In December 1972, one month after releasing their debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill, Steely Dan got eviscerated in the pages of The Los Angeles Times for looking like a bunch of car mechanics who had somehow wandered onto the stage at Whisky a Go Go. “Live rock’n’roll is supposed to be a show, and how long can one look at a pair of denim overalls without becoming utterly bored or downright repulsed?” wrote critic Richard Cromelin. He offered a modicum of praise for the band’s “moderately energetic” stage presence, and then immediately tempered it: “If only they can find some time to go shopping.”
David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona had made his debut that same year. Lou Reed issued Transformer, a glam rock album with a heavily made-up portrait of him on the cover, in November. Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, and Alice Cooper were all busy injecting danger and androgyny into American rock, which at the beginning of the ’70s was still finding its feet after the totality of the British invasion. And there were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, professional songwriters turned curmudgeonly bandleaders, playing jazz-rock with a group of like-minded nerds, wearing overalls and oozing contempt for their glitter-spangled peers.
A dark cynicism hardened around Becker and Fagen during their stints as songwriters-for-hire in Brooklyn and Los Angeles in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Both musicians were born on the East Coast—Fagen in Jersey, Becker in Queens—and carried an Atlantic saltiness with them to the streets of California. They had met as undergrads at Bard College, bonding fast over a shared love of jazz and Frank Zappa. Few other white kids in their orbit attached as fiercely to black music at the time: “I thought I was the only person in the world who was into this little secret about jazz,” Fagen said in a 1974 interview. He found Becker, his musical soulmate, and the pair began writing songs together on the upright piano in the lobby of their dorm.
After graduating, Fagen and Becker shopped their demos around various record labels, most of which laughed them out of their offices. Producer Gary Katz landed them a job as staff songwriters at the L.A. label ABC Dunhill, known for putting out records by North American rock bands like Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night. The work was steady but boring, and Katz soon encouraged the two musicians to form their own band. Fueled more by a distaste for the early ’70s rock milieu than anything, Becker and Fagen ganged up as Steely Dan, a band named for a rubber strap-on in William S. Burroughs’ surrealist novel Naked Lunch.
They must have had some idea of what they were about to become. “The newly formed amalgam [of Steely Dan] threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite,” Fagen wrote under the pseudonym Tristan Fabriani in the liner notes to the band’s 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill (they got the title from Bob Dylan, one of the few contemporaneous American musicians they could stand). “Amalgam” is right; rather than adhere to a standard rock formula, Steely Dan overloaded their sessions with players who could do Latin jazz or hot electric solos. They were a band who wanted more of everything: more guitarists, more drummers, more singers, spiraling out in a fever dream of excess. Fagen and Becker were the only writers in the room, but the credits for Thrill number a dozen musicians on instruments as far-flung as electric sitar and flugelhorn. Having escaped the sterile confines of commercial pop songwriting, Steely Dan were hell-bent on making a mess.
On paper, Thrill sounds as thorny as Italian prog, the product of a bunch of noodlers fiercely guarding their niche. But the record’s core hums with Fagen and Becker’s meticulous admiration for everything that makes pop tick. Bitter-mouthed contrarians in interviews, they wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise. The members of Steely Dan appeared to take themselves as seriously as long-suffering jazz purists in a world drunk on three-chord ditties, and then they shot up the pop charts with sunny, flippant ear candy-like “Reelin’ in the Years.”
As badly as they felt the need to differentiate themselves from mainstream rock’n’roll, it was always a part of Steely Dan. They claimed the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Dylan as influences before doing so became an outrageous cliché. Echoes of Zombies’ psychedelia and Beach Boys’ sunshine also waft through Thrill. Fagen and Becker stockpiled their debut with hooks aimed straight at your dopamine receptors, with vocal harmonies and gleaming guitar lines braided tight. The weird was there, embryonic, waiting to unfurl on later, more adventurous albums. But it curled itself up in service of pleasure.
Take “Dirty Work,” basically an Eagles song, or the “na-na-nas” of the post-hippie strutter “Change of the Guard”: No matter how detached they felt from it, Steely Dan put out pop music. They tried to make a ruckus and ended up polishing gems for broad consumption. “We’re a strange band y’know. The music is all WRONG,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1974. “Our songwriting process is not unlike the creation of junk sculpture.” If they identified with the gritty combines of mid-century artist Robert Rauschenberg, the songs they turned out were more like the sardonic baubles of Jeff Koons: fun, often hilarious, easy on the senses, and full of an unwavering disregard for the concept of authenticity.
Decades into their career, Fagen and Becker would claim the early hits as Trojan horses for complex musical ideas. “It was better to have our songs pass as pop songs and then have whatever else we wanted in them afterwards,” Becker said in 1995, as if the shimmering surface of Thrill were merely an excuse to smuggle their real musical passions into the mainstream. But the cresting harmonies and the guitar solos on “Reelin’” don’t sound like a front. They sound like a blast, like a group of young and insecure jazz dweebs egging each other on until they’ve made something so absurd even they can’t deny its allure.
Steely Dan crouched behind irony for much of their early career, and their popular legacy remains steeped in it. The hits from Thrill, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” blare out from classic rock stations right next to Black Sabbath, Yes, and all the other peers they shit-talked at the time. Their flair for melodrama, humor, and quick compositional turns got sucked right up into the most vapid (and delightful) of late ’70s hair metal hits, like Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” and Styx’s “Renegade.” They were so skeptical of rock music they ended up gilding it, breaking it down, and piecing it back together strangely enough for it to approach perfection.
