I was a latecomer to Steely Dan because of an odd, almost inverted, snobbery I suffer from: when Steely Dan were new and all the rage in the mid-1970s, I ignored them because they were new and all the rage. I hate being part of a crowd. But a chance purchase a few years later in the Ebbw Vale, South Wales, branch of the then Forbuoys (whatever the then current chain was called) got me hooked.
This was BCD (before CDs), and like many such stores there was a ‘going cheap’ bin of goods by the counter full of LPs and cassettes they just couldn’t shift for love or money. (It’s only just occurred to me: why would a newsagent chain selling fags, sweets, paper and stationery be selling LPs and cassettes? But they were.) They were being flogged off for just 5op each — 5op! This was in 1977/8 and that 50p is now the equivalent of £2.55, but it was still remarkably cheap.
I sifted through the bin and came across a copy of Aja. I don’t even remember consciously realising it was by Steely Dan — the name doesn’t appear on the sleeve — and thinking ‘ah, Steely Dan, OK, maybe they are worth a listen’. It was the sleeve I liked. It’s a great sleeve.
I took it home over the moor between Gwent and Powys to where I lived in Crickhowell (I was a reporter on the South Wales Argus working out of the Ebbw Vale office and Crickhowell was nicer than Ebbw Vale. Still is) and played it — and played it, and played it, and played it. And then I played it a few more times.
If you know it, and you probably do, it’s one of those rare albums where the featured band hit the top every time with every song. And being Steely Dan, the melodies, orchestration, playing and lyrics are that much more complex, so that every listen seems to reveal little nuggets you somehow previously missed. Then you get to the point where you know the tune so well, you start looking forward with pleasure to ‘where that lead solo comes in’ and ‘where there’s that subtle synth in the background you can hardly hear’.
By then I already liked soul and funk a lot more than boring old on-the-beat four/four rock, and this was a further step towards my appreciation of jazz. But Aja is not jazz and it’s not rock. Some might call it jazz-rock, but even that label is a threadbare description of the music on Aja. And Steely Dan’s music was also far more successful than the many attempts of ‘jazz-rock fusion’ in the 1970s which, to me ears (of what I heard) were usually just a forced marriage of jazz and rock which, like most forced marriages, was not a happy one. Steely Dan’s music, though, was organic: it wasn’t ‘this’ or ‘that’, it was itself and unmistakeable.
On the strength of Aja, I went on to buy, in no particular order, the rest of Steely Dan’s albums, and they are all very good and I listen to them a lot and like them all, but none quite gets to me like Aja. Aja rules supreme.
I particularly liked Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s lyrics and their sardonic take on life and ‘cool’ cynicism. So when a year or so later and by now a reporter working in Newcastle I heard they were to be interviewed on Radio 1, I tuned in. Silly me. It is never pleasant to discover your gods have feet of clay.
All I heard were two smart arse, clever-clever fuckwit Noo Yorkers, being obscure, making in-jokes and generally persuading me they were prime candidates for their own cynical mockery (‘Showbiz kids making movies ’bout themselves / they don’t give a fuck about anybody else’ — well, not quite but Fagen and Becker were getting dangerously close).
But that doesn’t matter. It never matters. The music is the music is the music. Only the music matters. Would the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony be any the less glorious if you discovered he habitually picked his nose? Of course not.
So here it is the album Aja, and the track I have chosen to play is the title track, Aja. That’s not because it is any better — all the tracks are equally good — but because it is longer and the arrangement is a little more complex and shows just how Fagen and Becker took care over every last, tiny, tiny detail. Shame they came across in that radio interview as smart arse wankers.
A few years ago I finally got to see Steely Dan live at Wembley Arena and as if to remind me that they weren’t half as cool as I had thought until that radio interview, Walter Becker kicked off with that hoary old cliche ‘Hello, London! We love your fish and chips!’ Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me a break!
A little later Fagen asked for requests and I — quite prominent in about the fourth row from the stage — shouted back ‘Play Hotel California’. Fagen, oh so cool Noo Yorker Donald Fagen, by then I’m sure a revered darling of the Noo York art scene*, was not amused. Fuckwit.
(*I hope to Christ I never become respectable.)
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