Mr. Steely Dan

 A while back, I wrote about Quantum Criminals, a book describing the recurring characters, or rather archetypes, in the music of Steely Dan. Hmm... I think we're overdue for a new pair of anthologies built around the Dan. Crimson Gate, take a memo...

Lately, I'm reading The Nightfly by Peter Jones, his biography of Donald Fagen. And once again, the "character" of Steely Dan emerges. Only he's directly identified this time as both Fagen and partner, the late Walter Becker. "Mr. Steely Dan" is a frequent name for the unnamed narrator in Fagen and Becker's tunes. He's the survivor of an apocalypse in "King of the World" and a ghost in "Deacon Blues" and a man with a midlife crisis trying to pick up a a couple of young women in "Babylon Sisters."

Who is Mr. Steely Dan?  Like all Steely Dan characters, he's a loser, one of the ramblers and gamblers that inhabit the band's catalog. Sometimes, he's in a bad relationship with a woman, sometimes an other woman, sometimes a woman whose betraying him. Mr. Steely Dan is looking for the next score. Perhaps most disturbing, yet usually unsuccessfully, Mr. Steely Dan likes young girls. Not Lolita young, though Becker and Fagen were fans of Nabakov. 

But when it appears in their lyrics, Mr. Steely Dan becomes that most noir of all characters, one who has almost no self-awareness. One might say what about the duo behind Steely Dan? Having just read Fagen's biography, Fagen and Becker had long-term relationships with either someone they knew from Bard College (despite never going back to their old school) or fellow musicians or artists. Post #metoo, they likely would have toned down that aspect a bit, but even with so many of the lyrics being autobiographical ("Ricki Don't Lose My Number" anyone?), they were still works of fiction. I seriously doubt George Lucas considered choking an underling or wanted to slice Francis Ford Coppola with a sword, laser or otherwise. Neither do I believe Donald Fagen was showing films in the den like Mr. LaPage.