feel like you can see all these elements that show up in Steely Dan's lyrics. I read somewhere that many of the characters and Steely Dan songs seem like they should be sitting at the Nighthawks Diner in that hopper painting, just lonely and slightly sinister and morose, as if they've just poisoned page in the park. Um Fagan would later admit that Steely Dan were obsessed with quote a culture of losers, and a good example of that's the character in Deacon Blues, this deluded want to be jazz musician living out in the sticks. Um. Ironically, they said that's the closest to an autobiographical song they ever had. And then you get Black Cow, which seems to be about a man who may be stalking his ex girlfriend who's pilled up and seeing a lot of men at the time, and it's basically a n Apacov character. This guy is stalking his ex. I think I have the meaning of that song, right. I mean, their words are obviously notoriously dance. When the Fairly Brothers were making the comedy Me, Myself and Irene in two thousand, for some reason, they wanted the soundtrack to just be all covers of Steely Dan songs, and they got people like Ben Folds and Wilco and Brian sets Or to contribute. The only person who turned them down was Jonathan Richmond. And when the Fairly Brothers pressed him on you know why, he said, Peter, I'd like to do this, but the lyrics, I don't know what they mean. I never understood with Becker and fake and we're saying, and he justifiably felt like he couldn't sing songs he didn't understand, so he passed. Now we have to get into hashtag peatto. My favorite part of the Theato Music Corner, favorite part of any t in my episodes. Uh. Steely Dan le lean on this very specific voicing for their major chords, which they called the mu or I guess move. I don't know. I didn't I didn't take Greek. I was in a fraternity. It's the Greek letter. I don't know how you pronounce it, um m yeah uh. And it's just basically a different way of voicing a major chord um. Technically it is a major nine chord um because you add the second degree of the scale that the chord is drawn from and voice it in such a way that it creates two sets of whole tone intervals, one between the root of the chord and the major set in, and one between the major second of the chord and the major third. So if you're in the key of C C major chord c e G root third five, the MU voicing over that would be a C D e G. The crucial difference here is that in like most jazz voicings of these chords, you see this chord tone at it as a ninth, and what that means is that it's stacked above the rest of those intervals. So you would have a root third, five, maybe a seventh, and then you would have the ninth above all of those. But what the steely Dan voicing does is put that tone that in this example, the d the second of the chord, put that right in between the root and the third, and that creates this very dense texture that sounds like what's yeah, Because it's three. It's a whole tone, which is the you know, the first three notes of the whole tone scale, which comes from like debuc and Revel Stravinsky. Do you hear the Looneous Monkeys the whole time scale a lot? And I guess it was their way of trying to make these major chords sound like a little more interesting without adding a bunch of other extensions and stuff to them. But it's I don't I can't think of another pop band that has a specific chord voicing associated with them that's wild there. It's also easier to play that way too, I mean, huge hand you have to spread your hand really. Yeah, I guess I I've I've been. I was unable to find where they exactly named this after I found one forum reference where they said they jokingly named it after UM, one of the opioid receptors in our brains, which as a way of like poking fun at a drug reference. But I wasn't able to find any verification of that. I think it was a critic talking at the opening of the speaking in the opening of the Classic Albums documentary. I can't remember who, but I remember they were saying, you know, I think about silly dan Is that they were not a pop band with Prague jazzy pretensions, and they weren't jazz guys slumming it in the pop world. They really were trying to make this fusion is the only word I can think of. I mean, something that was really new, that was sort of in between and speaking of I mean, I feel like this chord in a strange way, sums it up. I mean, if you were trying to do like serious hardcore jazz, you would have some really complex like B flat major seven, you know, with the with the and then these are these are fairly common major chords that you'd find in all sorts of running the mill pop songs with a little extra somethings to make it make it pop, a little something different. And that's that's steely Dan, that's the that's the fusion, that's the middle ground. Speaking of Insane Charts Asia, the song took three music stands to hold the sixteen pages of notated music for each one of the guys who played on this. Incredibly it came together then the less time they allotted for it. They planned to rehearse an entire day before going to record it, but they changed their mind after getting through one rehearsal take of this Becker told the guy who's I guess official title is Steely Dan historian Brian Sweet In two thousand eleven, he said, Steve Gadd, being a fantastic drummer, is a fantastic sight reader and didn't really need to rehearse, neither did the rest of the band. Goad took, I've heard two takes to record his solos that are that that take up the break in that song, first ever drum solo and a Steely Dan song edited together in the final mix, And I guess Becker's only just like play the blues. Becker's direction to him was just play like hell, and I guess he's His playing was so crazy in the studio that the other musicians stopped looking at their own charts, and we're just like drawn to him and up their own takes which tracks Yeah. Um. Months later, this is so funny. Ultimate Classic Rock has this feature. When they were mixing uh Cats, Gary Cats told Ultimate Classic Rock that he was playing these mixes for because, as you were called, this took a hundred and thirty seven years to mix. Um. Gary Cat said he was mixing this and played Steve Gad the song Asia, which Steve Gad played and soloed on and Steve gab was like, that was drum sound great? Who plays on that? Did he? Really? It was he just looking for compliments. Well, who knows who's who's who's to say. The hilarious thing to me is that Becker Fagan, I guess, didn't like Steve gads playing at first. They thought it wasn't laid back enough. And it's interesting the thoughts on that we talked earlier about how they didn't want slap bass because it was too in vogue at the moment and just juste to two showy. But I guess their thoughts on drumming during this period were really influenced by disco. They really kind of liked this rigid lockstep tempo of disco drummers. Donald Fagan told g t u K. They had all these records that were just whack whack, so perfect, the beat never fluctuated, and we didn't see why we couldn't have that too, except playing this incredibly complicated music and the drummer would go and play a great fill or something and come exactly back at the perfect beat at the same tempo. Yeah, it's funny because, like you know, all these guys are a great example of how you can play in time but placed the beat differently, Like Bernard Purdy is a metronomic drummer, but he's a little bit further back. Steve Gadd is a metronomic drummer, but he's a little bit on the beat, maybe even pushing a little. He's just such a clinic in musicianship this record. Speaking of that saxophone is Wayne Shorter, a long his own career as a leader in the jazz world, but also of the aforementioned second great Miles Davis Quintet. Uh. He initially declined to play the soul in this song when Fagan and Becker reached out to him, but they asked Dick La Palm, who's the manager of the Village Recorder where they were recording this. Um. I guess he knew Wayne Shorter from when Wayne Shorter was playing at weather Report, and they were like, can you put in a good word for us, And Dick La Palm is basically like to Wayne Shorter was like, these guys are jazz dorks, Like it will really make their day if you come in and play on their little record, their cute little record, and uh, they sent him a chart and when he got to the student. When he got to the studio, he warmed up not on his saxophone but by playing scales on the piano for half an hour, which I love. Uh. And he's got this very short part in the Classic Albums documentary, but he talks about who he found them corny because they were so nice to him. Um. I guess because in the neighborhood where he grew up in and also with Miles Davis. And he's one of these guys who just does the Miles Davis impression. Like unprompted. He says, Miles Davis is like, you can't give everything away. Don't give everything away. Yeah, And and so he was like, these guys are weird. They're being too nice to me. Because La Palms is that Donald Fagen had been showing up in T shirts and like jeans, and then when Wayne Shorter was there to play, he showed up in a starched white shirt, which is adorable. The only person he was ever nice too. I know, right they will Well, they wanted Tony Williams to drum on this song. Um. And Tony Williams is also member the Second Great quintet, which would have made between them and Victor Felban three miles Davis Sidemen on this record, which I think is amazing. Dick Lapalm also tells this amazing story about an engineer the studio by the name of Linnie Bent, who came to him one morning and asked to be taken off of these sessions because Becker and fake It had spent six hours the previous night choosing comping takes for the phrase well, the just a two word phrase in the song Home at Last. The fool lyric is well the danger on the rock has surely passed, and she told him, Dick, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do the voice. Dick, I gotta, I gotta get off the decision. They worked on the words well the for six hours last night. All they did was work those two words for hours. I gotta I gotta get opposition. Hilariously, in that g Q article, it's claimed that they spent four days, not six hours. Anyway, the Palm Palm Palm told. Palm told Ben he convinced her to stay because she was like, you're gonna be working on an iconic album, and he was right. Must have been even is for Donald Fagan because I guess he, like a lot of artists, says that he hates the sound of his own voice. So he listened to himself saying those two words for somewhere between six hours and four days. Um. He used to request that his scratch vocals be turned down when they were listening to early playbacks of the demos because he just didn't want to hear himself. And uh and John Lennon was another one who hated his vocals too. That's why a lot of his solo stuff is all drenched with that elvis he slap back. He just always wanted some kind of effect on his voice because he just had sounded is it the leslie on turn never knows? Well? That was more because he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountain top. That was that was a more specific yeah. Um, Apparently this Lennis person isn't the only one who couldn't deal with Becker and Fagan's brand of perfectionism. I guess when it came time to mix, an engineer named Bill Schneek just couldn't handle the constant What about this? What about that? Again? This was remixed thirteen times in five months, and he later said it became very obvious that we were both getting frustrated, and in the end we just shook hands and I said, good luck with the guys. It's gonna be a great album, which is good night and good luck. Yeah exactly. Um, I have a question for you, more of a dumb thought experiment than a question. This was recorded on twenty four track two inch tape on a cap stand list machine, which kept the tape even more crisp because prior to this tape had to be dragged across the little middle tape head, which inevitably degrades the tape to some degree. So much of the sound of this record, I assume you would know better than I is because they had so many tracks they could, you know, mike up. The drum kit was six or seven different mics make the mix incredibly precise because they had all these tracks to just to make it like, Okay, this is a track just for you know, the kid drum or something. I mean, how how do you think Steely Dan would have sounded if they were making records a decade earlier on like a four track? Um, I mean, I don't know, I think you can some of my favorite sounding records of all times, So those blue note records that are like the Rudy Van Gelder stuff recorded in UM I think Ingle Word Cliffs, New Jersey. It was like a famous famously engineered a lot of those jazz records, and I'll say that I think they could have gotten those scratch tracks or the basic tracks, like the rhythm tracks and everything like really good. But no, you can't bury a trash can lid in the mix on a tape recording this same way you can't digital anyway. There you go, short answer no with an if long answer yes with a butt. Now I'm nowhere near as proficient in music theory as you are, but purely from a listener's perspective, I want to talk about the chord changes on this record because they're so yeah, usually unexpected. But we talked a bit about this on the Hey episode. But there are certain stock phrases and progressions used in Western music that gives you a sense of where the melody and the chords are heading. And after hearing music all of our lives, it just becomes second nature and you know, we just can into it where a song is going to go when we hear a pattern, we just were humans. We look for patterns, and the most interesting songs are the ones that surprise us by resolving in pleasing but unexpected ways, and the pleasing parts where it gets tricky because you often run the risk of coming up with something distant and ugly. But when it's done right, it's really amazing. And you see that again and again on Asia. Think of the title track that I Run to you, that moment, that melody could go anywhere from there. There is no hint as to like where the song could go in just that little short phrase. It's beautiful enough to lure you in, but it gives absolutely no indication whatsoever about where the song is going next, which keeps you interested and curious. And that's you know, all the best music. It's really why that one in particular, Like just that phrase goes f G D flat C. It moves a whole step and then a try tone and then a half step, and that's how this whole song goes. I mean, the progression moves in whole steps and then it moves in half steps and a try tone. It beaks like some of the most weirdly dissonant intervals, but it works. Yeah yeah, well yeah, I mean, it's just all the key shifts and unresolved changes give it this edge that keeps it from veering into Musaki territory, which, against at the top of the episode, is kind of the kind of a hazard given how precise the recordings are on this. That edge comes through not only in Fagan's idiosyncratic voice and his kind of dark lyrics, but also these unsettled, unresolved chord changes. I think it's really like an important part of the blend um out original Critics over the years of accasionally saddled Steely Dan with having popularized the so called smooth jazz genre sub genre and whatever you wanna call it, or at least showed that there was money in smooth jazz. And Fagan has a really fascinating insight on this in this Dylan Jones g Q piece that we keep citing Decided Hate nineteen, which isn't on Asia, but it's still a huge song of theirs off a Gaucho. I just thought it was interesting to see this song through Donald Fagan's eyes and see the intention of these sonic tricks that he uses. He and Becker are always sort of reluctant to talk about their actually the actual meaning of their lyrics, so this seemed like a rare moment of as close to candor as we're gonna get. Fagan said, a lot of the effects we got were intended to be comic, like hey, nineteen from nineteen eighties Gaucho. We were in our thirties, still saddled with these enormous sex drives and face with the problem that you can no longer talk to a nineteen year old girl because the culture has changed. Yeah, that's why that's set. It gets an extremely polite little groove, and then the chorus is set to jazz chords, and when you play them on electric instruments, there's a flattening effect, a dead kind of sound, and it's scored for falsetto voices, which adds to the effect. To me, it's very funny. Other people find it nauseating. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information in just a moment. I don't know why, but I found this kind of sad. Denny Diaz guitarist any Dela Diez solo on Asia is the last time any founding member of the band played on one of the records. That's right. Yeah, he was the guy who started the band and invited Becker and Fagin in, and they, by their own admission, they took over the band. Yeah. I don't think I realized that for the earlier part of their career they really did view themselves as a proper band. And you know, wasn't until like seventy four with Katie Lie that they shifted to mostly studio players. Um, I yeah, I just assumed they were always sort of a faceless studio group. Um did Becker and Fagin play anything on Gaucho? That's a good question. I don't know. That's kind of a bind spot for me. As I mentioned, I really liked Cam't Buy Thrill. I don't know a ton about Gaucho. The title track for My Money is one of the worst songs they ever to. It sounds like it sounds like the Family Ties theme to me, like it seems like an eighties sitcom thing. I've never liked that album or I've never liked that song. It's got some good, good songs on it. Actually really just Bablon Sisters in Hey nineteen. Now that look at it. Uh. And Denny Diaz though, dude, bodhisattva to me, his is his triumph. I mean, my god, dude rips. Anyway, So, speaking of names, what's in the name? Uh? Speaking of names, where did where the hell does Asia come from? The most commonly accepted explanation, the one that I've seen Fagan giving the most often, is that it was the name of a Korean woman who married the brother of one of his high school friends. But the most that I've been able to pin down of that word in Korean is as a sort of like repeated phrase like um, like a sports cheer, like you would say Asia Asia in Korean at the end of like a long sports chance. It's kind of like bring it on, or like come get me, or if you're like a soccer hooligan, like uh, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough, like that that's sort of a thing. Um. But as a name is come and have a go, if you think you're a go, if you think are hard enough. Yeah, it is. Actually there's a great werewolf movie called Dog Soldiers, uh, and one of the guys is like a like a lower class whol again character and he says that to one of the werewolves. Uh um, And I googled it because I didn't know if it was like I thought. I didn't. I thought it was just aligned from that movie. Apparently it is like a thing like Northern English, Irish and Scottish soccer hooligans yell to other holigans. Anyway, pitting the origins down of Asia as a name is trickier. According to names dot org, multiple people pegg it as an African word that means high priestess, while one person from Croatia said it means night bird, which is really funny to me because Donald Fagan's well regarded solo album containing the hit I g Y It's called the night Fly. One of these other naming baby naming etymology sites, name mom dot com has it originating from the Greek to mean forest goddess. Baby names dot com i d s it as being of Indian origin and meaning to drive or propel, from which apparently derives its idiom magic translation in Hindu and perhaps it's literal translation in Sanskrit to mean goat. Just think about if Asia was just called goat. I mean, many people would say that steely Dan well, after all, that perhaps racist lee. The cover photo doesn't even feature anyone Koreans. The Japanese people was shot by Japanese photographer named Hideke Fuji. The woman on the cover is a Japanese model named Sayoko Yamaguchi, who was named one of these six top fashion Models in the World by Newsweek the year the record came out. Didn't know Newsweek was keeping track of that, but that is their second appearance in this podcast. Friend of the pod Newsweek, Ah Asia Brown, who's the mayor of Compton in California, was apparently named after this song UM since her mom was a fan of Steely and Well w n B, a m v P with the Las Vegas Aces. Asia Wilson told an interviewer that on NPR that she was named after the song because it was her dad's favorite. So there's that. Also, Asia Pecknold, who's Robin Pecknold's sister and manager of Fleet Foxes. There you go, three three Asias. But you didn't think you were getting that out of this UM. Convinced of this record's merit, Cats managed to persuade Fagin and Becker to do a little more work promoting this one. To wit any work because they've never done it before. But also taking a meeting with notorious power manager Irving as Off, is he a friend or an enemy of the pod? Well, considering he's behind the one of the shows I'm working on, I'm gonna say friends, well friend of the pod Irving as Off. Uh. He took my kneecaps. Please don't kill me, uh. Fagan told Cameron Crow we were ready to blissfully go through life without a manager. Yeah. Irving A's Off, huge power player. He managed the Eagles and was famously referenced by Don Henley with the immortal line, he may be satan, but he's our satan. As Off strategy for the record was simple but effective. He called all of his record store distributor buyer contacts and he offered them this album for a dollar off the list price, but that they could still sell it for retail. I think in the article he says they he offered to sell it to them at six, they could sell it at seven, and he said they all bought two, three, four times as many as normally. And I told them that offer would last two weeks, which worked. You don't give people a limited amount of time for discounted price. That's just basic sales. Uh. Cameron Crow asked him in that interview, He's like, hey, can you put me in contact with the guys? And as Off says, they could be anywhere. They haven't returned any calls in weeks. When those guys go underground, they disappear. I get no special privileges. They probably don't even realize they have a huge album. They truly don't give a damn no no. They were notorious for hating interviews. When the record label requested that they up their profile, they responded by including a fake interview with each other. As Liner notes, their whole persona is that they're, you know, the original hipsters, their precocious suburban kids on the hunt for weed, jazz and beat literature, and your re interviews with them. Unlike the rest of the music industry, who try to prove how utterly sincere they are, they seem to like almost get off by presenting themselves as insincere. And there shows up in their lyrics too. I mean they're often just passionate and sarcastic. And the writer Dylan Joe Owns had this great line. Fagan always seemed like he was singing with one eyebrow raised, which is I mean, my favorite is brilliant. In the years, you've been telling me a genius since you were seventeen, and all the time I've known you, I still don't know what you mean. Everybody knows that guy, though everybody knows somebody like that. Uh. Dylan Jones also calls Fagan a professional grouch. Yes, the Fagan and Becker do not seem like likable people. They're just sneering at the world while spending ungodly amounts of money on their musical whims. Even during their time in l A Recording, they were always extremely detached from the music scene, and they rented houses that in Malibu away from everyone. They privately referred to l A as planet stupid, which I find yes. Uh. They claimed that they would always consider themselves New Yorkers because, as Fagan later told Musician magazine, New York is the depository for misfit Americans. There's a reason that we're here and why we don't live in Cincinnati and steely Dan uh just basically perfectly fused West Coast cool with East Coast cynicism. As one critic said, there the Eagles meets witty Allen. I yeah, very fair, and this is probably why they never wore the mantle of fame very easily. It just went against their whole psyche. They kind of needed to be the uh, you know, the wise guys in the back of the class that was just making fun of everybody. Steely Dan have often been described as a major bands behaving like they were a cult act, which I feel like is a very telling way to view their cannon uh. And maybe that was the secret to their success. It made people feel cool by listening to them. I'd ever did. But Asia was in fact huge, at least on their standard of success, within three weeks of coming out and reached the top five of the Billboard two D ultimately peaked at number three to become the band's highest peaking album on the chart, eventually going double platinum. Right on Spin that it was their only album to break a million copies, which I find really surprising. But I don't know, And again, I guess I can't imagine like Katie Live or Pretzel Logic gum platinum, So I mean, I guess it might have been I have been singles and greatest hits. Yeah, I was gonna say I feel that I can't buy a thrill maybe, but that could have been singles though, because do it again and in the years really than the years would have been singles. Yeah. Anyway, peg the first single nearly cracked the top ten, but stayed on the chart for nineteen weeks, tying with Ricky Don't lose that number in Hay nineteen as Steely Dan's longest running chart hit, Deacon Blues the second crack the top twenty, and Josie went to number twenty six. Uh, just a hilarious for instance of where Steelie Dan found themselves at the time, the village voices seven tazan chop pole, which was that was a critics only poll, right, I think? So it was like the thing was just like a survey of the top critic goal responses the year. Asia went number five and seventy seven, surrounded by never mind the Bollocks, by the Six Pistols, Elvis Costella is my aim is true, Graham Parker and the Rumor, The Jam television's markis Moon, the Ramones, Rocket to Russia, and the Talking Heads. So that's like three icons of New York City Downtown cool one ground zero for UK Punk and also Graham Parker just if you wanted the illustration of how out of step they were. There was a small dissenting note though, from Robert christ Gal. Of course, uh He was a mostly positive review, but he described some of the riffs as two effing tasty. He was correct, But you're right. This was the year of punk and disco, and it's hard to stress just how incredibly weird this album was for its time. Michael Duffy's review in Rolling Stones set the tone for many of the criticisms for this album. In the band uh Asia will continue to fuel the argument by rock purists that steely dance music is soulless and, by its calculated nature, anathetical to what rock should be. How do you feel about that? It is not rock music? Like, I don't think they're rock in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame definition. It's it's not chuck very you dude. But like it's got a back beat. I mean you can dance to it. The kids can just kind of beating. The kids can answer no, I mean interesting. It is a very they are sort of frozen in time because they are very much the white hipster revolution of the fifties exemplified by like Norman Mailer and William Burrows and the Beats. But they also got like, you know, real deal black musicians to play on these records, and I mean they have been Chuck Rainey and Bernard pretty Pretty and Wayne Shorter, like those are their peers just in black music. So in a way they are kind of they are what rock and roll was, like they are a fusion of white culture and black culture. And yeah, it's very clinical, but I don't know that's what it is. And this was only like twenty years after rock became a thing. I mean, it's it's also you know, I thought about this in the Grease thing, Like I feel like rock and roll, as we really think of it as a uniquely American thing, doesn't really get codified until the sixties. Like a lot of fifties rock and roll is still extraordinarily white because it's coming from country music and rockabilly, like we didn't really let I mean, like everyone talks about Rocket eighty eight, and everyone talks about like, you know, soul music and do open, like those things don't really get integrated, and yeah, exact it was completely separate. That stuff really doesn't get integrated until the sixties, you know, right, am I I had a pocket and saying that, no, that's that's fair. I think towards the late fifties it started to cross over a little bit more. But I mean you'd see it in things like The Girl Can't Help It, that I should check this. But the first big budget rock movie, the one with um Jane Mansfield and Tom Yuele, it was like big Technicolor wide screen kind of deal and you had I mean, little Richard did the theme for that, and so I mean that was a big Hollywood movie. So I mean he started by the end of the decade started seeing it more Ed Sullivan, the Nightly Sunday night variety show type stuff. But yeah, I mean, I do your your points well taken. It was definitely it's still fifteen twenty years you know. Um. Anyway, the only Grammy this record, one out of its many nominations, was for engineering, which is, you know, funny considering as we talked about earlier for years that preferred demo disc of high end stereo shops everywhere. Um, and I must always, as as I always do, note that in the Library of Congress selected Asia for preservation in the National Recording Registry. I always just think that's funny. Steely Dan is in the Library of Congress. Well, I have a brief it belongs in museum segment. Apparently the masters for the title track of Asia and Black Cow have gone missing, and that makes it impossible to do surround sound versions of these tracks, and I imagine makes it really tough to remix too. Uh. In the lighter notes for the stereo remaster of the Asia album, Steely Dan offered a six hundred dollar reward for information leading to their return. She's like so little. That's like Lauren Michael's like offering the Beatles three thousand dollars to reunite. Like that's that's almost seems insulting. Um, you touched on this at the top of the episode, but I was really unaware of the anti Dan sentiment, uh, or at least that it was as strong as it was. The Pitchfork review for two thousand's Two Against Nature was pretty savage. Oh yeah. It opens with if you're a regular Pitchfork reader, why are you even so curious about Steely Dan in two thousand, before concluding with people fought and died so our generation could listen to something better than Steely Tan who fought and died. Okay, well there's been the Yamo. There's a Fortio Virgin line too about where they come after Michael McDonald for Yamo be there. I have to hear Yamo be there one more time. I'm gonna yamo burned this place to the ground. I love Michael McDonald. Why didn't you dask me to do Michael McDonald pressure? Can you will do it? Um? Well, there's now you're choking. Yeah, I'm choking. I just go, yeah, you did that to you. Oh total moved. Pick just the Rick Moraines SCTV. But where he's like he's literally driving from studio to studio just to like belly up to a mic and be like, oh, I told you my my Michael McDonald's story. I don't think so, No, I don't really. Oh man, I thought I told you this. He had gotten back with the Doobie Brothers or he was singing with the Dubie Brothers, I don't know which, and they were going on on tour and yeah, yeah, oh yeah, they were in fact taking it to the streets. They were exactly, yeah, exactly. And I was interviewing all of them and whatever. The lead guy from the Doobie Brothers, he was in a pissy mood and he kept like I would ask a question and he would always intentionally like misinterpret it to try to like, I don't know, just he wanted an excuse to go off on somebody and like put somebody in their place. And I was like twenty three, and I'd spent days researching them as I always do, and I knew what I was talking about, but for some reason, he was just in a bad mood. And then finally, after this happening like three times, Michael McDonald was like, come on, Tom, he nobody meant and then he like went up to me afterwards like kind of like it was extra nice to me, which I took us an apology, which is very nice. She was really sweet, sweet Michael McDonald. Oh, that makes me love him so much. Um anyway, so he's The critical appraisal of the album is swung back around with a new generation of musicians, notably Mac DeMarco. When I saw Mac DeMarco Pitchfork Festival, he just closed his set with just the outro section of Reeling in the Years, like keep No he played all of his hits and then the whole band just went into the but now like just the outro. It was incredible. Um anyway, for a long time, the biggest shadow this record cast and popular music was Treasure Trove of Samples. PEG was sampled by De La Soul for their iconic record Three Feet High and Rising. Yeah, that's how a lot of DJs, I think Mark Ronson Uh being one of them, first came across. Steely Dan and Black Cow famously sample do you know what do you grow up drinking? Black cows? No? Actually, surprisingly that's a bit of like mid century Americana kits that that's the thing my dians did. I grew up, Yeah, coke and milk or or root beer and milk, black or brown cow. It's like a soda fountain thing. Oh, I thought it was like a like a root beer float. Instead of root beer, it was coke. Although I guess it's a regional difference thing. I've heard both. Yeah, I think you do milk instead of just ice cream, so it's not like it's not like the solid ice cream. It's this anyway, Uh, sampled twice prominently, once by Beyonce on the J TI remix of two thousand four is Me, Myself and I and once more Famously and more depressingly by for the song Deja Vu Town Baby by Lord Tarik and Peter gunns Uh. In exchange for clearing the use of that sample, Steely Dan requested not just a hundred and fifteen grand up front, but a hundred percent of publishing royalties, which makes them the sole credited songwriters on that song. Peter Guns called this a stick up, which, yeah, it's not wrong. Uh. Fagan told g Q the Tarik and Guns technically also stole the sample from another hip hopper. Uh so quote the sample had already been licensed for Puff Daddy and Maze, which is really funny to be because this would have been right around the whole Puff Daddy and Maze cultural dominance moment um faking goes on. We actually heard that Puff Daddy was riding around in a limit with Lenny Kravitz and went crazy when he heard it, saying they stole my sample. Uh. That's my version of Peter Jack's an eight hour documentary. I need eight hours on Puff Daddy and Letty Kravitz riding around in a limo in seven being upset that they're steely Dan sample was taken out from under the feet. I guess. Becker and Fagan were given an award from ASCAP for this Peter Gunns song that they didn't actually write, but as Caps suggested, they stay home and mail them the plaques because there have been some violence the year before, and they were basically afraid that Peter Gunns would have some kind of clash with Puff Daddy and May's, or maybe he would clash with Becker and Fagan. I don't know, but honestly, that would be hilarious sad PostScript to steely Dan if they were shot to death in a one hit wonder hip hop man. Uh. Though there are dozens of other examples, probably the most famous Dan sample in recent memory was Kandye West pulling Kid Charlemagne for two thousand seven Champion, although um that beat was actually built by his producer Brian all Day Miller. Uh. There's a really cute story behind this. Fagan said, Kanye actually sent us a sample of his tunes, and frankly, Walter and I listened to it, and although we'd love some of the income, neither of us particularly like what he had done with it. We said no at first. Then he wrote us a handwritten letter that was kind of touching about how the song was about his father, and he said, I love your stuff and I really want to use it because it's a very personal thing for me. It was such a good letter we said, all right, go ahead, and we made a deal with him. The only person that Becker and Fagan have been nice to other than Wayne Shorter Kanye Um. Sadly, Walter Becker passed away in Seen at sixty seven of esophagio cancer. The New York Times wrote in his oh bit that with steely Dan Becker changed the vocabulary of pop in the nineties seventies, and tributes to him poured in from artists as wide ranging as Mac DeMarco, Beck Quest Love, Ni Rodgers, The Mountain Goats, John Darnill, Best Coast, Bethany Constantino, Jason Isabel Tully, Quality and producer Just Blaze. On the other end of the spectrum, they've also been praised by Judd Apataw, who's called them a bottomless pit of joy. Yet I cannot imagine that Donald Fagan gives a damn about any of this. Nope. Once a Milwaukee reporter asked him, or force is the word I actually see us more often? Becker to listen to Grizzly Bear, who are a group who cited Steely Dan as a major influence. Becker did and pronounced them quote horrible and said that he should quote drop science on them, which I don't even I don't even fully get it that means. But that's brutal all the same. Uh, he can be vicious. When Rolling Stone asked him to keep a diary for his trip to Coach Hell, he wrote, after hearing a few bands, I noticed that many of them sounded a lot like the folk rock band of the sixties that were born in the wake of Bob Dylan's electric switch over, only louder and dumber. At least, hip hop, which is tough for me to listen to, has got a few genuine eccentrics with street energy and something to say. In Vega's own tribute to his creative partner, he wrote that Becker was smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist, and a great songwriter, and he added that while Becker was cynical about human nature, including his own, he was hysterically funny, adding that he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people's hidden psychology, and transforming what he saw into bubbly incisive art. As far as Fagan is concerned, that is practically a full on, grabbed the handkerchief, snob nosed tearful Oscars tribute. Uh. They afore mentioned missile defense consultant and guitarist Jeff Skunk Baxter equipped in a band like Steely Dan couldn't get a rested today. Um, he was right. WILLIAMS Burrows, who you will remember the band named themselves after a sex toy and Burrows naked lunch, was asked about Steely Dan in nine. He says, these people are too fancy, they're too sophisticated. They're doing too many things at once in a song that should have been their greatest Hits title. Too many things at once in a song. Yeah. Um, I love this quote from Walter Becker. I'm just talking to Time out in New York in two thousand eleven. He said, that's sort of what we wanted to do, conquer from the margins. That's dude, Steely Dan lyric find our place in the middle based on the fact that we were creatures of the Margin and Alien Nation, and I think that's why I love this band and this record so so much. Um there's such a perversity to these two weirdos who were They were so close enough that they seemingly shared a brain, and they crafted all of these airtight songs with a rotating cast of some of the best musicians in the world, all grounded within their little neurotic world of jazz and sex, creeps and higher education literature. And that might have been weird cranks who I wouldn't have wanted to spend a second with, but they were consummate artists, and I am so happy that the world has caught up to that view of them. As they sang in Reeling in the years, you wouldn't even know a diamond if you held it in your hand. The things you think are precious, I can't understand. Thank you for listening, folks. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was research, Written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,