The guitar secrets of Steely Dan: as revealed by Walter Becker: “All of our equipment was always broken”
The inner workings of Steely Dan have always remained under a cloak of mystery and intrigue. Known for their perfectionist streak in the recording studio, Steely Dan’s esteemed hipsters Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, were a world unto themselves.
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While vocalist and keyboardist Fagen remains the sole surviving member of the pair – guitarist and bassist Becker passed away in 2017 – the duo etched a musical legacy that continues to both enthral fans of their music, and musicians alike.
With albums such as 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, 1976’s The Royal Scam and 1977’s Aja, Steely Dan married their love of the absurd with unique sophisticated musical complexity.
Tales of their studio escapades have become legend, best exemplified by the duo’s fastidious approach in capturing the right guitar solo for Peg where they churned through a succession of studio guitar aces such as Robben Ford, Rick Derringer, Elliot Randall and Larry Carlton among others, before finally settling for Jay Graydon’s blistering six-string offering.
Keep It Brief
When it came to a Dan recording session, guitarists hired for the session were usually given a brief prior to the session. “There were cases where we had lines or we had particular rhythm parts in mind, but a lot was always left up to the individual with the guitar,” Walter Becker explained to this writer in a rare interview in 2010.
“Guitar players are so idiosyncratic in how they voice chords and how they approach chords and so on. You want to tell somebody the effect you want to create, and what you want to end up with, more than you want to tell them how to create that effect because if you have strong, interesting players, they already have developed their own personal techniques for doing that sort of thing.”
An aficionado of the blues, Becker always sought a particular kind of guitarist to lay to tape a blues-infused solo. Yet, many times at the eleventh hour, it was Becker himself who wound up being tasked with the performance.
“In some cases, we just couldn’t find anybody that really was the right combination of things that could play blues style electric guitar, and also play over changes,” he said. “There weren’t too many people that really could do that back in the 70s. Now of course, there are lots of people who could do it.”
Keep It Low
While Becker himself was also a competent bassist, he and Fagen would also employ the services of bass virtuoso Chuck Rainey whose contributions, according to Becker, were integral to the duo’s recordings.
“Chuck always liked to hear the demos and hear the bass parts that I had on demos because he got a certain amount of information out of it,” recalled Becker. “There were a few things that were written that Chuck played, but mostly Chuck just got the chord chart. He would hear things on the demos that he liked or that told him something about what the general approach was.
“He basically created the bass lines himself and of all the great bass players that we’ve had a chance to work with from time to time, he was by far the best at that, at creating a part that really worked with the song and worked with what the other players were doing.”
Keep It Jazz
Fagen and Becker were one of the very few songwriters who were able to successfully incorporate jazz harmonies within a pop framework. “I don’t think most people wanted to do that,” admitted Becker. “Very few people really. Jazz and jazz harmonies, especially in the 60s and 70s, for many people evoked the notion of the music that their parents danced to at the USO or something, or the band that played the theme music for the Ed Sullivan show and stuff like that.
“So, jazz harmony and jazz instrumentation had been co-opted into sort of less reputable forms of music that didn’t have any of the interesting, powerful elements of jazz that we love, such as improvisation and really driving rhythm sections and that kind of thing. So, most people just weren’t even interested in doing anything like that.
“And I think probably up until a certain point, we were the only people really and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to integrate. We experimented with a lot of writing and over a period of years, on how to integrate the different elements that were in our songs.
“In other words, how to integrate humour into the lyric of a song without them becoming novelty songs, and how to integrate jazz harmonies into rock band sounds, rock band combos and rock band rhythms and stuff like that without it sounding like half ass jazz or without it sounding like, without it evoking the sort of out of date, old generation.”
Their taste in adding those sophisticated jazz harmonies into their songwriting, saw the pair experiment with multiple chord voicings as a way to stamp their take on their music.
It was through this trial-and-error approach, that Becker and Fagen came up with the ‘Mu’ chord, which became an integral part of their signature sound. At its core, the ‘Mu’ chord is basically a major chord with an added 2nd, and due to the added 2nd being paired to the chord’s 3rd, it results in a mildly dissonant sounding chord.
“When we started writing, some of the songs that we wrote were sort of folk-ish types of songs,” explained Becker. “And so, we were looking for ways to make the triads sound better and richer and ways to add a little dissonance and colour to the chords. And that ‘Mu’ chord was one of the ways that we came up with doing that.”
Keep It Appropriate
While much of Steely Dan’s output has been noted for its production sheen, they made sure that polished veneer never replaced the music’s substance, of which was the primary goal for both Fagen and Becker. “First of all, the sense that from the beginning the substance of the song, is the substance of the song,” explained Becker cryptically.
“And that’s not always the case for everybody. I think a lot of pop music now is predicated on the idea that the style and the trappings are more important than the substance and that the substance shouldn’t interfere with the style and the trappings, which is just a completely different 180 degrees from the way that we look at it anyway.
“So, I think the thing is that the production has to be appropriate, has to advance the cause of the substance of the song. It has to add to the impact of the song rather than diminish it or obscure it or overwhelm it. There are times when you can create some interesting effects by having a very unlikely production combined with a particular song, but generally speaking, it’s very easy for things to be overproduced and over fussed with and over ornamented.”
Looking back over the group’s prolific 70s period, Becker admitted that both he and Fagen weren’t cut out to be touring musicians, preferring instead the studio environs where they thrived and could allow their creative spirit to run freely.
“In the 70s, we were completely wrapped up in the idea of writing songs and making records,” he expressed. “That’s what we really wanted to do, and the touring just seemed to detract from that; it burned up a lot of energy. All of our equipment was always broken and destroyed the flow of work as regards to writing and recording, so we stopped doing it.”
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