1972-Donald Fagen
Walter Becker
They're named after a dildo from the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch. Donald Fagen recalled to Mojo magazine: "We had to come up with a name in a hurry and Walter and I were both Burroughs fans, though he was not known at the time. It was an in-joke- who's going to know what Steely Dan was? And we figured that, like most of our bands in the past, it would fall apart after three months, so we didn't think much about it."
"The name had less to do with sex than a rebel spirit, a beat consciousness that we grew up with."
When they were all attending Bard College in the late '60s, Chevy Chase was a drummer in one of Fagen and Becker's early bands, Bad Rock Group.
Becker and Fagen met while they were students at Bard College in upstate New York. You can hear references to these times in their song "
My Old School."
They were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2001, four years after they were eligible.
Steely Dan split up in 1981 due to creative burnout and personal setbacks (Walter Becker was hit by a car in 1980 and faced a long recovery). They got back together in 1993 and toured with an 11-piece version of the band. In 2000 they released another album, Two Against Nature, which won the Grammy for Album Of The Year.
In 2001, they received honorary degrees from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where their music is a large part of the curriculum.
The name of their first album, Can't Buy A Thrill, came from their dismay with Los Angeles. Becker once said to Fagen, "You can't buy a thrill in California."
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, who played guitar on many of their records, is a self-taught expert on mobile missile defense systems. He wrote a paper on the topic in the early 1990s that caught the eye of conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill. He has subsequently testified before Congress and became a consultant to the Pentagon.
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Mark - Falls Church, VA
Some notable musicians who have played with Steely Dan include drummer Jeff Porcaro, who went on to form Toto. Michael McDonald was a keyboard player and did background vocals, and later, he and Skunk Baxter joined the Doobie Brothers. Mark Knopfler, from Dire Straits, plays guitar on "Time Out Of Mind." Legendary sax player Wayne Shorter even played with them.
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Joshua - Seattle, WA
Steely Dan released seven studio (non compilation) albums from 1972-1980. Over 100 session musicians contributed to their songs. Other than Donald Fagan and Walter Becker, the duo that is Steely Dan, the only musician who played on all seven albums was the late Victor Feldman, a British jazz legend who played with the Glenn Miller Orchestra when he was 13 years old.
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David - San Diego, CA
They entered the corporate music world in the Brill Building, where they briefly became members of Jay and The Americans and recorded some songs that group member
Kenny Vance produced. Kenny told Songfacts: "They were just two guys that had a band that were steeped in jazz and Duke Ellington. Becker always had a book with him, and, you know, drugs were around. They were different. But then as time went by, at some point I discovered the depth that was contained there, and I always believed that they were going to be huge."
Unlike most songwriting duos, Fagen and Becker worked together on the music and lyrics at the same time.
In 2017, Becker was diagnosed with esophageal cancer during a routine checkup. He fought it with intense chemotherapy, but the cancer proved very aggressive, and four months later it killed him. Only his closest friends and family knew of his condition.
They stopped touring in 1974 to focus on studio work, something The Beatles did the previous decade. This made them even more meticulous when recording and yielded some classic albums. When Fagen and Becker revived the group in 1993, they went in the opposite direction, touring but not recording. It wasn't until 2000 that they put out another album, and they did tour to support it.
