360°Sound recently spoke with Alex Pappademas, author of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas Press).
Formed in 1971 by Donald Fagen (vocals and keyboard) and Walter Becker (guitar and bass), Steely Dan melded complex jazz harmonies and time signatures into accessible and melodic rock music. Known for their sardonic lyrics and pristine production, Steely Dan notched 10 Billboard Top 40 hits, among them “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “My Old School,” and “Hey Nineteen.”
Steely Dan released seven albums during their first decade together, beginning with 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill and ending with 1980’s Gaucho. They reformed to tour in the ‘90s and eventually recorded two comeback albums, the Grammy-winning Two Against Nature and 2003’s Everything Must Go. Becker died of esophageal cancer in 2017. Fagen continues to tour as Steely Dan and will support The Eagles on “The Long Goodbye” farewell tour beginning in September.
The 240-page Quantum Criminals, beautifully illustrated by Joan LeMay, tells the story of Steely Dan through the many colorful characters in the songs. In this first installment of a two-part exclusive interview, Pappademas discusses the unique structure of the book, the task of analyzing Steely Dan’s notoriously cryptic lyrics, and more.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
360°Sound: It’s an exciting time to be a Steely Dan fan. In addition to your new book, the entire catalog is getting reissued on audiophile vinyl and SACD. Midnight Special performances from 1973 have surfaced. The daughters of engineer Roger Nichols released a tape of the legendary Gaucho outtake “The Second Arrangement.” And The Dan will be going on tour with The Eagles.
Alex Pappademas: I’m happy to be part of a deluge of stuff that Steely Dan fans can be excited about. For so long, there was such a finite amount of stuff. Only the albums and the Classic Albums documentary, and another two or three books. I’m happy that this is all happening. As a fan, it’s very exciting. As someone who’s obsessed with Steely Dan and the Eagles and the relationship between Steely Dan and the Eagles, I am pretty stoked about that double bill.
As for “The Second Arrangement,” I am such a fan of the crappy bootleg versions. There’s one in particular that I feel was always the superior one. That’s been my kind of hipster answer when people ask me what my favorite Steely Dan song is. But now, there are TikToks of people singing “The Second Arrangement” and things like that. It’s incredible to live in 2023 as a Steely Dan fan.
Tell us about the unique approach to Steely Dan you took with Quantum Criminals.
I had this started out on my end, and it would have been a slightly more traditional book in the sense that it didn’t have the visual element. And it didn’t have the character element when I was first thinking about it. It was going to be a bunch of short essays on all these different topics. Rather than trying to do a chronological narrative about them, it was going to be about the different themes and add up to a cohesive portrait of them. But it was going to be done in bits and pieces where you could jump around. It would be thematically organized. A lot of the stuff that I was planning to do ended up in the version that we ultimately did.
It took me forever because I didn’t really know what the overarching thing was that was gonna hold this together. I had all these things about Steely Dan I wanted to write about, like cultural transactions between white and Black culture and how [the group’s] perfectionism drove them and brought them to these great heights, and then kind of ruined them. I had all the Christmas ornaments in a box, but I didn’t have a tree to hang them on.
Joan LeMay, a mutual friend of mine and [American Music Series editor] Jessica Hopper, decided during COVID that she was going to paint every character from every Steely Dan song. She made a list of every named character, and it was like 260. Jessica and I found out about that and immediately got in touch with Joan. I was like, ‘That’s the best organizing principle for a Steely Dan book, to wrap it around characters.’ I think pound-for-pound Steely Dan created more proper-named characters in the songs than just about anybody. And these characters really seem to have a life off the page or outside of the song.
Joan and I figured out how to merge these two projects together. Once that happened, everything came really fast. It was a way to organize all of these thoughts. I think the paintings do something that I wouldn’t have necessarily been able to do in the text, which is bringing to life these weird individuals from the Steely Dan universe and giving them an inner life. They’re all looking at the camera with pride or shame or something like that. There’s this emotional dimension to it. The first couple of paintings that Joan did for the proposal stage were like the dandy of Gamma Chi [from “Hey Nineteen”] and the Squonk from “Any Major Dude Will Tell You.” I saw those and was like, “This is gonna be amazing. I can’t wait for people to see this.”
Steely Dan’s lyrics are often described as cryptic. Were you intimidated by the task of analyzing all those Dan songs?
The intimidating part wasn’t the analysis because I knew I wasn’t going to get it definitively right… and that there is no definitive answer to a lot of these things. There’s things that they’ve never explained. The intimidating part and the thing that I had to get over was that I’m never going to be as funny or as smart as Donald and Walter. That was the thing I tried to always remember. Both of these guys are smarter, and you can’t hope to compete with that.
I’ve been a music critic in my life and you’re always interpreting things. You have to be confident in your own interpretation of things irrespective of what the artist might make of what you’re reading into it. When there’s wild speculation in this book, I tried to identify it. I don’t want to be arrogant about my viewpoint necessarily. But I think there’s certain things that when they’re substantiable, I tried to substantiate them. When there are things that are “headcanon,” as they say on the internet, I try to identify it that way, too.
I have no way of knowing if the song “Gaucho” is about Walter. There’s no proof that it is, and I don’t pretend otherwise. But once I decided that, I couldn’t stop believing it. Hopefully, I have written about these things in a way that is not going to piss people off who have different interpretations. Hopefully, it’s clear you are reading an interpretation and not somebody who is claiming to have factually pinned it down. I also feel like that’s not that fun to read, ultimately.
What are some common themes in Steely Dan’s songs?
My friend Matt Fraction once said that all of their songs are about weird sex and heroin – one or the other in different proportions. I don’t think that that’s wrong. They were very observant writers who were surveying New York and California in the 1970s. And the way that the liberations of the ‘60s left people detached from one another and seeking something that they weren’t getting.
They were writing about drugs, and they were writing about relationships in a time when a lot of old certainties were falling away. They were writing about nostalgia, which is something that they felt very strongly, but also distrusted because they were cynical people at their hearts. They were writing from the only perspective they could, which was being these white cis male baby boomers who felt alienated by a rapidly changing world.
They use a lot of made-up characters to personify some of those feelings, but I think they were writing about themselves more than they let on. That might be the interpretive thing you have to buy [into] to get with what this book is trying to do. Donald and Walter discouraged any autobiographical reading, and they never gave straight answers to those kinds of questions in interviews. The more I listened to the songs, the more I felt like, “Oh, they’re talking about themselves.” And they’re talking to each other first and foremost. One of the reasons this music is so strange is that it’s not one individual trying to communicate with an audience. The first distancing device is that it’s Donald and Walter trying to make each other laugh in the studio, and we get to listen in on that conversation.
And for people who are not into Steely Dan, I just say to start with Aja, one of the best records ever made empirically. And if you like that, there’s a lot more where that came from. If you don’t like that, you probably just are not a Steely Dan person.
Check back with 360°Sound soon for the rest of this interview.
