(Credits: Far Out / Steely Dan / Shockwaves Records)
Tue 25 November 2025 22:00, UK
Amid the broader progressive rock wave that exploded across the 1970s, Steely Dan joined the ranks of Rush and Pink Floyd in surviving punk’s threat and dropping whatever the hell records they fancied to commercial success.
They were always different. While many of their contemporaries had embraced bloated theatre and lofty conceptual arcs, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker dwelled in jazzy blues jams, scoring arch-smartarse lyricism and meticulous studio innovation. Just as the new wave was upending the arena-rock fillers above them three years later, the pair came into their Billboard 200 stride with Aja, their highest charting album.
Having met at New York’s Bard College in 1967, a shared ambition to enter the music biz saw the pair head to Brooklyn two years later and shove their foot in the door in the world of songwriter-for-hire while Steely Dan was in genesis.
“We were trying to get a band together and we were having trouble finding players,” Fagen revealed to Rolling Stone in 2021. “We were always looking for a singer, because in those days it never occurred to me that I would ever be a frontman. At one point, we said, ‘You know what, we have this book of funny songs, but maybe we should start trying to write some pop songs.’ So we wrote some pop songs and one day, we said, ‘Let’s go to the Brill Building and just knock on doors.’”
The Brill Building was a Tin-Pan Alley-style hit factory during the late 1950s/early 1950s between rock and roll and The Beatles’ British invasion, responsible for numbers like ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Be My Baby and helping launch the careers of Burt Bacharach, Carole King, and Paul Simon.
The heyday was long gone, however, with many of the writers decamping to Los Angeles or 1650 Broadway to find pop fame, but the duo persisted, knocking on further doors and playing their material on office pianos. After much slogging, they finally found their big break with a pop-rock outfit still enjoying a respectable chart presence amid the rapidly shifting music climate.
“We didn’t get a bite until we knocked on this door that said ‘JATA’, which stood for Jay and the Americans,” Fagen recalled. “And we walked in there, and they had a real sense of humour and they dug it. So we started trying to write songs for Jay, none of which he ever did. Because we were actually kind of terrible at writing pop songs. But it turned out they needed a keyboard guy and a bass player, so we ended up touring with them for a year and a half, and that was great fun. It was our first professional job, really.”
Mainly known for the ‘She Cried’ and ‘Come a Little Bit Closer’ hits years previously, Jay and the Americans were still an in-demand live unit into the 1970s, recruiting Fagen and Becker as part of their backing band as well as contributing string and horn arrangements for Capture the Moment. It was founding member Kenny Vance who took the greatest shine to the duo, seeing to it they composed the score to the comedy film You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat he was producing, and arranged for their ‘I Mean to Shine’ to land in the lap of Barbra Streisand.
Yet, Fagen and Becker’s complex songcraft and acerbic lyricism were never going to last long in the hit hustle. Having struck a relationship with ABC Records, the pair finally formed Steely Dan and found the fame they were hungry for, dropping a string of records across the decade that sold millions and set up the duo’s idiosyncratic anti-pop as one of the 1970s’ defining acts.
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