Three Decades (and Counting) of Steely Dan Fandom

For more than 30 years I’ve been a devotee of the band Steely Dan—or simply The Dan—which was the brainchild of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the pair of musical antiheroes who wrote ironic and intelligent lyrics, crafted catchy and beautiful tunes, and, with the backing of the industry’s most talented session players, created some of the most subversive and everlasting songs of the past 50 years.

Yes, I’m an unabashed and longtime Danfan. And like any true Danfan, I often celebrate Steely Dan’s genius and tend to talk or write about it, especially after a few libations.

This installment of “A Fan’s Notes” is the first of several posts that will discuss Steely Dan, so I hope you’ll join me by pouring a drink of your own, hitting play on “Aja” (or any of their other masterpieces) and enjoying this tribute to one of my all-time favorite bands.

It all began when I was a student at Rhodes College in Memphis. I listened to The Dan a bit as a freshman, but my fanaticism didn’t kick in until my sophomore year, the fall of 1990, when I invested in a top-notch stereo system and needed the music to match. It was my first compact disc player, so I had to upgrade my collection from cassette tapes to CDs. Thankfully, that was the era of the 1-cent CD club.

Those of a certain age will no doubt remember the deal: You chose 12 CDs for just a penny (!) and then agreed to pay full price for a certain number of items until your obligation was up. I can’t remember the exact details, but once those full-price bills started rolling in from Columbia House or BMG, you felt like you’d been royally scammed. You probably had been. Still, it was a quick and (relatively) inexpensive way to build one’s library.

My first order included Steely Dan’s greatest hits collection, “A Decade of Steely Dan,” released in 1985 on MCA Records. The compilation featured 14 tracks spanning what was, at the time, a six-album career that stalled after 1980’s troubled yet terrific album, “Gaucho.” I didn’t know it then, but that CD would spark a decades-long obsession with the band and its music.

Sure, I was already familiar with Steely Dan’s big hits—“Reelin’ in the Years,” “Deacon Blues,” “Do It Again,” “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”—but “Decade” marked a slightly deeper dive into The Dan. It took me beyond the usual FM radio fare to tunes like “Bad Sneakers,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Babylon Sisters” and others.

The CD proved to be the proverbial “gateway album to The Dan’s brilliance,” as I tweeted a few years ago:

“Decade” quickly became my go-to CD, one of just a few I spun in that new stereo because these songs were unlike anything I had heard before—rock fused with jazz, overlayed by smart, wry lyricism. The perfect music for solitary autumn afternoons on campus, drink in hand, empty notebook in front of me, longing for something but not exactly sure what.

As an English major, I was rather amused with the well-known and hilarious origin story of the band’s moniker: Fagen and Becker named their band after a sex toy in the William Burroughs novel “Naked Lunch.” But that was just one of many subtle eyewinks from Fagen and Becker that endeared me to Steely Dan.

Their dark sense of humor—combined with a love of literature, extensive knowledge of musical theory and history, wordsmith sophistication and deep intellect—would infuse everything the pair produced, especially after they fired the original lineup and The Dan became a duo that hired session players for recording albums. 

Their work appealed to a certain type of music fan, like me, who wanted something different than the pop offerings of that time. Everything else out there paled—was, in fact, utterly fucking boring—in comparison.

With Steely Dan, I was turned onto complex musical arrangements, arcane lyrics and a unique aesthetic that seemed appropriate for a 19-year-old kid who had just declared English as a major and somehow felt he was ready to drink kirschwasser from a shell or perhaps go to LA on a dare and go it alone.

The Dan wrote songs about disillusionment and detachment (e.g., “Deacon Blues,” “Bad Sneakers”). They told stories of skeezy characters doing sketchy things (e.g., “Don’t Take Me Alive,” “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies”). They sarcastically glorified the seedy LA lifestyle (e.g., “Glamour Profession,” “Everything You Did”). They wrote sardonic lyrics shrouded in mystery (e.g., “Pretzel Logic,” “Razor Boy”). They created some stunningly beautiful, complex pieces of music (e.g., “Aja,” “Doctor Wu”). And they made many allusions to illicit substances (e.g., “Hey Nineteen,” “Time Out of Mind”). It all fascinated me.

While Steely Dan’s cynical songs were better suited for a middle-aged, drug-addled, down-on-his-luck, failed professional than a fresh-faced college student trying to figure out his place in the world, I was hooked.

As my friend and fellow Danfan Logan H. Germann and I have discussed several times, there’s a Steely Dan song for every stage of life, for every emotion in this crazy world: Love and heartbreak, success and failure, happiness and sadness, youth and old age, fame and infamy, triumph and tragedy.

In case you couldn’t tell, we spent many, many hours listening to and analyzing their music. A trend that continues to this day.

For the rest of my tenure at Rhodes and into my early 20s, I moved well past the greatest hits and became an ardent listener of Steely Dan’s complete discography (look for a future blog in “A Fan’s Notes” that ranks their albums, which is a maddening exercise, as any Danfan knows). The Dan’s oeuvre became a sort of soundtrack for me, their songs serving as a backdrop for most of my life.

I would eventually see Steely Dan in concert twice—both times at Mud Island Amphitheatre in Memphis and both times while founding member Walter Becker was still alive.

My adoration didn’t end with Becker’s untimely death in 2017. If anything it intensified. Just last year, my Apple Music “Replay” showed exactly how much I listened to Steely Dan—3,546 minutes. They were No. 1 by a long shot.

That minute total doesn’t count how much I listened to The Dan elsewhere. Almost 20 years ago my wife, Sandy, received a turntable from her Dad, so we of course bought Steely Dan’s catalog on vinyl. Some Danfans consider this the only way to listen to the band, and many audio geeks test their speakers with the melodic and musically precise album “Aja.” Sandy and I usually start the party with “Gaucho.”

That’s not all. When we moved to the Denver area in 2014, I discovered not one but two Dan cover bands here—Citizen Dan and My Old School—which meant more chances to enjoy their music.

Not surprisingly, I’ve read books and watched documentaries about The Dan, but my favorite piece is a 2012 article in “LA Weekly” titled, fittingly, “Steely Dan Fans are Assholes.” (It’s true, in case you couldn’t tell by now.)

The Dan has long been divisive among the music crowd. For all the adoring fans, many talk about how much they hate their sound, their voices, their lyrics, everything. They’re wrong, of course. But the article’s author, Nicholas Pell, coined a classic Danfan rebuttal to end all rebuttals: “Listening to The Dan is akin to reading a novel,” he wrote. "You need a liberal arts degree to get it. Trust me, kids, it’s not that you don’t like Steely Dan, it’s that you don’t get it.”

I agree. Anyone’s criticism of The Dan is misguided for a simple reason: they don’t get it. At this point, perhaps you now understand something else Pell wrote in that piece: “Danfans are, by and large, insufferable pricks.”

Yes, we are.

In 2024, there are perhaps scores of new “insufferable pricks” out there. Fifty-two years after Steely Dan’s first album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” Dan fandom is expanding. It seems appropriate, and in true Steely Dan fashion, that we have a global pandemic to thank.

When COVID hit in 2020, Steely Dan found its way into the cultural zeitgeist. Their music, you see, was tailor-made for lockdowns. Steely Dan notoriously didn’t like touring, so social distancing was in their DNA as well as their lyrics. There was no better soundtrack for sitting in quarantine, unsure of the world outside. The same is true now, even with COVID mostly over. There are other dangers lurking and being antisocial with The Dan playing in the background makes sense.

Take, for example, “King of the World,” a song about surviving in a post-nuclear hellscape. The line, “If I stay inside, I might live ’til Saturday,” is the perfect expression of these modern times.

With their rise in popularity came a host of tributes, including some great content from much younger Danfans. There are now seemingly countless Twitter accounts (e.g., @baddantakes), podcasts (e.g., Gaucho Amigos), YouTube series (e.g., Yacht Rock), music reaction videos (e.g., Jamel_AKA_Jamal) and books (e.g., Quantum Criminals) that praise The Dan’s music and celebrate pretty much everything about the band.

And yes, millennials and even Gen Z are getting a lot of the credit for bringing The Dan to a new legion of followers, but allow me to circle back to my CD club purchase 34 years ago: If it hadn’t been for Gen Xers buying “A Decade of Steely Dan” in the 1990s and 2000s, I’m not sure such a revival would’ve happened. We kept that sound on the surface so those after us could discover it.

I tweeted as much last year in response to several articles lauding younger generations for keeping Steely Dan alive:

Do I welcome this newfound appreciation for The Dan? Yes. Am I also a bitter Gen X slacker who thinks our generation—and people like me, in particular—should be credited with keeping a couple of Boomers’ music alive all these years by simply being fans, buying their records and seeing them live? Also yes.

But in the end, the newer, younger fans are exposing more people to The Dan’s music, as it should be, so I won’t complain—not much, anyway.

I’ve spent a lot of time, probably too much time, writing this blog, but that’s what being a fan of anything this long will do. It’s why I started “A Fan’s Notes” in the first place.

With that, I’ll wrap up and get back to what I’d rather be doing: Pouring another cocktail, dropping the turntable needle on “Gaucho” and reelin’ in my many years—decades, actually—of being a diehard Danfan.