To recognize and celebrate the 45th anniversary of Steely Dan’s seminal sixth studio album, Aja, we interviewed Don Breithaupt, author of the 33 1/3 book on the record (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007). Released on Sept. 23, 1977 by ABC Records, Aja was the band’s first to go platinum, spawning the hit singles “Peg,” “Deacon Blues,” and “Josie.” The album won the Grammy for Best Engineered Recording (Non-Classical) and has long been used as a hifi test recording due to its pristine production and wide dynamic range.
An Emmy-winning singer-songwriter and pianist, Breithaupt brought his vast musical knowledge to the book’s analysis of Steely Dan’s songwriting and jazzy chord progressions. [We first spoke with Breithaupt in August about the new LP from his band Monkey House.] In this interview, Breithaupt discusses what he learned about Aja from interviewing frontman Donald Fagen, the mission to find a fitting guitar solo for “Peg,” and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
360°Sound: I imagine you’ve listened to Aja hundreds and hundreds of times. Does the album continue to reveal things or evolve for you?
Don Breithaupt: I think your experience of music evolves naturally as you go through different periods of your life. I have to say in the case of Aja, because I wrote the book on it, I really looked under the hood – chord by chord, rhythm by rhythm, word by word. I would say in terms of subtleties that I might have missed, there’s probably not much left for me to take note of. But that doesn’t mean that the album does not thrill me every time.
There’s always a little echo of that first time I heard it when I was in 12th grade, and it just blew my mind. It was ’77 and I had just started my very first job at a record store. It was a Tuesday, and I was unpacking boxes that had come in. I cracked one of them open and there was the new Steely Dan album. By then, I was already a gigantic Steely Dan fan. I don’t think I took that record off my turntable, at home or the store, for like three months.
How was Donald Fagen as an interview subject?
First of all, he’s not an easy interview to get. I had to pummel [music mogul] Irving Azoff’s office for months with requests and descriptions of what I wanted to talk to Fagen about. Finally, I convinced the guy I was talking to that I wasn’t going to ask a bunch of dumbass introductory-level questions. I’m not going to ask him how he met [Steely Dan co-founder and guitarist] Walter [Becker] or ‘Do they write the words or the music first?’ All those know-nothing kinds of questions.
Finally, word came back that Fagen was willing to sit with me for an hour. Steely Dan, particularly when the two of them were together, have been kind of a prickly interview over the years. They would stonewall people or make up fake information. One time, they dragged a Rolling Stone reporter into a session when they were making Gaucho, and all they did was work on some background vocal delay settings the entire day. I was glad that my experience of Fagen was utterly unlike that.
He was super welcoming. He was very effusive and nice. We quickly got into the weeds on Aja. Once he realized that I was a musician capable of talking about the music in technical terms, I think he relaxed, and we ended up talking for about three hours. He was cracking jokes and sharing a lot of information that I had never seen or heard anywhere. I guess a lot of that is because no one had asked him before about specific chord progressions and horn charts, or how they related to specific musicians and what the chain of command was in the control room – all that specific production and songwriter type stuff that interviews don’t get into.
To the non-musician general reader, how would you explain how Steely Dan incorporated jazz and standards in a way that other rock bands did not?
It’s an interesting topic because there was this strange animal called jazz-rock going on in the early and mid-‘70s. That label got applied from everything to Weather Report and Return to Forever to Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears, but really that’s a whole different species from the Steely Dan thing. Steely Dan were writing pop and/or rhythm & blues type songs with strong choruses at short, easy-to-digest lengths. But they were increasingly, album-by-album, using the vocabulary of jazz with chord changes specific to jazz and pre-dating anything to do with rock ‘n roll. They would demonstrate a knowledge of everything in the Great American Songbook as well as peak ‘50s jazz like Miles Davis, Oliver Nelson, and Bill Evans. They were allowing themselves to use those colors in a pop context, which nobody else really was.
When they started out [with their 1972 debut Can’t Buy A Thrill], they were less that. With each album, they got more and more into [jazz], so it wasn’t like before Aja they flipped some switch and all of a sudden decided to do this jazz-influenced stuff. They started to do it on Katy Lied pretty prominently and more on Royal Scam. Although you hear the evolution from record to record, I feel like on Aja, they dug deeper, they allowed themselves to do some longer songs. They opened up the soloing, like in the title song you’ve got that long Steve Gadd drum solo and [saxophonist] Wayne Shorter taking two big chunks.
They were not trying to sugarcoat it or worrying about it being palatable, because by then, they had a large dependable audience. They took advantage of the fact they knew people were listening and they knew the label would fund whatever they wanted to do. So why wouldn’t they swing for the fences and try to make the best record they’d ever made? Which I really think they did. After one spin of that album, I just thought it was even better than what they’d done before in a bunch of different categories – like groove, arrangement, lyrics, solos, and production. It seemed like everything just went up a notch on that album.
Steely Dan have a reputation for being perfectionists in the studio. Tell us about the challenge they had in finding the right guitar solo for “Peg.”
First of all, people always throw the word ‘perfectionism’ around with Steely Dan, and I think that sort of has a negative connotation to it as though they were getting scientific and vacuuming stuff out to the point that it was this airless, personality-less landscape, which is exactly the opposite of what they ended up with. There’s lots of free-wheeling soloing. The players are putting their personalities into those records. It’s not like they were Alfred Hitchcock and already had the whole thing written out on a storyboard.
I do think they enjoyed making records. And as much as you do hear stories about Walter Becker and [producer] Gary Katz trying out 30 snares in the studio and things like that, I think they just hit that balance on Aja. They had the budget and the time they needed. They got everything just right and knew when to stop putting paint on the canvas.
The legendary story that people always cite is them trying to get somebody to take that convincing solo over “Peg.” That tune is sort of a variation on a blues progression, but it has a couple of spots where the blue notes won’t work in it. You had to get somebody who really understood how the little riff was functioning. Fagen has said that they were both just baffled as to why nobody could do anything definitive on it. They had as many as eight people taking a crack at it, and some big names, too.
Somebody finally recommended Jay Graydon, who was an absolute first-call session guy in L.A. but wasn’t a guy that they knew at that point. Jay told me they were not super bossy or specific about what they were looking for. They were just like, ‘Let’s hear what you got.’ In the solo he’s got this double-stop bluesy thing he opens up with, and in the second half, he gets a little more into the bebop-y, jazzy vibe. He just kills it. I don’t know whether that’s one take or a couple spliced together, but they must have thought, ‘OK, finally, that’s the one.’
The book goes into detail about the album’s rhyme schemes and use of alliteration. What’s special about the lyricism?
If you go looking for order, meaning, and intention in their lyrics, you will never be disappointed, particularly on Aja. Everything has this inevitability. Every phrase just kind of rolls off the tongue, and that’s not by accident. The way they would match vowel sounds or use alliteration or use internal rhyme, it very much points to somebody who was not happy with the first draft, somebody who writes a lyric and then tinkers with it to make it special, interesting, unique, memorable, or especially singable.
I’m an old English major at heart so I got into a lot of specific poetic techniques when I was doing the lyric chapter in the book. There’s never a throwaway lyric in a Steely Dan song. They’re always looking for something great. I appreciate very much the fact that they let the listener connect the dots. They’ll give you just enough information that you’re intrigued, but it will never spell out a story in all its detail. They’ll sort of give you these snapshots, which is why when you ask people what Steely Dan lyrics mean there’s a wide range of opinions because some of them are impossible to pin down, and that’s by design.
What’s the main legacy of Aja 45 years later?
Sometimes you don’t know the answer until 100 years later. I’ve seen a number of people in different styles of music citing Aja as a pivotal record, from hip-hop people to Justin Timberlake and Mark Ronson. It really has endured well and has touched a lot of musicians and songwriters. It’s kind of the template for groove-based pop that isn’t scared of chords. There’s a freedom to writing based on that template, because it means anything that any songwriter had in their pocket, whether it’s Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin or Lennon-McCartney or Cole Porter, even instrumental jazz writers, you have access to all that stuff as a songwriter because of Aja.
Fagen mentioned to me how influential Bob Dylan was on him. Dylan, according to Fagen, was the guy who just made it possible to make a song about anything. He exponentially expanded the playing field thematically and in terms of vocabulary of what could happen in a pop song. I would argue Steely Dan did that in the harmonic realm. They made pop safe for jazz harmony.
Peruse Bloomsbury’s entire catalog of 33 1/3 titles at 333sound.com/33-13-series
