From: DDuBray@cox.net   
      
   Entertainment Weekly   
   March 17, 2006   
      
   Donald Fagen - Back to Annadale   
   The origins of Steely Dan -- Donald Fagen returns to campus and revisits the   
   origin of his old grudge   
   by Rob Brunner   
      
   On Halloween 1967, a party is raging inside Ward Manor, an Elizabethan-style   
   mansion-turned-dorm at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. On a small   
   stage set up in the corner of the common room, a band called the Leather   
   Canary tears through the Rolling Stones' ''Dandelion,'' Moby Grape's ''Hey   
   Grandma,'' and Willie Dixon's ''Spoonful,'' along with a few recently penned   
   originals. It's a typical late-'60s student shindig - most of the audience   
   is tripping on acid - but it's hardly an ordinary band. Behind the drums is   
   Chevy Chase, familiar around campus as a gifted musician and good-natured   
   goofball who's been known to drop his pants after losing late-night games of   
   ''dare'' poker. Just in front of him is a long-haired muso named Walter   
   Becker, one of the school's most accomplished guitarists. And the shy singer   
   behind the electric piano? That's Don Fagen, decked out in a leather jacket   
   with feathers attached to it (hence the band's name). Just a few years   
   later, Chase will find fame as one of the greatest comedians of his   
   generation. Fagen and Becker, meanwhile, will evolve into Steely Dan, score   
   huge hits with songs like ''Rikki Don't Lose That Number'' and ''Reelin' in   
   the Years,'' and create several of the most beloved and enduring albums of   
   the 1970s. And in 1973, on their second LP, they will record ''My Old   
   School,'' an angry kiss-off that, for reasons that have never been entirely   
   clear, takes a very public swipe at Bard. ''California tumbles into the   
   sea/That'll be the day I go back to Annandale,'' Fagen famously sings. ''I'm   
   never going back to my old school.'' You can practically hear him sneer.   
      
   Almost four decades after that Halloween gig, Donald Fagen is back at Ward   
   Manor, gazing around the very same common room. In many ways, this quiet   
   lounge - its ornate wood-paneled walls and elaborately plastered ceiling   
   unchanged after all these years - is where Steely Dan sputtered to life.   
   Fagen and Becker both lived here, and they wrote their first, now-forgotten   
   songs together on an old piano that disappeared from the corner years ago.   
   But despite this room's heavy history, Fagen, exploring the dorm's dark   
   halls for the first time since college, seems a bit underwhelmed. ''Looks   
   pretty much the way I remembered it,'' he says with a shrug.   
      
   If Fagen is reluctant to reminisce about beginnings, perhaps it's because   
   these days he's more interested in how things end. His new album, Morph the   
   Cat, is a typically wry and unflinching look at death. ''I was just 58 the   
   other day,'' he says, sitting down at a table only a few feet from where the   
   Leather Canary performed. ''You start to realize that you don't have that   
   much time left. And also my mother died in 2003, which was a big shock to   
   me. So it's something I've been thinking of.''   
      
   Morph is the third in a semiautobiographical trilogy, following 1982's The   
   Nightfly, a look at his youth in New Jersey, and 1993's Kamakiriad, a   
   surreal take on his middle years. On this latest installment, Fagen taps   
   into the undercurrent of fear that's defined life in New York City after   
   9/11, weaving dirty bombs and burning buildings, airport security and   
   authoritarian governments into deceptively upbeat-sounding tunes about a   
   variety of tragic situations. Though most of the new CD's songs aren't   
   overtly personal, some are based on fact, including the disc's most direct   
   take on mortality, ''Brite Nitegown.'' ''I was mugged on the Upper East   
   Side,'' says Fagen. ''I was almost sure I was going to buy it there. Two   
   huge dudes sat me down and said, 'Give us all your money, we've got a gun.'   
   They took the cash and booked. I sat there for a few minutes. Then I started   
   to shake.''   
      
   When Fagen arrived at Bard in 1965, he was shy and bookish, a kid from the   
   Jersey burbs who smoked a bit of pot and played a lot of piano. ''Don sort   
   of looked like a crow most of the time,'' says Chevy Chase. ''He'd walk   
   around with this beak of a nose and he always wore black clothing and looked   
   down with his hands in his pockets. People thought he was kind of weird and   
   quiet. They didn't realize that he was really intelligent, a very funny,   
   bright guy.'' A fan of bebop and Beat poetry, Fagen quickly fell in with a   
   bohemian crowd. ''He hung out with some bizarre Bard students who were too   
   dark and mysterious for some other people,'' says Terence Boylan, a friend   
   and musical collaborator at Bard. ''They never came out of their room, they   
   stayed up all night. They looked like ghosts - black turtlenecks and skin so   
   white that it looked like yogurt. Absolutely no activity, chain-smoking   
   Lucky Strikes and dope. [Fagen was] immersed in an entirely Beat attitude.   
   Very hip, very chip-on-the-shoulder, very jazz, very hat-down-over-the-eyes,   
   saying, 'Hey, man, that's not cooool.'''   
      
   Today, as Fagen wanders around Bard, that lost world starts to come back. He   
   stops in front of Stone Row, a series of Gothic-style buildings at the   
   center of campus. Here is Fagen's freshman dorm, Potter, where he lived next   
   to Lonnie Yongue, the leader of that boho Bard scene. Yongue would later   
   show up in the 1973 Steely Dan tune ''The Boston Rag'' as a ''kingpin'' who   
   goes on a two-day drug bender. ''Lonnie was king of Potter, that's for   
   sure,'' says Fagen, gazing up at the imposing stone structure.   
      
   Bard was - and still is - an intensely creative environment, and Fagen soon   
   found his way into regular jam sessions, which popped up all over campus. In   
   Sottery Hall, Chevy Chase might be playing ''bad jazz'' with his singer   
   girlfriend, Blythe Danner, while in a little practice room called Bard Hall,   
   Fagen and Boylan might be rehearsing a 10-piece wall-of-sound version of   
   ''Like a Rolling Stone'' for a class project. Fagen was already an   
   accomplished pianist, and he started playing in a series of semi-serious and   
   short-lived jazz and rock groups. At first, nothing really clicked. ''One of   
   the problems in those days was finding a guitar player,'' he says. ''There   
   were a few guitarists at school, but most still sounded like they were Dick   
   Dale or one of the Ventures. They hadn't quite figured out how to play   
   blues. They sounded sort of amateurish.'' One day in 1967, Fagen happened by   
   a long-gone campus coffee shop, the Red Balloon. ''I hear this guy   
   practicing, and it sounded very professional and contemporary,'' he says.   
   ''It sounded like, you know, like a black person, really. And that was   
   Walter. I walked in and introduced myself to him. I just said, 'Do you want   
   to be in a band?'''   
      
   Fagen and Becker quickly forged the intimate collaborative relationship that   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)