It’s February 21, 2001, and the new millennium is barely underway. Stevie Wonder and Bette Midler stand at a microphone before the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and an ocean of the world’s best/highest-paid musicians, and announce that the Grammy Award for Album of the Year goes to... Steely Dan?
Bad enough that the rock press (and millions of record buyers) were rooting for Eminem, and would immediately decry the Grammy as “stolen!” The win was an uncouth burp of the universe; Steely Dan hadn’t put an album out in 20 years, and Two Against Nature, while every bit as brilliant and pristine as their previous albums, didn’t even strike the band’s legions of long-haul faithful as any better than what had come before.
Adding insult to injury, they also won Best Pop Vocal Album, over Madonna, Britney Spears, and ‘N Sync – and Best Pop Vocal Performance for the track “Cousin Dupree”, a song about incestuous lechery. These three wins brought Steely Dan’s career Grammy total to... three.
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker saunter to the stage, looking more like wandering associate philosophy professors from Berkeley whose mothers always let them dress themselves than the unparalleled rock legends that they are. Their nonchalance is palpable; they project benign patience in the face of having to get up out of their seats as they politely accept the awards.
“Thanks very much,” Fagan politely says. “We’ve been around a long time. It’s nice to get one of these.”
U2 manages to tie the Dan with three Grammies of their own, which cools the righteous indignation to some degree, but Fagen and Becker remain awkwardly but indifferently present, even in this moment what they’ve always: outsiders who have no interest whatsoever in being insiders.
This remains true a month later at the Waldorf Astoria, as they are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which they have historically mocked.
“Everything we’ve had to say about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame we’ve said on our website,” Becker says from the podium, “so I’d just like to open the floor to questions.”
Fagen and Becker had launched Steely Dan almost exactly 30 years earlier, in 1971 – the year I discovered rock music, channeled through a rural Indiana school bus from WLS-Chicago, the greatest rock station in the Midwest (then or now). Their single “Do It Again”, from the debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill, was the first record I ever bought.2
They would generate seven albums from 1972 to 1980 – my teenage years – brilliant works, from Pretzel Logic to The Royal Scam, including two unchallenged masterpieces – Aja (1977) and Gaucho (1980). There would then be a two-decade hiatus, as they wisely sat out the Eighties and Nineties.
The Dan had an eight-year recording career, then, before calling it quits. Like the Beatles before them (who had broken up just the year before they had started), they had abandoned the road and taken up permanent residence in the studio halfway through.
The result was a parade of flawless albums – absolutely perfect albums, compositionally and sonically, a potpourri of jazz-tinged light rock and pop with an unapologetically sardonic lilt and a downright unhinged enthusiasm for irony, featuring an endless rotation of the very best guest players and session masters rock had to offer. Not a single album had any filler tracks whatsoever; every Steely Dan song ever released is a polished gem.
It’s arguable, then, that the 2001 Grammy wins were retro recognition; but even if so, the chosen moment was itself a glaring instance of sardonic irony.
Why are we talking about Steely Dan in a book about millennial rock, to which they contributed not a thing?
It will become important later on...
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