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Walter Becker and Donald Fagen: The Private Lives of Rock’s Most Secretive Duo
They were the most enigmatic partnership in rock: two sardonic New Yorkers who wrote the smoothest music of the seventies while cultivating an image of total mystery. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen gave few interviews, revealed less, and let the songs do the talking. But behind the shades and the smirks were two deeply private…
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Steely Dan’s “Katy Lied”: The Masterpiece Its Makers Could Never Listen To Again
It is one of the cruelest ironies in rock history. In 1975, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen set out to make the best-sounding record anyone had ever heard — and ended up with an album so sonically wounded that they could never bear to listen to it again. “Katy Lied” contains some of the finest…
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The Untold Story of Steely Dan: The Perfectionists Who Named Their Band After a Sex Toy
They were the unlikeliest rock stars of the 1970s: two sardonic, chain-smoking studio rats who hated touring, fired their own band, and treated hit records like math problems. Steely Dan made some of the slickest, most sophisticated music ever to reach the Top 10 — songs full of drug dealers, losers, and showbiz casualties, delivered…