Steely Dan Comes Up Swinging: Number Five With a Dildo

Now we’re all here,” said the 30ish black man in the natty maroon suit, “we’re gonna do it to ya. We gonna have ourselves a time.” The audience roared. He stumbled out of the spotlight an instant, then bobbed back to declaim in a belligerent, ass-pinching tone, “Your friends who stayed home, you can just tell them, ‘Baby, you missed. You missed it.’ ” Three thousand people stomped and whistled.

“Yeah. Because we got the best damn thing ever happen to Santa Monica right here. Right on, right on.” More audience roaring.

“… ‘Cause we got … Mister … Mister … Steely Dan! … Mister … whatever.”

Mister Steely Dan? Mister Whatever?

The buildup was done by one Jerome Aniton, Steely Dan’s announcer. “We dig him,” says pianist Donald Fagen with a wry smile. “Nobody does better buildups than he does. ‘Mr. Whatever’! Once he introduced us as ‘Stevie Dan.’ “

Whatever. OK, good question: As they say in the science fiction movies, who—or what—is Steely Dan?

It’s what it seems. Says bassist Walter Becker: “We like the suggestion of a big guy named Steely Dan.”

It’s also a rubber penis, one of a dynasty of dildoes in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Principally, it’s Tristan Fabriani. (The name doesn’t ring a bell?)

In point of musical fact, it’s five musicians, augmented at times with various sidemen, who have jazz and rock backgrounds and a lot of experience as studio musicians. The Steely Dan sound is unmistakable: nasal singing voices, double lead guitars and jazzy piano, doing firmly constructed and neatly arranged tunes. The lyrics are relentlessly difficult, the themes emerging as cowardice, obsession, low-life violence and self-deception, all performed over a rock-solid rhythm that has at the same time a jazzlike lightness and swing to it, often even a Latin beat.

“I’m not interested in a rock/jazz fusion,” says Walter Becker. “That kind of marriage has so far only come up with ponderous results. We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.”

Together with the challenging lyrics, this unique brand of rock sounds like the kind of thing that could go over with critics, and it has. But it has also won a popular following. Nobody knows what that following consists of. At the Santa Monica concert the high schoolish, collegeish crowd wore no particular pop uniform—glitter, psychedelic flash or raggedy jeans. But the band has had two Number One singles, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In the Years,” and by the time of the Santa Monica concert, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” had been climbing the Hot 100 for 11 weeks and was currently the Number Five single in the Cashbox charts. The Pretzel Logic album had been on the charts for four months, the last eight weeks wandering around in the 20s.

Mr. Whatever, indeed. For that matter, who is Jerome Aniton?

“He used to drive our equipment truck,” says Fagen. “We had to fire him because he kept hitting auditorium doors with the truck, but we kept him on for his buildups.”

Tristan Fabriani is credited with the liner notes on Steely Dan’s first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. And strange liner notes they are, if you trouble to read between the splotches that decorate the back cover like nocturnal emission stains on a paper bag: “Hear the raw urgency of Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter’s solo on ‘Change of the Guard’ and savour his tasteful utilization of the spinal vibrato. Or hear how he displays the cunning of the insane on steel guitar in ‘Fire in the Hole.’ ”

“Tristan Fabriani is a collective persona of Donald’s and mine,” explains Walter Becker. “The notes were intended to amuse and to … cast an oblique light on the music.”

Obliquity is Becker’s style. He wears smoked glasses, accenting a somewhat gnomish face marked by high cheekbones and an upswitched nose. He has the fool, slouched posture and crooked, potentially menacing smile of somebody who was probably a sarcastic outcast in junior high school. Chortling soundlessly he can assure a reporter, “I think it important in a story of the sort you’re doing to have some misspellings.” When he wants to end a conversation he may sign off by cracking, “Don’t tell me about it, I’m tripping.”

The Tristan Fabriani name, says Becker, dates back to the days when he and Fagen, who write all Steely Dan’s material, were working in Jay and the Americans’ backup band. “We got tired of being introduced as Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, so we had them announce us as Gus Mahler and Tristan Fabriani.

“I hasten to point out that I am not particularly fond of the music of Gustav Mahler.”

Donald Fagen is an ironist too. The pinched rectangular face of his photos, which has led to his being called “a rock & roll Victor Mature,” in person turns out to be dominated by an alarmingly long nose, wide mouth and high forehead, giving him the aspect, perhaps, of a mad scientist. He no longer is introduced to audiences as Tristan Fabriani, but with his own band he still doesn’t run it straight when it comes to introducing himself. Naming the members of “our little orchestra” from his seat at the piano, he winds up, “and yours truly … Mary Tyler Moore.” His irony is less in the razor blade and more nearly in the lanky, swallowing-his-words, country-western mode.