Steely Dan at Chicago Theatre

Band takes to the road

August 23, 2009|By Greg Kot, TRIBUNE MUSIC CRITIC

Steely Dan famously quit touring to concentrate on recording meticulously crafted studio albums in the '70s. But in the last decade, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have spent more time on the road than behind a mixing board. And now, with a dozen musicians, they're performing some of those hallowed '70s albums song-for-song on stage.

In a four-night residency at the Chicago Theatre next week, Steely Dan will devote an evening each to "The Royal Scam" (1976), "Aja" (1977) and "Gaucho" (1980), plus a fans' choice set on the fourth night.

Fagen and Becker once were notorious perfectionists who found concert sound sorely lacking in the '70s. They've loosened up a bit, but the realities of the music business have also dictated their decision to do it on the road rather than in the more controlled environment of a recording studio.

"Those days, conditions were poor" and the tour packages with heavy metal bands and Texas outlaw bands were "mismatched," Fagen says of Steely Dan's '70s touring experiences. "We were sharing dressing rooms with guys who had the shower and a chainsaw going at the same time."

"We have our chainsaws now," Becker adds.

Fagen: "We have a band that's been together long enough so that everyone feels the groove the same way. We stay in nice hotel rooms, we have cute backing singers, everything you could want."

Becker: "Plus the skill, organization and ability to create sounds live are much greater."

One thing clearly hasn't changed: The dry, often dark sarcasm that has informed Steely Dan's music ever since they bonded at Bard College in the '60s on Kurt Vonnegut novels and Blue Note label bebop. That sensibility made the Dan unique among '70s rock bands. Their recordings from that era remain touchstones for several generations of musicians and are often studied for their sonic innovation and peerless musicianship. Initially a relatively conventional rock-pop band, Steely Dan soon morphed into a Becker-Fagen collaboration with a rotating cast of musicians.

The finicky pair would sometimes fly a musician across the country to play a particular solo on a particular track. "We would write a part with a specific person in mind," Fagen says. "Once we stopped being a touring band, it opened up all sorts of possibilities for how the arrangements would work and who could play on them."

Becker and Fagen inserted bebop chords and sly lyrics informed by Beat Generation literature into rock tunes and even infiltrated the charts with some of the most harmonically sophisticated pop music ever made; "Aja" became one of the best-selling albums of the '70s even though its elliptical, jazz-stoked tunes came out months after the Sex Pistols were breaking in England.

"That was the height of the punk era, when musical values became intertwined with social or political values," Becker says. "It became all about what music was more radical or what kind of music had real working-class 'authenticity.' But in my experience of listening to music, nothing was ever as radical as jazz. Given a choice between Charlie Mingus and Eric Dolphy or Joe Strummer and Lou Reed, there was no choice. I like Reed and Strummer, but it's kiddie music."

For Fagen, the music got better and more satisfying as the group evolved, which explains why the band is choosing to perform the last three studio albums of its initial run (1972-80) instead of the earlier stuff, which many fans would prefer: "Can't Buy a Thrill" (1972), "Countdown to Ecstasy" (1973), "Pretzel Logic" (1974) and "Katy Lied" (1975).

"The ones we're playing have a more mature style; each of the others has a track that Walter and I think is a clinker," Fagen says. He'll also make the case for the duo's comeback albums, the 2000 album "Two Against Nature" that bested Eminem for best album at the Grammy Awards and the 2003 follow-up, "Everything Must Go."

"But no one wants to hear those," Fagen says with a laugh.

The duo prided itself on standing outside the mainstream throughout its career, so the notion of playing some of its best-known albums front to back suggests an uncharacteristic embrace of nostalgia and trend-hopping. Lately, every band or artist with any sort of musical heritage seems to be hitting the road and promising to play a "classic" album as part of the set list, from Bruce Springsteen ("Born to Run") to the Pixies ("Doolittle").

But Fagen and Becker have assembled an 11-piece band that can bop as much as rock. They suggest that the current tour is less about exactly duplicating their work as configuring it for the moment -- in large measure because every album after "Countdown to Ecstasy" was conceived without touring in mind. The relative complexity of the material allows them to reinterpret a few passages while still hewing to the familiar outlines of the original work.