So, I understand WB was busy in the producer's chair for most of the '80's, but was he still writing/recording demos of his own songs during this time frame, and if so, might we get to hear some of those older tunes here?
I really appreciate all the discussion here that was generated from my initial question; I've enjoyed reading it all and it's helped fill in the blanks for me. Thank you!!
It’s just a solo— on Fra Lippo Lippi's Angel -- (below)
from the Becker produced Light and Shade (87)
-- But to the extent that playing in someone else's song can reveal anything, it does let us hear a tiny bit of one musical choice he made during that time.
By the way,credits for this album, for which the Norwegian FLL was brought to LA to record (this was to be, alas, the album that was to launch them in the States) reads like the portable musical troop from which both Donald and Walter drew upon for so many projects, everyone from Nichols’ engineering to Porcaro’s drumming.
I discovered a very freaky thing while revisiting this song: In the official music video, the singer (a keyboardist) is strumming a guitar and pretends to play Walters solo (!). Not that there could be any question about that sound, from the solo through to the end of the track, but it sent me back to the original credits to see how this Milli Vanilli moment was represented. The credits are legit; it's the video that's deceptive. FLL was essentially a keyboard player/ singer Per Sørensen and a bass player Rune Kristoffersen (!).On the Light and Shade wiki page, Sørensen is credited with keyboards and vocals, and Walter with guitar and production. One page in particular that just names personnelalso has "Guitar -- Walter Becker" underneath the track name.
Hard to imagine what was behind this 60’s era feint. As a demanding Japanese promoter we knew used to ask, “Who is fired”?
Anyway…nice prototypical Becker playing on this "nice" prototypical 80s cut :-)
Absolutely @Moderator: D-Mod ! I had gotten an inside tip on that album when it came out in ‘87, so I was all over the CD as soon as it hit the shop I frequented in the Village. And literally from the first notes of the solo in Angel, I knew it was Walter playing. As you say, there is no mistaking that sound. It was a little disappointing to see the credits looking more like Pretzel Logic or Katy Lied, but no guessing was required for this one. A pretty cool little tune, with a typically beautiful and tasteful WB solo. Thanks for bringing back that memory; haven’t thought about it in quite some time but it’s worth revisiting!
@Tony Favia I've said it before and I'll say it again. In so many ways, I'm glad that Walter/Steely Dan didn't have 80s output. Songs like this remind me of why I gravitated towards the pop music of the 60s and 70s rather than the 80s or 90s. Sure, Walter's solo is worthwhile...reminds me of the FM solo in places...but otherwise the maudlin sincerity, the synths, the drums—so anathema to the warmth of real instruments recorded on analog that I love.It's like the rest of the world caught up to the precision that Steely Dan always pursued, but the music became sterile.Anyway, trying to set aside my anti-80s bias, the thing that strikes me here is that Walter is doing what he does, but divorced from the creativity of the kinds of unexpected chord changes and harmonic voicings that might have occurred in his own compositions. So it sounds like Walter's guitar playing, but not a Walter song. As far as the video goes, its laughable to have anyone pretend to play WB's solo, but I assume Walter was unavailable at the time of filming.
Re-listening to some of WB’s production work, I was put in mind of hourstuff’s question about 80s musical output, and this discussion.
First, Walter was writing at least from the time of the DF/WB sessions in the mid ’80: there are cassettes of some of their work, and some of Walter’s fooling around with some of it afterwards.
Second, he said —and may have mentioned in an interview, and as reported by Matt’s source, above, — that he started keeping track of “the songs that were in my head” as he was working with RLJ on Flying Cowboys…so that’s 87-88 or so?
Finally, I believe the earliest “out loud” writing he did at the pre-dawn of the ’90s was with Dean Parks, who can confirm or not. Some of the earliest cassettes I found were marked "WB/DP". Walter said he felt that Dean could get him started writing and, especially, playing again… and indeed it worked, and as we know, they went on to write some great songs together.
This post was going to be about something else…which I’ll put in a second post; it’s too embarrassing to drop these massive core-dumps, especially since they don’t seem to stimulate discussion. (BTW, came across a cassette labeled “crickets” and I assumed it was throw-away stuff, like “nothingsville”. When I played it, it was…crickets. Literally. For some reason he wanted to sample them)
The cricket thing is interesting. I remember that Jim Wilson did a thing in 1992 called "god's Cricket Chorus, that evolved into something Robbie Robertson did for a song on the "Music for the the Native American" soundtrack:
The background chorus effect is crickets, slowed down to "human speed."
We do know that sometime in the late 80s, probably around the Rosie Vela era, that D & W took a shot at writing some songs together for the first time since the 70s. I believe that Snowbound and West of Hollywood sprouted from those meeting.
I've always been curious about those sessions. I assume they wrote a few songs, but never moved to record them. I wonder what they worked on, other than Snowbound and West of Hollywood. Did you ever read the article written after Walter's death where the interviewer mentioned all of the stuff that was written for West of Hollywood but never used?https://americansongwriter.com/2017/09/remembrance-steely-dans-walter-becker/
“One trick of writing,” Walter said, “is to use the mechanics of typing things over and over again as a way of exercising and developing an idea.” To illustrate this technique, he shared these variations, all of which started with the line, “I’m way deep into nothing special …”
…coming from a place of power just west of Hollywood.…with a base of support located just west of Hollywood.…in a matrix with its nexus just west of Hollywood.…situated as I am in the crescent just west of Hollywood.…having as my target the citizens just west of Hollywood.…in a cluster franchise operation just west of Hollywood.…and business is booming in the triangle just west of Hollywood.
This project has revealed that Walter often did this with lyrics...work out variations and tangents and possibilities. On some of the SD stuff, you can see where the lyrics devolve or descend into silliness as the two songwriters crack each other up for a few lines before returning to the subject. And somewhere in there, there is always magic. To me, the process of creation is just a magical, and often even more so, than the creation itself. Walter was a master of this kind of thing, both lyrically and musically. Hearing some of these demos and outtakes, and getting to surreptitiously view the process, even from a distance, is illuminating.
The short answer is that so far we've sourced what we've released from Walter's extensive collection of DAT tapes. DAT tapes were introduced by Sony in the late 80s, so I wouldn't have expected to find much pre-90s material on them, with the exception of some older stuff that was backed up to DAT. The Circus money era demos and outtakes are from digital files, but I don't think we've even begun to explore cassette tapes or the mysterious box of reel to reel tapes labeled "Steely Dan - All The Good Stuff That We Didn't Release." No idea what's on those.That last part is a joke, but the truth is that there may well be other formats that we just haven't gotten to yet.Additionally, and d-mod is going to know this answer better than I do, but I'll take a whack at it anyway; I think Walter honestly did stop writing music with the expectation of recording it after Gaucho and for at least a few years. There may be a notebook with lyrics etc in it somewhere, but I think he really did put the same amount of effort that he had reserved for his music into taking care of himself, and that by definition precluded the kind of output we see occurring around 11ToW, Circus Money, and the intervening Steely Dan albums.
Thanks Matthew. That all makes sense. I know Fagen hit a writer's block between Nightfly and Kama (except for a few stray items), but had never heard any discussion around what Becker may/may not have been doing musically. Thanks for filling-in some of the mystery.
BTW, I about crapped myself when I first read your reel-to-reel joke. Very funny! You had me going for a second there. If only...
@hourstuff I want to be 100% clear that what I'm going to say is conjecture on my part, and not a product of any of the conversations I've ever had with Walter, or with d-mod on this project:I have always believed that the songs for The Nightfly album were written during the production of Gaucho, and that the songs on Kamakiriad (other than Snowbound, which is a product of the aborted midish-80s songwriting sessions) were all written after Walter reunited with Donald for the New York Rock and Soul Review stuff. I think Donald has always had a particularly hard time writing without Walter there to bounce ideas off of. I think that's also the reason that his various songwriting partnerships with Hirth Martinez (Do Wrong Shoes), Daniel Jobim (Orchids And The Summer Rain), and Carole Bayer Sager haven't yielded public results. Donald mentioned more than once in 70s interviews that he could never finish a song by himself, and though I know they lied to interviewers more than once, that one might have had a slightly larger kernel of truth to it than some other things he said.Just my take.I remember being told by one of the musicians on 11ToW that when Walter started writing songs during production work for Rickie Lee Jones and during production work for Kamakiriad, the songs just started to flow out with no end in sight. I think you get some of that in the verbosity of the lyrics to 11 Tracks songs...he'd been quiet (in terms of his musical/lyrical output) for so long that he had an awful lot to say.
@Matthew Kerns Actually, Do Wrong Shoes did end up getting recorded a couple of times, by Carmela Rappazzo and Jackie Allen. I like Jackie Allen's version better (on the Tangled album). And yes, thanks for the reminder about Walter getting inspired to do his own stuff during the RLJ sessions. My belief has always been that he didn't really think of himself as a potential solo artist until then, probably because he was self-conscious about his singing (as was Donald at first). That's why he tried writing with Donald again first. Then during the RLJ sessions, I think he got frustrated with having to live with RLJ having the final say on some musical decisions, and he decided that it would be liberating to do something on his own.
I really appreciate all the discussion here that was generated from my initial question; I've enjoyed reading it all and it's helped fill in the blanks for me. Thank you!!
Re: 80s musical output
It’s just a solo— on Fra Lippo Lippi's Angel -- (below)
from the Becker produced Light and Shade (87)
-- But to the extent that playing in someone else's song can reveal anything, it does let us hear a tiny bit of one musical choice he made during that time.
By the way, credits for this album, for which the Norwegian FLL was brought to LA to record (this was to be, alas, the album that was to launch them in the States) reads like the portable musical troop from which both Donald and Walter drew upon for so many projects, everyone from Nichols’ engineering to Porcaro’s drumming.
I discovered a very freaky thing while revisiting this song: In the official music video, the singer (a keyboardist) is strumming a guitar and pretends to play Walters solo (!). Not that there could be any question about that sound, from the solo through to the end of the track, but it sent me back to the original credits to see how this Milli Vanilli moment was represented. The credits are legit; it's the video that's deceptive. FLL was essentially a keyboard player/ singer Per Sørensen and a bass player Rune Kristoffersen (!). On the Light and Shade wiki page, Sørensen is credited with keyboards and vocals, and Walter with guitar and production. One page in particular that just names personnel also has "Guitar -- Walter Becker" underneath the track name.
Hard to imagine what was behind this 60’s era feint. As a demanding Japanese promoter we knew used to ask, “Who is fired”?
Anyway…nice prototypical Becker playing on this "nice" prototypical 80s cut :-)
Re-listening to some of WB’s production work, I was put in mind of hourstuff’s question about 80s musical output, and this discussion.
First, Walter was writing at least from the time of the DF/WB sessions in the mid ’80: there are cassettes of some of their work, and some of Walter’s fooling around with some of it afterwards.
Second, he said —and may have mentioned in an interview, and as reported by Matt’s source, above, — that he started keeping track of “the songs that were in my head” as he was working with RLJ on Flying Cowboys…so that’s 87-88 or so?
Finally, I believe the earliest “out loud” writing he did at the pre-dawn of the ’90s was with Dean Parks, who can confirm or not. Some of the earliest cassettes I found were marked "WB/DP". Walter said he felt that Dean could get him started writing and, especially, playing again… and indeed it worked, and as we know, they went on to write some great songs together.
This post was going to be about something else…which I’ll put in a second post; it’s too embarrassing to drop these massive core-dumps, especially since they don’t seem to stimulate discussion. (BTW, came across a cassette labeled “crickets” and I assumed it was throw-away stuff, like “nothingsville”. When I played it, it was…crickets. Literally. For some reason he wanted to sample them)
Second post later…
We do know that sometime in the late 80s, probably around the Rosie Vela era, that D & W took a shot at writing some songs together for the first time since the 70s. I believe that Snowbound and West of Hollywood sprouted from those meeting.
The short answer is that so far we've sourced what we've released from Walter's extensive collection of DAT tapes. DAT tapes were introduced by Sony in the late 80s, so I wouldn't have expected to find much pre-90s material on them, with the exception of some older stuff that was backed up to DAT. The Circus money era demos and outtakes are from digital files, but I don't think we've even begun to explore cassette tapes or the mysterious box of reel to reel tapes labeled "Steely Dan - All The Good Stuff That We Didn't Release." No idea what's on those. That last part is a joke, but the truth is that there may well be other formats that we just haven't gotten to yet. Additionally, and d-mod is going to know this answer better than I do, but I'll take a whack at it anyway; I think Walter honestly did stop writing music with the expectation of recording it after Gaucho and for at least a few years. There may be a notebook with lyrics etc in it somewhere, but I think he really did put the same amount of effort that he had reserved for his music into taking care of himself, and that by definition precluded the kind of output we see occurring around 11ToW, Circus Money, and the intervening Steely Dan albums.