2013 Steely Dan Interviews

Steely Dan on Making New Music: 'We've Been Talking'
Band kick off 53-date Mood Swings tour this weekend


By Andy Greene
July 18, 2013 11:40 AM ET

Interviewing Steely Dan is no easy task. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen turned messing with journalists into an art form back in the Seventies. Rolling Stone checked in with Becker and Fagen during the final days of rehearsal for their upcoming 53-date Mood Swings American tour. It kicks off on July 19th in Atlantic City and runs through October 8th in New York. Select shows will include complete performances of Aja, Gaucho and The Royal Scam.

We spoke with Fagen first, and he lulled us into a false sense of security by casually answering our questions in a relatively straightforward manner. A couple of hours later, Becker called. He was a little less cooperative, though equally sardonic. The pair talked about choosing songs for this tour, the possibility of a new Steely Dan record, their aging fan base, what songs they're sick of playing and many other topics.
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Read the full interview HERE in Rolling Stone.

And here's one from Scene HERE.

Awesome Donald Fagen Interview from 2006 about His Bard Days

Back to Annadale
The origins of Steely Dan -- Donald Fagen returns to campus and revisits the origin of his old grudge
By Rob Brunner on Mar 17, 2006

On Halloween 1967, a party is raging inside Ward Manor, an Elizabethan-style mansion-turned-dorm at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. On a small stage set up in the corner of the common room, a band called the Leather Canary tears through the Rolling Stones' ''Dandelion,'' Moby Grape's ''Hey Grandma,'' and Willie Dixon's ''Spoonful,'' along with a few recently penned originals. It's a typical late-'60s student shindig — most of the audience is tripping on acid — but it's hardly an ordinary band. Behind the drums is Chevy Chase, familiar around campus as a gifted musician and good-natured goofball who's been known to drop his pants after losing late-night games of ''dare'' poker. Just in front of him is a long-haired muso named Walter Becker, one of the school's most accomplished guitarists. And the shy singer behind the electric piano? That's Don Fagen, decked out in a leather jacket with feathers attached to it (hence the band's name). Just a few years later, Chase will find fame as one of the greatest comedians of his generation. Fagen and Becker, meanwhile, will evolve into Steely Dan, score huge hits with songs like ''Rikki Don't Lose That Number'' and ''Reelin' in the Years,'' and create several of the most beloved and enduring albums of the 1970s. And in 1973, on their second LP, they will record ''My Old School,'' an angry kiss-off that, for reasons that have never been entirely clear, takes a very public swipe at Bard. ''California tumbles into the sea/That'll be the day I go back to Annandale,'' Fagen famously sings. ''I'm never going back to my old school.'' You can practically hear him sneer.

Almost four decades after that Halloween gig, Donald Fagen is back at Ward Manor, gazing around the very same common room. In many ways, this quiet lounge — its ornate wood-paneled walls and elaborately plastered ceiling unchanged after all these years — is where Steely Dan sputtered to life. Fagen and Becker both lived here, and they wrote their first, now-forgotten songs together on an old piano that disappeared from the corner years ago.
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Read the whole interview in Entertainment Weekly HERE.

Great Interview with Bass Guitar Master Anthony Jackson

Conducted by drummer Cliff Almond that he posted in 2007.

Studio Bass Legend Carol Kaye Multi-Part Video Interview 2013

A great series of interviews with Carol Kaye produced by Snapshots Music:

Illustrated PBS Interview with Maurice Sendak

Just touching and lovely:

Scorsese on Taxi Driver

Watched this film again recently and really appreciate what a great film it is. Martin Scorsese has some great insights in this interview:







"Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere...in bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man... "

Donald Fagan talks about Steely Dan's "Peg"

Storycorps: Germans in the Woods

StoryCorps is a wonderful oral history project which enables ordinary citizens to make oral history recordings about their lives. This one was set to cartoon art.

Gail Dines Book “Pornland” and How Pornography Destroys Intimacy and Hijacks Sexuality

I saw a link to this interview on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. Gail Dines is professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College and an expert on pornography. Dines' book Pornland looks at the effects of contemporary pornography on society. It's a pretty sobering assessment and an interesting interview. An interview excerpt:

PULSE

In the preface of your book, you share a personal story about a conversation you had with your son over pornography. You write, “I said [to him] that should he decide to use porn, that he was going to hand over his sexuality—a sexuality that he had yet to grow into, that made sense for who he was and who he was going to be—to someone else.” How and why do boys and young men give their power away to pornography? What kind of power does pornography have in shaping boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?


Boys and men don’t realize the power they’re giving away to pornography. They don’t understand the power it has to shape who they are, their sexuality, and their sexual identity. In this culture, we think of pornography as a joke or something to laugh about. We don’t take it seriously as a source of information that has the ability and power to impact on the way we think about the world. Most boys and men go to pornography for an ejaculation; they come away with a lot more. I don’t think they’re quite aware of it.

Pornography, like all images, tells stories about the world. It tells stories about women, men, sexuality, and intimacy. In pornography, intimacy is something to be avoided, and—as I say in the book—“In pornography nobody makes love. They all make hate.” The man makes hate to the woman’s body. It’s about the destruction of intimacy.

Is it true that what most boys and men see in current trends of pornography are things that they expect in sex? How did that happen, and how is it impacting on boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?

Well, a lot of people don’t know what pornography is. The first thing I do in the book is very purposefully describe it in detail. I know that for many people it’s going to be hard to read. I understand that. But if you’re really going to understand what I’m saying and why I’m saying it, then you have to understand the material I’m talking about. A lot of older men and women think I’m talking about Playboy from 15 years ago: a centerfold or a woman with no clothes on smiling in a cornfield. They think, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, that was bad enough in the way it objectified women, but we’re on a whole new level now with this kind of imagery.

How it got to this point is the Internet. It made it more accessible, affordable, and anonymous. You’re seeing a massive rise in use, and the users are getting younger and younger. Children who are 11½ years old are now looking at pornography because it comes straight into the home. There’s no limit on how much you can access. It used to be you had to steal father’s Playboy or Penthouse. Use was limited to how much you could actually pilfer. Today it is unlimited.

So what happens is that desensitization sets in that much quicker and that much earlier. In order to keep the consumer base going, the pornographers have to keep upping the ante. They make it more violent, body-punishing, or abusive as a way to keep men interested. When you think about it, if you’re exposed to it at age 11 or 12, you’re jaded by 20. You’re certainly jaded by 30. Pornography bleeds sex dry of intimacy, emotions, and connection. Once you do that, then there’s not much left. It becomes boring and mechanical. So you have to keep feeding newer and newer ideas just to keep [the audience] interested.

You describe Gonzo porn as “body-punishing sex.” Why is it body-punishing, why is it prevalent today, and what do people need to know about it?

It’s body-punishing because the male performers pound away at a woman’s body. You often see three men orally, vaginally, and anally penetrate her over and over again for 20 minutes or more, and these are often Viagra-fortified penises, so they stay hard much longer. A woman’s body has limits. All of ours do. What you see in Gonzo porn is a woman’s anus that is red and sore and a swollen vagina. All of these things happen because of the way a woman’s body is treated. Even the pornography industry says that Gonzo is very demanding and potentially dangerous for women. If the industry is saying it, then there’s certainly a problem.

What I’ve found with my interviews with men is the more they watch, the more they want porn sex, because they become habituated to that kind of industrial-strength sex. Once you become habituated to that, anything else looks boring or uninteresting. What I find is that some men lose interest in their partners altogether and use more pornography. Other men nag and cajole their girlfriends to perform porn sex, or they use prostitutes because that’s who they think they can play this porn sex out on.

Remember that you are not just reading or looking at porn. You’re actively masturbating and having an orgasm to it. It has a very visceral response in the body. This is one of the reasons it is so powerful.

How/why does pornography misuse and abuse the concepts of sex and how/why does pornography normalize the idea that pain is pleasure?

Well, it’s because of the way the woman’s body is treated. In pornography, no matter what you do to her, no matter how much you physically or verbally abuse this woman, she loves it. She can’t get enough. What I find fascinating and upsetting at the same time is…

Men believe that!

… That’s right. They believe it. I’ve had men argue with me that they believe women like it. So when I say to them, “What’s your evidence? Have you seen any empirical studies? Have you interviewed these women?” No, of course they haven’t. They’re using the text as their evidence because she’s saying “I love it! Give it to me harder!,” when of course she has no choice. First of all, she wants to get paid. She has to say that, and if she wants to continue working in pornography, she has no choice.

Read the entire interview HERE.

Donald Fagan interview

At the Gothamist.

an excerpt from the middle of the interview with Steely Dan member and solo artist Donald Fagan:

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Do you have any theories about what’s made your collaboration with Walter [Becker] so fruitful? We share a lot of the same interests. We met at Bard College in the late ‘60s and we were both jazz and blues fans as kids, which was kind of unusual at the time; I guess it still is. At the time there were a lot of different kinds of music and it was all novel at the time; soul music was basically invented when we were in high school and that grabbed our attention. And we just combined all those things into the kind of music that we like.

On the other hand, we were both also interested in literature. At the time, I guess we were of the generation that began what they used to call black humor, which they now just call humor. It was a kind of dark humor that was typical of the upcoming writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Bruce Jay Friedman and, on a more sophisticated level, Vladimir Nabokov, who was a big influence. We were both fans of those people and I guess our world view was kind of shaped by the subculture which we were a part of. Now the whole world sees everything the way we did back then, but at the time, coming out of the conformist ‘50s and so on, it was sort of unusual, I guess. But it’s not anymore.

There was a long period where Steely Dan existed as just a studio band and the impression was that you didn’t like playing live. I guess that’s changed? For a long time we had been trying to get a band together. And we finally got a record contract still without having a band, really. So we got together a bunch of guys we knew who were competent but we had never spent any time together. And when we went out on the road various problems developed. They were all very enthusiastic and had a lot of energy and all that and the band had all that going for it, but it wasn’t exactly what we had in mind when we dreamed of starting a band. So after a couple albums we decided to let everyone go and employ studio musicians to try to realize what we had in mind. And that made it difficult to tour because studio musicians for the most part didn’t want to go out on the road. And we ended up just making records.

The first couple nights at the Beacon will be opened by Bill Charlap. Yeah, rather than get someone we don’t really know – especially since we don’t know too much about popular music anymore anyway – we’re taking it as a great opportunity to have some jazz musicians come on and open. Bill played with us in the studio a couple times and he’s going to open. And we have the Sam Yahel Organ Trio opening for us in the south and a few other places. There are some other jazz artists opening on the west coast too. I think it’s good; a lot of people over the years told me they started listening to jazz because they starting hearing some jazz artists soloing on our records. So I think it’s a good thing to do.

My older brother is one of the many fans always hoping to hear Dr. Wu live. Why has that become such a rarity? We tried it out in sound check a couple times last year and it sounded okay. It’s mainly that I don’t like the way it feels on stage. I think a lot of those songs have aged really well and aren’t dated at all. And if the words still seem relevant in some way or can be recast to make some kind of sense, we rearrange it – if the music seems dated. That tune feels dated to me and it’s difficult for me to sing if I feel, you know, that it’s not… There’s something about the curve of the song that doesn’t work dramatically on stage for me.

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Read the full interview HERE.

Gary Giddins on the Future of Jazz

another great interview clip from Bigthink.com

What's Next for jazz?

Gary Giddins: Well, nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Fusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going.

But I would say this. I don't think we're going to be seeing those kinds of distinct and discrete movements like Swing, Bop, and Fusion. I think now, it's a question of individuals—one thing that is important to remember is that in the early years of jazz, a lot of major musicians, like Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman, had college educations and degrees and all of that.

But a lot of the great figures, like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, did not. I mean, Armstrong didn't even go through high school. Hundreds, if not thousands, of major figures learned on the bandstand, that was their apprenticeship.

Today, the apprenticeship of musicians is in the college orchestra. I mean, you're just not going to meet a musician who hasn't got a least a BA and probably an MA, and hasn’t been to a music school and hasn't had “Giant Steps” and a homework assignment. So, it's very different.

So, because they have this historical perspective, they aren't necessarily just coming out of whatever their generation is into, and also because they are growing up and they don't have the same prejudices against pop music that certain generations had, they can use that.

So, today's musicians, who maybe grew up with hip-hop, may use hip-hop beats in a way that if you're not looking for them, then you won't even hear it. But it's there, it's informing the way they think of rhythm.

And they may use things that they picked up from Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie that isn't particularly obvious, it's not a homage, it's not a matter of playing “Conna Homa” or “Sophisticated Lady,” it's just voicings or it's some idea that they picked up.

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Read the full transcript or watch the video HERE at Bigthink.

Interview with author of important new biography on Thelonius Monk

The Atlantic

The Secret Life of Thelonious Monk
By Douglas Gorney

Free Press
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley is the first biography to put the idiosyncratic music and eccentric behavior of this jazz legend into factual context. With unprecedented access to Monk's family and records, Kelley dispels many of the myths around the eccentric pianist and the psychiatric, legal, and professional challenges he faced before he died in 1982. Through it all, he renders Monk's world in rich detail, from hardscrabble North Carolina roots to the demanding and uncertain life of the working jazz musician. Kelley, on sabbatical from the University of Southern California, spoke to me from Oxford University, where he is the Harmsworth Professor of American History. You write about Thelonious Monk getting up from the piano and dancing around in circles on stage, falling asleep at the keyboard, sporting strange hats, staring off into space and wandering out of nightclubs during gigs. On eccentricity alone, I can see why he'd be a good subject for a book. But what were you really after?

For me, Monk had been an obsession—aesthetically and culturally—pretty much from the moment I was introduced to his music as a teenage wannabe jazz piano player. But when the subject of Thelonious Monk comes up, the eccentricities are what people talk about first, as you just did. Descriptions of his music become conflated with descriptions of his behavior, onstage and off. I wanted to disentangle those things, understand who Thelonious Monk was as a human being, and who he was as an artist.

What did you find when you teased them apart?

I won't lie to you—when I went into this project, I didn't know I would find what I ended up finding. I was surprised by the depth of Monk's musical education. I was surprised by the way he suffered, financially, as an artist—even after he became the one of the most recognizable faces in jazz and was on the cover of national magazines, he just wasn't making much money. I was surprised by his deep commitment to his family and his community. It was the mundane things that I found most fascinating, not the outlandish, eccentric character we usually associate with Monk. As a consequence, I ended up writing a very different book than what I thought I would write.

See web-only content:
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/03/the-secret-life-of-thelonious-monk/38128/
This was one of the most assiduously researched biographies I have ever read. I have a feeling that if I asked you, "What did Monk have for lunch on August 12, 1958," you could have told me—

[laughs] Almost...

Did you think that you'd get as deeply immersed in Monk's world as you did? It took you 14 years to write this book.

Well, of those 14 years, a good six was spent trying to convince the Monk family to give me access to them. Once Thelonious Monk, Jr. let me in, though, I suddenly had unprecedented access—not just papers, but family members who had never talked to anyone before. Nellie, Monk's wife, had never granted interviews until I came along.

Once that happened, I wanted to approach this project as a historian—meaning the more you find out, the more you have to look up. Too many biographies of jazz musicians are written by critics using liner notes from albums and articles and interviews in the jazz press, and then filling in the rest with their own commentary.

To tell Monk's story and the story of the people who shaped his world, I was uncovering some of the most obscure individuals, people in the jazz world we know nothing about now. And what I found was that so much of what we think we know about Monk's life is just wrong. It was so hard to figure out the most basic things—in fact, I'm still finding mistakes in the book that I'm correcting for the paperback.

So what else has jazz history had wrong? In what other ways did you find the real Monk different from the image we have of him?

With jazz musicians, issues and assumptions about of drug use always come up—particularly in Monk's case because he was...odd. So odd, in fact, that the question of mental illness always looms large when we think of him. But with access to medical records and to his family, I got a sense of a man who suffered more from prescription drugs and bad diagnosis than he did from illicit drugs and bipolar disorder. He received very bad medical treatment, bad advice and bad prescriptions for a very long time. The impact that had on his ability to function shocked me.

I was also struck by the role of his wife, Nellie. In films of Monk, we get an image of Nellie as the loyal helpmate—there's some truth to that, she was the person most responsible for keeping him together. But I really came to see her as a fully realized human being with her own goals and dreams, desires and frustrations, as someone who suffered quite a bit. One of the things my book tries to do is look at the so-called male genius in the context of his family...to understand how important his spouse was, his partner, in the realization of that genius.

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Read the entire post HERE.

Interview with UCLA Ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger

Great interview with ethnomusicologist Tony Seeger, at Artistshousemusic. many clips, check them out HERE.

Interview with Ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice

A nice interview about a wide variety of subjects with UCLA ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice. See the menu of interview clips HERE.

Joseph Kwame Degbor StoryCorps Interview by Stephanie Boegeman

Much thanks to Stephanie Boegeman for putting up this interview for everyone to access. Stephanie made this in 2006 as an undergraduate student in an impromptu manner when the StoryCorps oral history project visited her campus. Though she had never conducted an interview before, she utilized StoryCorp's audio equipment to talk to Kwame about a culture and life. For those who knew Kwame, it is a precious thing to be able to hear his voice with such clarity. You can listen HERE.