Reelin' in the Years - Catching Up With Steely Dan

by editor Michele Catalano

There’s something to be said about hiding who you are, musically. High school is rough in that respect. As I’ve written about before, fear of peer pressure kept me from expressing my love of disco to my friends. That same fear, as well as my defiant teenage brain, kept me from opening my mind to music that I might have liked but which fell outside of what I thought was acceptable music. I would eventually learn the error of my ways, but not without a few mishaps along the way. One that sticks out in my mind is the tale of the crush that got away and the band that came back to me. 

It’s 1978. I’m 16, at a party in somebody’s basement, a room decorated to resemble a cave. Black lights and black-light posters and a leather futon with matching leather chairs. Kids mill around, passing a smuggled bottle of vodka to pour into their sodas. A boy I like sits next to me; a boy who just moved here from Canada and has the exotic name of Jacques. Steely Dan plays, side one of Aja. The long-winded “Deacon Blues” has just started. (This is not my first foray into Steely Dan. Back in the day, I had a friend named Rikki, and we often sang “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” to her).

Jacques spends the rest of the song trying to find a subtle way to put his arm around me. He fidgets and fusses and moves a little closer, and, by the time he’s done the pretend “I’m tired” stretch and moves his arm behind my neck, “Deacon Blues” has ended and someone asks me to flip the record over. I’m hesitant to move, but I’m on record-player duty, the one job keeping me from having to socialize. I get up and flip Aja to side two. Jacques is gone when I get back, and Bobby Wilson is sitting on the futon where the boy I was crushing on used to be. I sigh wistfully and make my way upstairs as “Peg” drifts from the speakers. I run into Jacques at the top of the stairs. He brushes past me as if the arm thing never happened.

Jacques eventually goes back to his Canadian life, and I forget about him and Steely Dan. I go through musical phases. I’m into nascent punk rock, then I’m into new wave, then grunge, and later emo and indie. There’s no room in my life for the type of music Steely Dan plays. I see them as adult music, and, even though I’ve reached adulthood, I either don’t recognize that or I am ignoring it. Even when I do get into music that is similar to Steely Dan’s—Springsteen, for instance—I never venture toward Fagen and Becker, because they are for nerds and I have a reputation to uphold.

Even later, after graduation, after leaving all those judgmental people behind, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Steely Dan or any music in their vicinity (now known as yacht rock). It felt so grown up. Even though I took this approach well into adulthood, the fact is that I rarely felt like an adult. At least not one who would settle for what I thought of as soft rock.

Thirty-odd years later, I found myself in a “related artists” wormhole on Spotify and came upon Steely Dan. I hovered over the keyboard a moment, thinking, Do I want to do this? I was in my fifties. Maybe it was time to settle into a life of sitting on my porch rocker, yelling at neighborhood kids, and listening to the likes of Badfinger and Looking Glass, and, yes, Steely Dan. 

The timing felt right. I clicked on Aja and was transported to that basement party and the sweet awkwardness of Jacques. I listened to the whole album, then made my way backward through the band’s discography, hitting on all the songs that brought it all back: the football field at school, Pinball Palace, Field 6 at Eisenhower Park, the bus to Jones Beach.

I hadn’t listened to Steely Dan purposefully in a long time. But there I was, listening to them as if they were my favorite band, savoring the melodies and lyrics, reminiscing in time to the rhythm. Nostalgia makes you do weird things.

I didn’t just dabble in Steely Dan. I didn’t dip my toe in the water and run away. I stayed. I was in it for the long haul. Those first few weeks, I listened to nothing but Steely Dan—switching from album to album, listening to “essential”playlists, remembering various times in my life when the Dan was playing in the background. Family functions and fondue restaurants and bars with grungy jukeboxes. They were always there, always in the picture.

Look at me now. I own almost every album on either vinyl or CD. And it’s not just Steely Dan anymore. When I started to get back into the band, I wrapped it all up in listening to music of that nature. Yacht rock, if you will. I went deep.I listened to all the songs I eschewed as a “cool” teen, who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Christopher Cross. But here I was at what felt like an appropriate age to get into all of it. 

This music wasn’t meant for 14-year-old kids, the age I was when all of it was popular. It was meant for your later years. It was meant for people who had mortgages and coached Little League and wore sensible shoes. That was…me. I was finally at the right age to enjoy this music, and I went all in. Especially on Steely Dan. I ended up making a soft-rock playlist, and 12 of the 99 songs were theirs.

That night with Jacques was special in an unintended way. Maybe I didn’t get to kiss my Canadian crush, but that Steely Dan record locked itself into my memory bank, breaking free just when I needed something to soothe my soul. Thank you, Steely Dan, for making music that fulfills me, even if it took me so long to let that happen.

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