Word: fagen
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...Donald Fagen of Steely Dan was probably the best interview. I didn't talk to Gilbert Arenas [of the NBA's Washington Wizards] that much, but he was the greatest subject. Considering I talked to that guy for a total of 12 minutes, it was probably the easiest feature I ever wrote. Of anyone I ever interviewed, Bono loved the process the most - he actually laid down on a couch like he was in a psychiatrist's office and wanted me to ask questions where he could analyze his own iconography. The person who's consistently the best interview...
...gleaming skyline of New York, yet worlds removed from Manhattan magic. A place whose residents shiver in dour poverty, and whose most famous native sons and daughters had to leave town to make it big. The honor roll would include Joe Piscopo, Paul Rudd, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, three-time Oscar-winning producer Saul Zaentz, sitcom regulars Loretta Swit and Larry Storch, sports hysteric Dick Vitale...and, Be Kind Rewind tells us, the legendary pianist and composer Fats Waller...
Back in the primordial rock ooze of the late '70s, Steely Dan wanted the world to think it was more wanton even than its extravagantly wanton rock peers. Judging from their blithely cynical and mordantly libidinous 1970s songbook, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were guys who would wait until the Eagles checked out of the Chateau Marmont so they could rush in and snort what was left on Glenn Frey's coffee table. Then they would go to a bar and talk about hitting on high school girls...
...including Album of the Year), Steely Dan fully inhabits the role of rock's would-be Humberts, swinging through lite jazz riffs and dropping amber-encased phrases like "the big adios" while the girls ignore the come-ons. On tracks like the heartsick Things I Miss the Most--with Fagen yearning for the days of "Frying up my sad cuisine/Getting in bed and curling up with a girlie magazine"--the two are loners romanticizing lechery. On Blues Beach, the romance is replaced by a tropical bleakness: "I'm dying, freezing in the merciful rays/And it's the long sad Sunday...
...airy and chipper that when mixed with the lead weight of the lyrics, it induces a pleasant sense of numbness that, given a few drinks, might be mistaken for depth. Everything Must Go doesn't have the relentless catchiness of their late-'70s work, but Fagen and Becker do seem happy in their advancing misery. That's the immortality they share. --By Josh Tyrangiel