Nightfly: The Life of Steely Dan's Donald Fagen

By Peter Jones

Donald Fagen will forever be associated with Steely Dan, the band he formed with Walter Becker and four other musicians in 1972.

The smooth, radio-friendly veneer of the duo's songs made Steely Dan internationally popular and famous in the 1970s, but the polish glossed over the underlying layers of anger, disappointment, sleaze, and often downright weirdness lurking just beneath the surface. The elliptical lyrics were—and continue to be—an endless source of fascination. What kind of person was capable of writing such songs?

Fagen has always kept his true self hidden behind walls of irony, confounding most journalistic enquiries with a mixture of obscurity and sarcasm. Nightfly cracks open the door to reveal the life behind the lyrics and traces Fagen's story from early family life in suburban New Jersey, to his first encounter with Walter Becker at Bard College, their long struggle for recognition as songwriters, and the formation of Steely Dan. The band's break-up in 1981, re-formation in 1993, and Fagen's parallel solo career are covered in detail.

Author Peter Jones seeks to explain the public's continuing fascination with Fagen's music, both in collaboration with Becker and as a solo artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9780897332576

Peter Jones

Peter Jones spent several years working as a consultant in credit card banking, fixing various issues in high-profile organisations. Peter’s outlook on life changed dramatically when Kate, his wife of 2 years and 3 months, passed away due to a brain haemorrhage. He left his job in finance to follow his passions. Peter lives just a few miles outside London. He doesn't own a large departmental store and probably isn't the same guy you've seen on Dragons' Den.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

DONALD FAGEN will forever be associated with Steely Dan, the band he formed with Walter Becker and four other musicians in 1972. Few have enjoyed so much success with such varied and sophisticated music. The smooth, radio-friendly veneer of the duo’s songs made Steely Dan internationally popular and famous in the 1970s, but it masked underlying layers of anger, disappointment, sleaze, and often downright weirdness. The elliptical lyrics were—and continue to be—an endless source of fascination, while the music defies categorization. In fact, from the earliest days, almost no one could describe it. Comparisons were attempted, whether with Frank Zappa or Poco, but these were always inadequate, sometimes verging on ludicrous. It is now clear that Fagen and Steely Dan were sui generis , their music painstakingly distilled from elements of rock, R&B, blues, soul, jazz, pop, country, funk, Brecht-Weill, Bach, and Stravinsky, along with the Henry Mancini faux-luxe TV themes that mesmerized Donald as a child. So thoroughly did he internalize these sources that his own music emerged as something entirely unique.

Of course he wasn’t the first American Jew to craft something original from the materials he found around him. Many others with family roots in Jewish Eastern Europe had trodden the same path, from Irving Berlin to Randy Newman. But perhaps the most influential of them all, for Donald Fagen, was Bob Dylan, who came from the folk tradition while also borrowing freely from blues and country music. Jewish composers working in the orchestral/modern classical area, from Darius Milhaud to Philip Glass, were similarly magpie-like in their search for their own style among the ethnic crosscurrents of American life. In doing so, they created the American music of the twentieth century. Donald Fagen has earned his place alongside them.

Much has been made of his jazz influences. In fact, for many listeners, Fagen’s music served as their gateway drug to jazz. After all, who wouldn’t want to investigate the source of all that gorgeous harmony, those complex and detailed arrangements? In an age of disappearing melody, [Fagen and Becker] seem more and more like the George and Ira Gershwin of the ’70s, wrote one reviewer at the time of Steely Dan’s first reunion tour. Ground zero for them was not Buddy Holly or Elvis but Duke Ellington. The songs are replete with references to Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, and Horace Silver, while modern jazz titans played on Steely Dan’s own recordings: Wayne Shorter (Aja), Phil Woods (Doctor Wu), Ray Brown (Razor Boy), Joe Sample (Black Cow and Aja), Pete Christlieb (Deacon Blues, FM), Michael Brecker (Glamour Profession) and most of all Victor Feldman (every Steely Dan album up to and including Gaucho). But Donald’s music was never mere jazz-rock—there’s far more to it than that.

Born in the predawn of modern pop, Donald was into jazz as a child, although he once claimed that his favorite song was Burt Bacharach’s In the Land of Make-Believe—a title that neatly describes the place where he spent most of his imaginative life. As a pianist and singer, Donald’s greatest influence was Ray Charles, right down to his body language at the keys. In the opinion of one journalist Donald wished for soul and got irony instead. But recent history was with him: many of the Jewish soul songwriters of the 1950s whom he admired had grown up in Black neighborhoods and had been influenced by the music of the streets.

This is a critical biography. In it I hope to explain the public’s continuing fascination with Donald’s music, both in collaboration with Walter Becker and as a solo artist. As well as the nine Steely Dan albums (seven from 1972 to 1980 and two after 2000), he has made four solo albums, with the hint of a fifth on the way at the time of this writing. Donald also wrote or had a hand in a number of compositions for films or for other artists. Toward the end of the 1970s, as the gaps between Steely Dan albums grew longer, unofficial collections of raw early demos emerged, along with a complete low-budget film soundtrack album. To this day, fans avidly collect outtakes from the official albums as well as songs from the pre-Dan era—the more obscure the better. Some fan sites list songs believed to exist that no one has yet heard, although in the course of writing this book I was lucky enough to hear several of them. Nightfly tells the intertwined story of Donald’s life and music and attempts to find out what made him capable of composing such extraordinary songs.

Those who obsess about Steely Dan, and about Donald Fagen as a solo artist, often speak of the moment when they realized that every tiny detail of the music and lyrics they were listening to had been crafted with a finesse virtually unknown in rock. However opaque the subject matter of the songs, the language was hip and literary and poetic, full of cultural allusions, while remaining as American as Elmore Leonard. The lyrics roamed far beyond the familiar topics of pop music (cars, girlfriends, macho posturing), revealing a deep knowledge of culture both high and low, books and movies, histories ancient and modern, science, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. More often than not, the songs were about anxiety, failure, loneliness, disappointment, aging, or death, rather than joy, celebration, and hope. And very little love was to be found in the work of Fagen and Becker. Sex and lust, certainly—often of an unwholesome kind. Just not much love.

But there was irony. Fagen and Becker were postmodernists before many people were even aware of the concept, including perhaps themselves. So it was irony, postmodernism’s defining characteristic, that became the defining characteristic of their songs, along with skepticism and such total distrust of ideology that some might call it nihilism. In person, they were constantly described as sarcastic and cynical. Donald was often accused of sneering. Whatever the truth of these characterizations, they all seem to miss the point. Certainly the work is often dark and abrasive, reflecting its New York roots. This darkness frequently mutated into humor, although the writers could rarely be bothered to share the joke. Their obscurantism made people uncomfortable, hence the accusations. Donald rarely felt the need to smile in public, or put people at their ease. In person, his distinctive appearance was rather forbidding. In 2000, when he was fifty-two, he was described thus by a Rolling Stone reporter: Fagen has black hair that has gone gray and a short black beard. He has a wide, square face, with a somber and obscurely melancholy expression; he looks like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Al Capone. He has a slight sneer. His upper lip looks like a curtain being raised.

He rarely did interviews unless he had something to promote and did not respond to interview requests for this book, despite several approaches (I’m a little apprehensive about just dealing with strangers, he said once). Many who had ideas for involving him in creative work were daunted by his elusiveness. If you’re really evasive and hard to get a hold of, a lot of these projects just fold on their own accord, he explained. Despite his reputation for being neither straightforward nor open, he has revealed rather more about himself than one might think, particularly in his entertaining 2013 memoir Eminent Hipsters. The air of mystery that surrounds him is due partly to his desire for privacy in his personal life, and partly to his public history of kidology and sarcasm—redoubled whenever he was with Walter Becker: the two of them egged each other on, although individually they were more amenable. Their fifty-year friendship had its ups and downs and included a break of several years during the 1980s. But most of the time the duo presented a united front to the outside world. After Walter’s death in 2017, Donald became the last remaining original member of Steely Dan.

As a child he was idealistic, but he soon developed a jaundiced view of the world. In his notes for The Nightfly he describes his youthful enthusiasms as fantasies. But the prevailing attitude in those years was the hope, perhaps even the expectation, that the world was on its way to becoming a better place, that there was such a thing as progress—both scientific and social. It was widely believed that democracy would spread around the world; that the planned economy would guarantee society’s ability to function even in difficult times; and, in some quarters, that socialism, as espoused by the sort of American science-fiction writers Donald admired, would ensure that no one got left behind. Spandex jackets for everyone, in fact. By 1963, when he was fifteen, he had reason to doubt the likelihood of this steady ascent to the sunlit uplands, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and later as demonstrations against the Vietnam War escalated, and as cities across the United States erupted in protests against racial discrimination and police brutality. Far from escaping the social problems engulfing the rest of the country, New York City, where the young Fagen lived from 1969 to 1972, was one of the worst casualties. But the counterculture proved equally disappointing, becoming so commodified that by the time of the Woodstock festival Donald lost faith in it altogether. A decade later the country was ready for Ronald Reagan’s own postmodern fantasy of a return to a simpler world.

These conflicts and crushed hopes found their way into the songs. Their milieu was the sleazy underbelly of American life in the 1970s, crawling with degenerates and losers. Lust, greed, envy, anger, hubris—all made regular appearances on the overheated, garishly lit stage of the duo’s imagination. Steely Dan were the closest thing in rock music to film noir. In noir, the protagonist’s cry of anguish was often prompted by the unspoken question Why is this happening to me?—to which the only possible answer was, For no reason. This nihilistic worldview explains the bafflement of the protagonists in Steely Dan songs and their inability to see their way out of their situation. Here, bad things happen to good people and bad people alike, just as they do in the real world.

The combination of upbeat music and downbeat attitudes confused the rock press, some of whom disparaged the songs as too bizarre or hippie muzak. Cynicism was another common accusation. But when Donald sings, his voice sounds not so much cynical or ironic as a little wounded—human, in other words, his vocal delivery characterized by one reviewer as the ache in the throat, the slight lisp … From The Nightfly onward, Donald turned away from the irony and obscurity of the Steely Dan records, although of course as a postmodernist he did so with tongue planted firmly in cheek. One interviewer suggested that during the 1970s Fagen had been consumed with feelings of disappointment, but that by the 1980s he had dealt with that and moved on to other things. Yeah, he responded, the other things being first and foremost Post-Irony. And I’m not talking about the New Sincerity, of course, but rather Post-Irony. Or perhaps it’s the Pseudo-New Sincerity, or New Pseudo-Sincerity. Or maybe it’s the Pseudo-Post-Irony. I don’t even know anymore, it’s hard to say. You know what? As soon as David Letterman hit the airwaves, it was really all over for irony.

And what of the audience? The stereotypical Dan fan may be described as an old White educated male, a fanatical collector of records and memorabilia, who is obsessed with the details of who played what solo on what make and model of guitar. This audience has aged along with Donald Fagen, to his evident displeasure. John Granatino, archivist at the online Steely Dan Reader, has pointed out that those who feel a strong identification with the losers and creeps who populate their songs are more likely to be square pegs in the round holes of our society. But you don’t need to be an outsider to enjoy the music, nor are critical faculties essential. Yes, there are hidden depths, but if you’re happy to paddle in the shallows, you can still enjoy it enormously. Nor is the audience entirely male. In early 1992, female subscribers to the fanzine Metal Leg were challenged to explain the appeal to women of Steely Dan, seemingly the most male of all rock bands. Roxie Lucas, one of those who responded, pointed out that unlike lots of other bands of the period, these songwriters were not afraid to express their own vulnerabilities, fears, mistakes, love affairs gone wrong, etc. She added, Even at their darkest and most raucous, a tenderness comes through, and always with a solid dose of humor. The music doesn’t only appeal to White people. YouTube reaction videos by young Black music fans give the impression that although most have never heard these songs, once they do, they dig them. Over the years the songs have been repeatedly ransacked by samplers—further proof of Steely Dan’s continuing appeal.

I first encountered Donald’s music in 1974, when my brother returned to London from a high school trip to New York with a stack of LPs under his arm. Most were dross, but among them was a copy of Steely Dan’s second album, Countdown to Ecstasy. Upon listening to those double-punch guitar chords on the intro to Bodhisattva, as the piano banged out its counter-rhythm, I could tell there was something pretty cool going on. Later, everyone seemed to own a copy of Pretzel Logic. My own interest evolved into obsession with Aja—a vast, unexplored ocean of music in microcosm. How lame and derivative my own attempts at songwriting now sounded (I’d been listening to the Flamin’ Groovies, who themselves were trying to sound like the Beatles circa 1965). I realized that if any great songs were to be written, Aja marked the new standard. Now there was a challenge …

Many years later, when Fagen and Becker reunited and announced their plan to tour as Steely Dan, a friend and I bought concert tickets. In August 1993 we got on a plane and flew from London to catch them at the Hartford Civic Center, Connecticut. After all, it had been nineteen years since their last tour. Who knew whether they would ever play live again? In New York during that same trip, we stumbled upon a thriving underground market in sacred Steely Dan relics: not merely copies of the unofficial fanzine Metal Leg, which had been appearing quarterly since 1989, but unsuspected bootleg albums and cassette tapes. I acquired outtakes from Katy Lied and Gaucho, including a muffled recording of their supposedly lost masterpiece The Second Arrangement. I was, in short, hooked.

1

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A NERD AND A SCHMENDRICK

IN APRIL 2020, in the depths of the worldwide coronavirus lockdown, Rolling Stone magazine asked some well-known musicians how they were coping without gigs. One of them was Donald Fagen, whose 2020 Earth After Hours Steely Dan tour had recently been canceled. Back came an email:

Yow! It’s the Nightfly here with a shout-out to all the fingerpoppin’ cats and kittys! What can I say? The Prez has a loose wig and it’s tragic. So dig the docs and hunker down in your hidey-holes until they say it’s cool to hit the downbeat. Check out some sounds! Stretch out your frame, and like that. Later, gate, ’cause I gotta go!

He was seventy-two at the time, but he’d lost none of the wit, frequently sarcastic, that he’d been unleashing on journalists for decades. His response to Rolling Stone’s inquiry would have baffled any readers under forty, but it echoed the voices he had first heard coming out of his radio when he was a child living in Passaic, New Jersey. Donald Jay Fagen was born there on January 10, 1948, in the first wave of the postwar baby boom. His sister, Susan, arrived six years later.

The Fagen household was full of music. And much as he always proclaimed his reluctance to sing, singing was in Donald’s blood. It came from his mother Elinor, who had performed as a child with a trio at the Ideal Hotel (later the Concord) in Parksville, New York, in the Catskills. Elinor’s mother Rose knew the owner. The area was so popular with Jewish families that it was known as the Borscht Belt, or the Jewish Alps. I loved my mother’s singing, recalled Donald. Every year from when she was 5 to 15 she’d go up there and sing for tips with her trio. Performing under the name Ellen Ross, Elinor’s career lasted until the age of sixteen, when stage fright put an end to it just as she was preparing to sing on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio show. (Her terror was understandable: this long-running talent spot was compered by the eponymous Edward Major Bowes, famed for his sometimes brutal treatment of contestants.) Thereafter, Ellie restricted herself to singing along with her record collection at home, and occasional performances at ladies’ club functions. But she had studied the techniques of professional singers, and understood the importance of phrasing in popular music, particularly back-phrasing, whereby the line is delivered just behind the beat. She listened constantly to Billie Holiday, Helen O’Connell, Sylvia Sims, and the Boswell Sisters. At home, she would sing standards by George Gershwin, Harry Warren, Burton Lane, and Harold Arlen. This was Donald’s introduction to the Great American Songbook, which, then as now, provided the bedrock of the jazz repertoire.

In 1955 his father Jerry bought a television set. The following year the small screen offered Donald a discouraging glimpse of the adult world. For some reason, Ed Sullivan decided to show the nation a six-minute British-made animated film called A Short Vision about the dropping of a nuclear bomb. Despite the crudeness of its execution, there was no mistaking the film’s horrific message, as the flesh melted from the faces of people and animals, turning them into skulls. The screen turned black, as the voice-over grimly intoned, And the flame died. The next day at school, all the kids were traumatized. Up until then, they had been assured that all they needed to do to stay safe in the event of a nuclear strike was duck and cover.

When Donald was eight, his life turned upside down. For reasons he could never quite fathom, his father moved the family a few miles up the road to suburban Fair Lawn. After a couple of years they relocated again to a bleak, half-finished housing development on Bedford Road in Kendall Park, not far from Princeton. Donald was furious: he was now forty-five miles from his extended family—the grandmothers, aunts, and many cousins with whom he spent most of his time. All the branches of his family had originally settled in the Garden State after arriving in the United States from Central and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. The Fagens, the Bushins, and the Browns were Jews for whom life in the Russian Empire had become intolerable. There, most Jewish families lived in shtetls, or small towns. For hundreds of years they suffered varying degrees of persecution, and more than two million fled, many of them to the United States.

After leaving the old country in 1906, Donald’s paternal grandfather Samuel Fagen ended up in Passaic, New Jersey, about thirteen miles west of Manhattan. Passaic was part of an urban sprawl that stretched all along the western side of the Hudson River, taking in Elizabeth, Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, and Hackensack. Samuel found work as a painter and decorator, and married Tile Buschin (later anglicized as Tillie Bushin) from Latvia. She had arrived in the United States on the Lusitania in 1910 with her parents and six brothers and sisters, via Liverpool, England. Samuel and Tillie had two sons, Jerome (Donald’s father) and David. Donald’s maternal grandparents were born in New Jersey, and lived in Howe Avenue, Passaic: Harry Rosenberg, whose ancestry was Austrian, had married the Russian-descended Rose Brown. They had three children—Howard, Shirley, and Donald’s mother Elinor.

Born in nearby Paterson, as a young man Jerome Fagen lived on Market Street, Passaic, where he restyled himself Joseph Jerry Fagen. He studied for his accounting degree at Rutgers University in Newark, after which he found work as a certified public accountant at M. Grossman & Son, a large accounting firm in New York City. He met Elinor while she was working in a milliner’s office, and they married in 1942. After the United States entered World War II, Jerry was drafted, got promoted to staff sergeant, and was stationed in Germany at the Nazi death camp Dachau for three months following its liberation in April 1945.

Those who fought in that war had experienced enough action—not to mention privation, pain, death, and horror—to last a lifetime. For most of them, the return to civilian life meant settling into a well-paid job that would become a lifelong career, on a salary that would finance a pleasant, middle-class lifestyle. For Donald, trauma was watching a scary cartoon on the Ed Sullivan Show, and privation meant no more family visits on Sundays to Rutt’s Hut, Passaic’s no-frills deep-fried hot dog restaurant out near the freeway. But Kendall Park wasn’t just a long way from Passaic, it was a different world: the ’burbs. Like the protagonist of Don’t Take Me Alive, on Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam album, Donald was a bookkeeper’s son, and later described his family as poor. Where his parents saw an enticing new future, young Donald saw only houses that all looked the same, marooned in a wasteland of mud, concrete, and a few sticks that might, in the fullness of time, become trees.

By the age of ten, a sense of alienation was creeping into his preadolescent mind, precipitated by shock at his parents’ poor judgment in choosing to live in a place like Kendall Park. The fact that his father had got himself a much better job did not seem to him to be worth all the upset of being uprooted from Passaic. He has described himself at the time as hyperaesthetic, which we might translate as oversensitive. At any rate, he began to withdraw into a world of his own, giving up traditional group activities like the Stamp Club, Little League baseball, and the Boy Scouts. Alienation wasn’t the only reason: his baseball career was cut short when he was prescribed bifocal lenses, and an extreme allergy to poison oak made camping with the Scouts in the great outdoors impossible for him. After that, when it came to physical activity, only table tennis and the backyard swimming pool held any attraction. He was a good swimmer, and after his swimming he would sit in the shade and read. He read unendingly, his father said. It was the genesis of Donald’s rich interior life, the period in which he started constructing elaborate defenses against his uncongenial surroundings, while fashioning a new inner landscape from his TV viewing, radio listening, and reading.

A 1958 TV appearance by Chuck Berry on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand gave Donald his first taste of rock and roll. Enthused by what he heard, he started spending his allowance on rhythm & blues singles, beginning with Chuck’s Reelin’ and Rockin’. He also dug the Everly Brothers, vocal groups like the Coasters and the Drifters, and the occasional Spike Jones comedy disc. Noting his interest, his parents rented a guitar for him, but it was poorly set up, with the strings too high above the fretboard, making it hard to play.

Big-screen noir movies may have been on the way out by the late 1950s, but their conventions continued to provide the television networks with a low-budget diet of sublimated sex and violence: The Naked City, Richard Diamond, M Squad, and best of all, Peter Gunn, with its cool, jazz-influenced Henry Mancini theme tune. For Donald, this was the beginning of a lifetime of appreciation for Teflon-coated film and TV music, deliciously fake jazz, a style he later dubbed anomie deluxe, with that space-age bachelor pad vibe that fitted perfectly with the suburbs in which he was now stranded. In fact, it was around then that jazz, both fake and real, started sounding better to him than pop and R&B. During these years, the raw authenticity of Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino was losing ground in the record charts to white-bread showbiz acts like Frankie Avalon and Pat Boone. Without a backward glance, Donald bequeathed all his pop records to his sister Susan.

He had been introduced to jazz by his cousin Barbara Cohn when he was ten or eleven. Glamorous, authentically hip cousin Barbara was eighteen, and a big jazz fan. She knew Thelonious Monk quite well and had even briefly dated Miles Davis. Donald remembered, We used to have this family celebration every year and we spent most of it in the basement listening to these records—records by Johnny Griffin, Wynton Kelly, and Hank Mobley. He developed a liking for big-band jazz, too, and persuaded his parents to take him to concerts by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Maynard Ferguson.

Now, when he came home from school, Donald would listen to Ed Beach’s afternoon show Just Jazz on WRVR, New York. On the air six days a week, the scholarly Beach would often devote an entire show to a single performer or ensemble, supplying detailed credits for every track he played. As he nestled under the covers at night, Donald would still be glued to the radio, especially Symphony Sid Torin, a late-night Jewish DJ on WADO, whose show often beamed live jazz from Birdland. Symphony Sid played all the latest hip sides, linking the tunes with a stream of beatnik lingo, as he kept his chops lubricated with a steady supply of booze and reefer. There were other voices, too: William B. Williams’s Make-Believe Ballroom, which featured jazz; Dan Morgenstern; Martin Williams; and Donald’s favorite, WEVD’s Mort Fega, who alongside the jazz would sometimes spin tracks by the hipster lunatic and performance artist Lord Buckley. Donald’s uncle Dave—his dad’s younger (and hipper) brother—introduced him to another broadcaster, Jean Shepherd, who would conduct all-night monologues on WOR, starting at 11:15 pm. Shepherd encouraged his listeners to send in stories they had found. Donald came across one in the local newspaper about a man who had gone around a brand-new shopping center, smashing all the windows with a Coke bottle. He sent it in to Shep, and Shep read it out on the air. Thrilled to be acknowledged by his hero, Donald ran downstairs to tell his parents, who were watching Bonanza on TV. They were mildly pleased for him, but they couldn’t understand why he was so excited—that for him connecting with Shep opened the door to a wider and cooler world that he wanted to be a part of. It’s no coincidence that the back of his first solo album, The Nightfly, depicts a small suburban house at night; the house is in darkness apart from a light still burning in one upstairs room. But his late-night radio obsession didn’t sit well with the dreary reality that he would have to get up for school the next morning, and lack of sleep began wreaking havoc on his grades.

Hearing Red Garland on Mort Fega’s radio show, he persuaded his mother to buy him Garland’s Soul Junction. He began collecting jazz records at the E. J. Korvette’s store, and as he got older he would frequent the Dayton record store on Eighth Street in Lower Manhattan. He subscribed to DownBeat magazine, the weekly jazz bible, and read the Saturday Review, but it was with the discovery of science fiction that his imagination really took flight. A Short Vision had led him to postapocalyptic fiction, and, as he pointed out later, the unfinished housing development we lived in then provided an excellent post-holocaust landscape. He began devouring sci-fi magazines and enrolled in the Science Fiction Book Club. Authors like C. M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Fredric Brown expanded his mind. Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! was his favorite, with its brutal antihero. [Bester] had a very cosmopolitan attitude, Donald told an interviewer. He was funny. He had a very postmodern sensibility. He had this distance from what was going on, which we incorporated into Steely Dan. Donald was smart enough to recognize that, at its best, the science-fiction genre was a vehicle for satire, often picking up on current social or technological trends and showing readers where those trends might end up. There was one story by Philip K. Dick that particularly resonated with him: The Father-Thing features an alien creature that takes up residence in a man’s body and proceeds to eat him from the inside. The victim continues to walk around and appear, on the surface, no different from the human he had once been. Only the son realizes what his father has become.

It was the cultural split between parents and children that defined the baby boom generation across the western world. Unlike their fathers, they had not fought in a war, and had no intention of doing so, as their protests against the Vietnam conflict showed. For the boomers, having plenty to eat and money to spare was a given. In Donald Fagen’s case, the split wasn’t terminal, but it was deep. Where the senior Fagens regarded TV dinners, polyester clothing, and wall-to-wall beige carpets as signs of progress, young Donny saw nothing but fakery and the death of what had once been real. His values had become different from theirs, as he sought what he considered to be authentic in the increasingly phony world he saw around him, just like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. To this day, he said in 1993, my parents’ values are still bound up with comfort and convenience. New Jersey bought early and heavily into the cars-andmalls culture. I was conscious, as I grew older, of the way my mother dressed and looked, and how her whole image became more and more plasticized as the ’50s wore on—the way her hair looked, and the change from cotton into various polymers. The way she stopped cooking and started buying frozen dinners. My parents essentially bought the whole trip.

Donald’s sense of nostalgia kicked in early, even before he started high school: he was already nostalgic for Passaic, nostalgic for authentic (i.e., Black) rock and roll and R&B, and no sooner had he got into jazz than he became nostalgic for the harmonically rich bop style that was even then giving way to modal and free-form jazz and Horace Silver’s distinctive brand of proto-funk.

His family’s Jewish heritage was another factor that made him feel self-conscious, different from others of his age, although his parents were not religious and only went to the synagogue to be sociable. I did have a bit of a Hebrew education, and the rabbi at the model home started teaching me conversational Hebrew, he recalled. Jerry Fagen helped establish the first synagogue in Kendall Park, the Congregation Beth Shalom, at which Donald was the first boy to be bar mitzvah’d in 1961 (and was the rabbi’s only student). But Jerry was anxious about his Jewishness, and wanted Donald to fit in with the WASPs. Even before his experiences in Nazi Germany, he remembered his own father Samuel’s paint store being torched by a gang of American anti-Semites. (Some time afterward Samuel went down to the basement, put a shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.) In an era when assimilation was preferred, Jerry felt that his son Donald looked too Jewish—far more Jewish, in fact, than either of his parents. As a result Fagen Sr. would march Fagen Jr. to the local barber-shop once a fortnight to be given a regulation flat-top. The haircut may have helped Donald fit in, but he looked no more Aryan than before. He was expected to emulate the American astronauts, modern equivalents to the frontiersmen of legend. But he didn’t feel conventionally Jewish either.

By now, he was attending South Brunswick High School, where he soon became known as eccentric, antisocial, even unfriendly. He described both himself and his father as emotionally stunted. But despite the generational clashes, it is clear that the Fagens wanted only the best for their children. It was common, he said, for Jewish women who had lived through the Depression to play the piano a little. In 1960 his grandmother bought one for the kids. It was a Baldwin Acrosonic spinet—a small upright model that didn’t take up much space, but produced a decent-enough sound for the price.

Susan began taking lessons, and before long Donald was also picking out tunes. The first one he learned, after hearing it on the radio, was Ernest Gold’s theme from Exodus, Otto Preminger’s film about the founding of the state of Israel. His parents took him for lessons at the Princeton New School of Music, but unlike Susan, he resisted formal training at the keys, which would have involved learning to sight-read. All he wanted to do was learn jazz tunes and play them like Red Garland, or Dave Brubeck, or Thelonious Monk, and he devoted himself to hour after hour of practice at home. Thelonious Monk was the alien in my bedroom, Donald once told an interviewer, contrasting his childhood with that of the creator of E.T., another Jewish child of the suburbs, Steven Spielberg. He liked the fact that Monk played like a gorilla—as he thought he himself did.

He was so immersed in music that nothing else mattered, his father said. We never stopped him, really, except when he played so late it was time to go to bed. We used to tell him, ‘Donald, please stop playing the piano. You’re keeping your sister awake.’ When he went to bed he had the radio in his room. Otherwise he was always quiet. Friendships with his peers, meanwhile, took a back seat. For a brief period he played baritone sax in the school’s marching band—an interest that lasted until the band’s director, music teacher Chauncey Chub Chatten, informed him that he would be expected to spend every Saturday at the school’s football games, marching up and down the field of play during halftime.

Despite the generational clash, the Fagen household was a liberal one. Elinor was a politically active Democrat, canvassing the neighborhood for Adlai Stevenson. Fortunately for Donald, there were family members who shared his enthusiasm for jazz and the culture that went with it. When he was twelve or thirteen, his cousins Mike and Jack began taking him into Manhattan by bus, there to be ushered into the presence of gods: Count Basie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus. Later, he would travel into the city by himself, hanging out at the Village Vanguard, Slug’s Bar, or the Café Au Go-Go, witnessing what turned out to be the declining years of jazz, as folk became the preferred music of the young. Once, when Donald was late boarding the AA train from Waverly Place back to the Port Authority terminal, he missed the 1:30 am bus home. It was the last one of the night, so he had to sleep on a bench. When he was fifteen, he hitch-hiked with Jack and Mike all the way to the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. He didn’t particularly enjoy the experience: What a nightmare: Sleeping on the cold wet beach, standing in line for tickets, sitting in the cheap seats in the rain watching Howard McGhee play the trumpet … It didn’t put him off jazz; on the contrary, he developed an interest in Duke Ellington, and bought a three-disk set of Duke’s recordings. This in turn piqued his curiosity about jazz arranging, so he enrolled on a course taught by the New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson; the other attendees were mostly housewives, in Donald’s words. Wilson played his rare 78rpm records, and Donald felt he was the only one