Las Vegas Sun

By Joe Brown

Fri, Aug 8, 2008 (2 a.m.)

The very first words out of Steely Dan, on the very first song of its very first album:

Now you swear and kick and beg us

That you’re not a gamblin’ man

Then you find you’re back in Vegas

With a handle in your hand ...

Las Vegas, along with New York and Los Angeles, has been a continuing motif, metaphor and milieu for the songs of Steely Dan, offering a glamorous/seamy setting for a cast of morally ambiguous characters that includes Jive Miguel, Cousin Dupree and Dr. Wu, all of them midnight cruisers after bounties of fortune and fame.

You’d gamble or give anything / To be in with the better half, they sang in “Razor Boy.” You throw out your gold teeth / Do you see how they roll? they sneered in “Your Gold Teeth.”

Fronted by founding masterminds Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the band, which rarely tours, plays tonight at the Pearl at the Palms. And it’s asking Cher-level prices for tickets. But Dan-fans will pay up, not just because Steely Dan performs its singular fusion of pop, jazz and R&B and ironic, cryptic lyrics with impeccable style and only the finest musicians. They know that this is a rare and perhaps never-to-be-repeated event.

• • •

Fagen, 60, and Becker, 58, hinted at their affection for our city when they taped a promotional video for their last album, 2003’s “Everything Must Go,” from the back seat of a Las Vegas Yellow Cab piloted by a salty cabbie named Rita. After she recognizes them, she asks the laconic duo what they like to do for fun. “Well, there’s brooding,” Becker says. “Do you know anywhere that has a good rack of Penguin paperbacks?” Fagen says. Cruising with Rita up and down Las Vegas Boulevard, they visit a drive-through and stop to pick up a rambunctious blonde, who misremembers their lyrics and tells tales about her boyfriend — all her stories sound as if they could be Steely Dan songs. Then a magician named Marie gets in with a live python necklace, and she tells them she once used their “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” in her act. Fagen and Becker ask her how much it would cost to make someone in the record business disappear. (The video can be streamed here.)

• • •

In an interview with Rolling Stone before the band’s current 44-date, 37-city “Think Fast” tour, which included two performances at the Montreal Jazz Festival last month, Becker talked about the tour:

“Well, we’re revamping our show to change the pace and the flow of the show and to include songs that we haven’t been doing as much recently. We haven’t really started rehearsing yet, so I don’t really know how it’s gonna turn out. We just want to make sure it has a fresh energy for people that have come in previous years, even though they’ll still get to hear basically what they wanna hear: the Steely Dan songs played more or less how they were recorded. In some cases, we’ll do rewrites, segues and stuff, make it a different live experience. There’s a couple songs that I’d like to do that we’ll maybe get to do this year. But I hate to say in advance, in case it doesn’t happen. And then fans are coming to the shows with signs and stuff, throwing rotten tomatoes at us if we don’t do certain songs.”

• • •

A studio-based band since 1975, Steely Dan has always been synonymous with sonic quality — “Aja” was for years the audiophile’s album of choice for demonstrating stereo components. Fagen and Becker are notorious perfectionists, and when they do play live, it’s always with the choicest musicians available. This year’s Dan band:

Jon Herington (guitar): Being Steely Dan’s “new guitar guy” may be one of the most coveted and most intimidating slots in pop music — guitarists who have held that spot include such aces as Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Elliott Randall and Larry Carlton. Fagen (who plays keyboards and sings lead) and Becker (guitar) have said Herington is handling it all with “perfection and grace,” evoking “the melodic and rhythmic heart of cherished recorded versions while simultaneously displaying his own original and powerful musicality.”

Jeff Young (keyboards, backing vocals) appeared on Broadway in “The Gospel at Colonus” and in Fagen’s early-’90s New York Rock and Soul Revue.

Freddie Washington (bass) started his career touring with Herbie Hancock and has played bass for Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Keb Mo.

Keith Carlock (drums) has toured with Sting and James Taylor, and plays on solo albums by Fagen and Becker.

Michael Leonhart (trumpet, keyboards) is the youngest Grammy recipient in history, winning at age 17 for the most outstanding musician in a U.S. high school.

Jim Pugh (trombone) is the reason Steely Dan changed its long-standing “no trombones” rule.

Roger Rosenberg (baritone saxophone) has played with Chet Baker, Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, to name a few.

Walt Weiskopf (saxophone) started performing at age 21 with the Buddy Rich Big Band.

The backing vocalists are Tawatha Agee, who has sung behind Lenny Kravitz, Dave Matthews and Luther Vandross; Cindy Mizelle, who toured with the Rolling Stones on the 1990 “Steel Wheels” tour; and Catherine Russell, who just released her second album, “Sentimental Streak.”

Fagen and Becker have invited distinguished jazz artists, including the Bill Charlap Trio and the Sam Yahel Organ Trio, to open each concert on the tour; Vegas is being treated to the Joey DeFrancesco Trio — DeFrancesco, an ace on the Hammond B3, was named best jazz organist in a 2003 Down Beat magazine critics poll.

• • •

Our advice: Catch them performing live while you can: Barring tribute bands (and there are several, with names like Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam and Aja Vu), there’s not likely to be another band like Steely Dan in our lifetimes. An excerpt from “Aja,” an analysis of the band’s most successful album, by session musician Don Breithaupt, from the hip 33 1/3 minibook series, describes the music and media climate that enabled such a pop anomaly to get airplay.

“A band like Steely Dan couldn’t get arrested now,” former Dan guitarist and current Defense Department consultant Jeff Baxter opined back in 1995. Indeed, the conditions necessary for the success of a band with Steely Dan’s history, personnel and goals seem to be specific to the ’70s. Three main factors were in play: the confluence of jazz and rock; unprecedented stylistic breadth in pop radio; and a record business open to new forms of expression.

“By 1977, AM radio was nearing the end of its reign as the vehicle by which the Top 40 took shape and was disseminated ... The casualty was diversity. During AM’s salad days, playlists were assembled with little regard for what music belonged together stylistically, or especially demographically ... The upside to a pan-categorical pop chart for an artist like Steely Dan was that classification wasn’t the first order of business ... The permutations were infinite: While waiting for Andy Gibb to come on, an impressionable listener might have been exposed to a little Steely Dan ... a truly robust Top 40 could tolerate both ...

“So Baxter, likely the only Pentagon regular nicknamed “Skunk,” had it right in 1995. The conditions which allowed Steely Dan’s unique amalgam of jazz, rock and R&B to flourish in the seventies have not recurred, and likely won’t. Jazz and its offshoots have achieved permanent niche status. Pop radio has splintered into a half-dozen specialized formats. And the music business, hemorrhaging cash as it struggles to persevere in a broadband world, has returned to priority one: finding round pegs for round holes.”

This excerpt from “Aja,” by Don Breithaupt ©2007, is reprinted by permission of The Continuum International Publishing Group.

• • •

In a recent interview, Becker said there may be a new Steely Dan album — “sometime between now and before the end of time.” He’s still singing about Vegas: The very first words on his new solo album, “Circus Money” (which in a way, is the latest Steely Dan record to date) give a nod to our town:

Betsy Button — she just got old

Drives to Vegas with a kid or two

She saved her nickels — it sure adds up

Now she’s got ’em in a paper cup

She needs:

3 bars

3 cherries

3 lemons

3 pigs

A date with Elvis

A new car

A roll of dollars for the cookie jar (“Door Number Two”)

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