walking upstream…
Steely Dan
sourcesCompuServe Online Steely Dan Fanclub — 1995 chat with Becker and Fagen (backs the Ellington cover confirmation and band name) · Metal Leg #14 — Paul Zollo/SongTalk interview with Walter Becker (backs the jazz-fan bio quote) · Metal Leg #18 — Richard Cromelin, Los Angeles Times, on Donald Fagen (backs bio detail on Fagen's Bard years) · Salon — "Sophisticated skank" by Gary Kamiya (backs bio characterization and the Horace Silver quotation) · South China Morning Post — "Blue Notes" review of "Eminent Hipsters" by Robin Lynam (backs Ray Charles as a formative influence)
In 1967, at Bard College in New York's Hudson Valley, jazz-obsessed piano major Donald Fagen met guitarist Walter Becker, and the two found they'd rather write songs together than finish class. They took the band's name from a passage in William S. Burroughs' novel 'Naked Lunch' — a claim both men still confirm decades later in the same deadpan breath ('DF - I did' / 'WB - I did'). What followed, starting in 1972, was less a touring rock group than a standing studio session, built to smuggle jazz harmony into three-minute singles. 'Jazz was always a big influence because Donald and I were both jazz fans,' Becker said in 1989, and the records that resulted — dense with hired-gun soloists, cryptic lyrics, and the harmonic tricks fans nicknamed 'mu major' chords — turned two record-collector obsessives into one of the most exacting sounds in 1970s pop.
the sound in question
1977
AjaSteely Dan
walk the tributaries ↓
Duke Ellington1930s–40s · Jazz / Big band
Asked by a fan in a 1995 online chat whether 'East St. Louis Toodle-oo' was the only cover Steely Dan ever recorded, Walter Becker didn't hedge: 'WB - Yes it is.' The 1927 Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley theme is the sole cover in a catalog otherwise built entirely from originals — and when the Pretzel Logic remake was finished in 1974, Donald Fagen mailed a copy straight to Ellington for his 75th birthday. There's no record he ever heard it; he died less than a month later.
listen: upstream & here
1927
East St. Louis Toodle-OoDuke Ellington
1974
East St. Louis Toodle-OoSteely Dan
listen forOn the original, listen for Bubber Miley's growling, plunger-muted trumpet moan against the low reeds. Steely Dan's 1974 remake swaps in studio stand-ins for every voice: Walter Becker works a talk box to mimic that trumpet growl, Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter's pedal steel takes the trombone part, and Donald Fagen plays the clarinet line on acoustic piano. 'Walter and I are such jazz fans and this composition stood up so well,' Fagen explained, 'we wanted to hear it with all the expertise of modern hi-fi' — the point isn't reverence, it's translation.
Horace Silver1950s · Hard bop / Jazz
Critics have long pointed to the same four bars: the piano-and-bass vamp opening 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' in 1974, which Rolling Stone says the duo 'lifted' from Horace Silver's 1964 hard-bop staple 'Song for My Father,' and which Salon's Gary Kamiya cites as proof of the band's more 'superficial' jazz quotations. Fagen has pushed back on that reading directly, calling the figure instead 'a Brazilian bass line which is common to numerous songs' — not a quotation of Silver at all, just an idiom two jazz fans happened to reach for.
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — "Steely Dan ↗
1964
Song for My FatherHorace Silver
1974
Rikki Don't Lose That NumberSteely Dan
listen forCue up the opening bars of each: Horace Silver's quintet locks into a rolling, syncopated bass-and-piano vamp under Latin-tinged horns, and Steely Dan open 'Rikki' with a figure that traces the same shape, just slowed down and stripped to electric piano and bass before the vocal enters. Whether that's a deliberate nod or, as Fagen maintains, a generic bossa-derived bass line shared across a lot of songs, the resemblance is audible enough that it's become the most-cited jazz quotation in the whole Steely Dan catalog.
Ray Charles1950s–60s · Soul / R&B / Gospel
Of every musician Fagen praises in his 2013 memoir 'Eminent Hipsters,' none gets a more devoted paragraph than Ray Charles. Reviewing the book for Slate, Seth Stevenson quotes Fagen calling Charles's 'Georgia on My Mind' — 'square-ass backup singers and all' — 'just may have been the most beautiful three minutes and thirty-nine seconds in all of twentieth century music.' The South China Morning Post's review of the same book traces that devotion to Fagen's childhood in New Jersey, where jazz, blues, and Charles's soul records were, in the reviewer's words, his 'musical first loves.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Slate — review of Donald Fagen's "Eminent Hipsters" by Seth Stevenson (backs the Ray Charles quote) ↗
1960
Georgia on My MindRay Charles
1980
Third World ManSteely Dan
listen forBoth tracks are slow-building ballads carried by a behind-the-beat lead vocal floating over lush, jazz-inflected chords: Charles lets 'Georgia' bend and ache against just a murmur of strings and backup choir, and 'Third World Man,' the closing track on 1980's Gaucho, asks Fagen's voice to do something similar over a hushed, unhurried arrangement. No single quotation ties the two songs together — the debt here is Fagen's own memoir devotion to the Charles record turning into the patient, vocal-forward ballads Steely Dan kept returning to.