I've contracted Steely Dan disease

They're outrageous, oh honey let me tell you

Just when you thought I couldn’t get any more insufferable, here I am, sailing around in the yacht of my mind, vibing out to the pretentiously constructed studio alchemy of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.

I claim this as my birthright, as a Caucasian Dad. Finding the Steely Dan-shaped hole in my heart and subsequently filling it has been the universe’s way of saying to me, “Yes, Jayson, you are very nearly 40. Welcome. This has been waiting for you, along with the satisfaction of blowing your nose mightily every morning and telling jokes more for your own satisfaction than that of your unsuspecting children.”

Look, I don’t know what to tell you, but Hey Nineteen is a perfect piece of… music. It just is. That ellipsis you see there represents my brief flirtation with assigning the song a genre. But it transcends genre because it is at once jazz, rock, pop, sitcom theme song, dentist waiting room visit and cocaine surf dream.

Any band, any musical artist, would die to have Hey Nineteen in their catalogue. But the wild thing is, it’s like maybe Steely Dan’s fifth? eighth? best song? It’s impossible to quantify, when you’ve got so many best songs. It shouldn’t be allowed.

The Cuervo gold…

The fine Co-luh-mbia…

Make tonight a wonderful thing

Even if you’ve never heard it, you’re hearing it now. It’s stirring something in your soul. If it’s not, maybe you don’t have one.

If you’re hearing it right, it should be sexy, sleazy, corny, and perfect.

Steely Dan is so sublimely on their own exquisitely and ironically crafted pedestal, they just sometimes assign backup vocals to god darn Michael McDonald, the foremost Doobie Brother. That may be the greatest flex in popular music history. And I bet he was glad to do it. Guy has the voice of an 80s action hero posing as an angel, and there he is just hanging out in the background on Peg and several other bangers.

But that’s the real secret to Steely Dan. They’re not just Don and Walter, they’re a cavalcade of unbelievably badass session musicians, laying it down in the studio until it sounds so good you feel like the cops would pull you over if they knew you were listening to it in your Sony WH-1000XM5s strolling along the river of a Friday night. Jay Graydon, also on Peg (the behemoth; the juggernaut). Larry Carlton with the all-time great guitar solo on Kid Charlemagne. Phil Woods on Doctor Wu. Are you kidding me.

I don’t know if there’s a canonical way to come to Steely Dan, but I like the way I came to them.

One night, back in the good old days before covid, I arrived late in Kyoto. Talkin bout maybe nine, nine-thirty at night. I had to take a taxi to the venue where I’d be working the next day, because it was pouring rain. So I’m in this rainy late-night Kyoto taxi, early autumn, the kind with the roll-down windows and the seats with the doilies on them.

The driver’s got this just sublimely-appropriate music playing. So cheesy and lush and blood-stirring that it made me feel like I was in a smoked-out boozed-out Showa-era “snack” bar, the kind with the optional karaoke unit in the corner. The kind of shit I’m nostalgic for even though I never lived through it.

So I lean forward and say to him, すみません、運転手さん、この音楽はなんですか？

And he goes, あ、これ？これはね、and he holds up the jewel case. Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly. ドナルド・フェイゲンご存じですか？he asks me. I did not zonji at all. But that night, when I checked into my room, not a ten-minute walk from Nintendo’s headquarters, I downloaded The Nightfly to my iPhone. I listened to it, start to finish, the following night on the shinkansen home, after a couple of beers, and it sounded impossibly perfect. It still does. (Except for Maxine.)

That was years ago. I spent literal years just riding around, walking around, sitting around, listening to The Nightfly (minus Maxine) dozens of times, knowing this Fagen guy was in a band before, but not really caring. I didn’t care about his other solo albums, even. The Nightfly just slotted into a groove in my brain, and satiated me in a way.

Of course I’d always known Do It Again, from the first Dan album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. I’d known it because my mom and dad listened to FM radio when I was coming up. And then I listened to FM radio until the internet destroyed culture. And if you listen to enough FM radio, you’re going to hear Do It Again. And you’re definitely going to hear Reelin’ in the Years. And what you’re going to notice about those songs is, they’re classified as “classic rock,” but they sound way fucking cooler than anything else labelled as “classic rock,” and your ears will perk up whenever they come on, and you’ll vibe out for four minutes, but then not think about it after that four minutes is up.

But if one day you make the connection between that rainy Kyoto night taxi ride and those peculiar FM radio moments? That’s when a spark flies. A tiny little firework display in a dormant part of your brain. The part that remembers when dudes used to have giant speakers in their rec rooms, and would try to convince you that the gold audio cables really do produce a clearer sound.

You’ll want to crack a beer and unbutton the top three buttons of your shirt and sit in a basement with a carpeted floor and maybe wainscotting on the walls and listen to those wheedly deedly guitar solos too loud while your wife and your buddy’s wife are upstairs having wife talk and you’ll want it to be 1987 even though you were two years old in 1987.

Maybe I am stowing away the time. I never stopped to think about what that means.

Here come those Santa Ana winds again…

And in the actual year 1987, Steely Dan hadn’t put out an album in seven years. They had one of the all-time great runs, from 1972 to 1980, putting out seven (SEVEN!) stone-cold classic albums back-to-back, and then just chilled for TWENTY YEARS before recording the weird and slightly cringey Two Against Nature in 2000, for which they won their first (and only) four Grammys, which tells you everything you need to know about the Grammys lol.

Let me leave you with this live performance of Showbiz Kids.

I haven’t even mentioned how Steely Dan helped to invent hip-hop, by being imminently sampleable, and being the first to make hip-hop dudes pay up if they wanted to sample, and then making Kanye West write a hand-written letter before letting him sample Kid Charlemagne (which he did, to legendary effect). I haven’t even mentioned how I loved Steely Dan vicariously through Kanye and De La Soul and Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz (and, uh, All Saints), because all of those dudes knew about Steely Dan’s righteousness way before I did, and saw fit to try and grab a piece of that.

But yeah. So. Let me leave you with this live performance of Show Biz Kids. From some TV show (?) called The Midnight Special, from 1973. This is the most Nineteen Seventies thing you have ever seen or experienced in your life, unless you were actually alive for that decade, and then I don’t know. Donald Fagen said the F-word, on TV, in 1973. If you watch this video, you’ll first notice the absolute life you are receiving from the ladies singing the “Lost Wages” refrain. You’ll then notice that Donald Fagen looks like a coked-out, emaciated, high-on-more-than-just-his-mother’s-love Liberace Frankenstein monster. As one of the YouTube commenters aptly points out, this all happened when talent mattered more than looks.