Before Sunday night’s ACL Live performance, Steely Dan’s possession of the chillest catalog in rock music always seemed attributable not to its famous studio sheen or revolving door of ace session players, but to its major dude having no chill.
Whereas the velveteen sonics of soft rocking contemporaries like Chicago or the Eagles clearly emerged from some sort of loathsomely blinkered Boomer contentment, Fagen’s mellow perfectionism comes across as the direct product of discomfort – grasping onto mixing board levels as the only reliable constants in a cruel, chaotic world.
As the years have reeled in, with reunion tours persisting half a decade past the death of the one band member Fagen could actually reunite with, concertgoing Dan-heads wary of being lumped in with the Michael McDonald stans in attendance could at least trust the brittle sarcasm in the band’s lyrics would never be sold out by Fagen. The mixed blessing is that the frontman’s dependable curmudgeonism of a public persona has never seemed more agitated than when forced to reflect on the cynical, exhausting business of, y’know … playing music (check out this Coachella tour diary from 2015, in which he bristles equally at long flights and being lumped in with AC/DC). And the less said about whatever the hell happened with Aimee Mann, the better.
So, when Fagen lurched on stage in what appeared to be jeans and a dumpy drawstring sweatshirt while his 11-piece backing band (*deep breath* … three backup singers, two guitarists, two saxophonists, a trombonist, a bassist, some sort of ambiguous quadruple-keyboard wizard, and an absolutely savage drummer who, on his own, accounted for at least twice that) warmed up by playing literal TV cop show jazz, I prepared myself for a long night of reminding myself how great Steely Dan’s albums are. Of course, it took only a few sweeping bars of epic vagabond anthem “Night by Night” to get my head banging.
The shock wasn’t so much that the band ripped (it’s a predictable pleasure to see large ensembles perform arrangement-heavy music, doubly so when you’re intimately familiar with the arrangements; there’s nothing like leaping your eyes to the saxophonist in anticipation of a solo), but that their ringleader was clearly having the best time among them. Maybe that’s the luxury of manning such a widely beloved songbook, but there was a moving contrast between the furrowed brow, can’t-miss-a-measure concentration of the employees and the tendency of the boss to wander around stage, nodding his head at their prowess (or, perhaps, his own curation of it) until it was time to return to his tiny keyboard.
To my further delight, that spirit of bemused self-inspection extended to the singing; Fagen’s voice has aged to a glorious Kermit the Frog vintage where he’s not so much delivering his lyrics as he is twirling them in the air – twisting phrasing and examining wording in relaxed oneness with the groove supporting him. The spectacle of Donald Fagen, contented boomer, seems oxymoronic, and perhaps in my indie-er, sleazier teens it would have disappointed me. But even a pasty, indoor boy like Donald deserves a chance to ride off into the sunset. At the very least, his pitch-black shades (giving a distinct Stevie Wonder flavor to his joyous piano head bobbing) made it plausible to believe such levity was only possible because he didn’t have to actually look at the audience. And indeed, for every glorious sexagenarian dance party in the aisles, there are times I wish I could have blacked out the crowd as well. The entire row to my right disappeared for the first half to buy drinks and then spent the second stumbling over me – presumably for reasons of accelerated bladder-in-human aging.
The two-hour performance could’ve easily coasted on vibe alone. Instead, out of an expert mixture of deep cuts and hits culled from the band’s first LP up through Fagen’s own 1982 solo debut, the set list was intelligently constructed as a series of showcase moments for the band Fagen took every chance to shout-out. (His only remotely sour comment came when he confusingly bemoaned vinyl illiteracy. Hasn’t Donald Fagen ever been to an Urban Outfitters?) Highlights included a fake-out cool jazz jam on “Home at Last,” a duel between a melodica-toting Fagen and the rhythm guitarist on “Time Out of Mind,” and a staggering drum fill apocalypse on “Aja” worth about 8 million “Moby Dicks” and “Rat Salads.” And of course, the show ended with a lovely “Reeling in the Years” that came dedicated to Walter Becker and after maybe the shortest encore break I’ve ever seen in my time of concertgoing (seriously like 15 seconds). Call it accelerated bladder-in-human aging. It’s a good look on Steely Dan.
This article appears in June 3 • 2022.