Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095)

by Fagen, Donald

  I’ve noticed that, on off days, some band members do their laundry—at least, the girls do. (In the seventies, I used to throw my underwear in the sink and pour in some Woolite.) Walt Weiskopf (sax and flute) and Freddie Washington (bass) play golf. Asking me to play golf would be like asking me to drive over to the town dump and separate all the wrongly placed bottles and cans from the regular garbage. That’s how I think of it. So, again, I’m holed up in my room. I can’t work on music on the road. It just doesn’t happen. So I’m writing this.

  I always associate Northern California with the late sixties, when I spent some time here. The hippie stuff was fun for about five minutes and then, by late ’67, the barbarism had set in.

  A typical story: A woman I know made the mistake of accepting the invitation of a famous “hippie” songwriter to spend the day on his houseboat in Mendocino, where he proceeded to beat the hell out of her and, for a time, kept her there at gunpoint. Luckily, she escaped and told her friend Sonny Barger, then president of the Oakland Hells Angels, about it. Sonny sent a crew roaring upstate, where they worked the guy over and burned down his boat. In those days of love and peace, you’d hear that sort of stuff all the time.

  JUNE 27

  On the bus, rumbling toward LA. The Santa Rosa gig was at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, which used to be called something else. (Just about every place used to be called something else two years ago, and something else before that.) Also, I’ve noticed that the venues seem to be getting smaller every night. My manager, Irving Azoff, who, over the years, has acquired a piece of just about every valuable asset in the music business (or what’s left of it), including the acts, the venues, the company you have to buy the tickets from and various other entities that just seem to spit back money at him, tells me that it’s “because the Dukes ain’t Steely Dan.”

  The thing is, lately, when I tour with Steely Dan, the venues also seem to be shrinking. Of course, I’m being disingenuous. Mike, Boz and I are pretty old now and so is most of our audience. Tonight, though, the crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers. Nevertheless, by the end of the set they were all on their feet, albeit shakily, rocking out to Mike’s performance of Buddy Miles’s “Them Changes.” So this, now, is what I do: assisted living.

  JUNE 28

  The show at the Gibson Amphitheatre in LA would be a big deal if we were a promising band of young lads, or even us, like, thirty or forty years ago, when we didn’t have these idiotic white beards. Nevertheless, the house was decent and Fox News cameras were there, although that might be because Bill O’Reilly is a big fan of McDonald, I kid you not. There were a fair number of backstage guests, including two musical Bobs, Bob Neuwirth and Bob Thiele Jr.; Connie Stevens, who used to play Cricket on Hawaiian Eye in the fifties (hey, she’s a fan); James Gadson, an all-star R&B drummer I’ve worked with; jazz writer Devon Wendell, who used to be an intern at River Sound, my erstwhile recording studio in New York; and my cousin Alan Rosenberg, an actor, and his ex-wife, Marg Helgenberger, also an actor, who’s famous from TV and very good looking and always provokes a stir backstage.

  Also my manager Irving and a “friend,” Matty. Irving, who’s leprechaun-sized, often travels with one of these “friends”—really bodyguards—who all look like they were Navy Seals or mob enforcers or some combination of both. I guess he’s afraid of being kidnapped and held for ransom or maybe just mugged in a parking lot, though I can’t imagine him not being able to talk his way out of a sticky situation.

  JUNE 29

  Waking up in the overchilled back bedroom of the bus with the thick shades locked down is like waking up in a dark, dusty shoe box on a shelf in the basement of a Florsheim shoe store in, say, Utica, New York, in 1953. Staggering up to the front, I saw that we were parked across the street from the Miramar Hotel in bright, downtown San Jose. A day off here. Oh. Great.

  Yesterday I sent a gripe e-mail to Irving about the insane bus routing, that is, the boomeranging from Northern to Southern California and back again, which, aside from wasting diesel fuel, is hard on drivers, musicians and the crew. Now, I know I should have caught this earlier myself, and I also know that Irving is semiretired and really doesn’t concern himself with this stuff anymore. Nevertheless, I needed to break someone’s nuts about it.

  It was interesting. Irv’s first reaction was to accept responsibility but to claim that the available dates in the venues we wanted necessitated the crazy routing. Then, after thinking about it a minute, he decided to blame it all on McDonald’s and Boz’s managers, Jack and Joel. Then he tried to make Vince the scapegoat, but Vince had already told me he’d brought the matter up weeks ago but had received no response.

  Finally Irv demanded an explanation from Marc Robbins, who works for him. Marc seemed to think the problem was that the Dukes had opted for buses instead of chartering a jet. Of course, we had previously been warned that this would’ve been too expensive. I finally told these backpedaling desperados to knock it off and just remember not to screw it up again. Christ.

  Again, I tried to swim a bit in the hotel pool. The Miramar has one outdoors in the back. The trick is to get there early, when it’s relatively empty, which I did. An hour later, it was teeming with screeching children, plump moms and the big, bullet-headed, tattooed family men you now see all across the country. Are they ex-military? Domesticated bikers? Professional wrestlers? I don’t know.

  I’ve started to exhibit early symptoms of Acute Tour Disorder (see Appendix). One is sleep trouble, although, at the Miramar, I think it’s because the sheets and pillowcases smell like soy sauce, a common occurrence in hotels. Is it because they use some particular noxious detergent? Or is it what everyone’s thinking, that the launderers are Chinese people who eat while they’re working and allow certain food elements to mix with the cleaning elements? Or would it seem totally paranoid to imagine that certain disgruntled, vengeful workers might actually pour their bottles of soy sauce into the washing machines or dryers?

  I finally manage to get to sleep by listening to an old Verve album I have on my computer, “Getz Meets Mulligan in Hi-Fi.” These two white jazz virtuosos, both acolytes of Lester Young, both ex-junkies and heavy drinkers, and both, according to musicians’ lore, megalomaniacal dicks, played like angels, and never more so than on this album. I’ve been listening to it for a half century, and it always seems fresh and beautiful.

  JUNE 30

  Speaking of megalomaniacal dicks—I was about to comment on how it’s impossible to be a working artist without being somewhat of a megalomaniacal dick, but I need to think about that more.

  JULY 1

  Last night’s show in San Jose was the best so far, with the crowd really into it and dancing and screaming. For one thing, it was Saturday night, which, for any number of reasons, disinhibits the crowd. Also the crowd was mostly around the right age, and not too many TV Babies.

  Incidentally, by “TV Babies” I mean people who were born after, say, 1960, when television truly became the robot caretaker of American children and therefore the principal architect of their souls. I’ve actually borrowed the term from the film Drugstore Cowboy, in which Matt Dillon, playing a drug addict and dealer, uses it to refer to a younger generation of particularly stupid and vicious dealers who seem to have no souls at all.

  • • •

  The Paramount Theatre in Oakland is one of those old art deco movie palaces from the thirties. It’s pretty gorgeous in that kitschy sort of way. By the sixties, many of these theaters served as rock venues. Although they can be fun to play in, they have their drawbacks. Many of them still have poor ventilation. The dressing rooms are often old, tiny and ill equipped; same with the bathrooms.

  One of the oddest things is the security personnel. There’s always “security” backstage, men and women who sit in Samsonite folding chairs on the stairwells and on the landings who, theoretically, make sure that no one is
wandering around backstage without a pass. I’m not talking about the Secret Service here. In the old theaters, for this sedentary, unskilled job, they often hire people who have been associated with the building for, like, forever, and that sometimes means old show people or what Levon Helm used to call “rounders”—assorted wannabes and crazies, folks who just like to hang around with performers. I like most of them; they usually turn out to be pretty nice. But when you’re kind of wasted after a long bus ride, it can still be a shock to climb the stairs to your dressing room and have to walk past a woman sitting on the landing in a flannel bathrobe and flip-flops with a face that looks like the tragic result of a fire in a wax museum, wearing a wig-hat made of blue yarn. In a certain, vulnerable frame of mind, I can be quite squeamish about such things. And yet, I suppose she’s there to protect me from people who are even crazier than she is.

  JULY 1

  Back to the artist as a megalomaniacal dick: Just like in the civilian population, a nasty, rude fucker is nasty and rude because they’re scared of what you think of them. It’s a defense. Sometimes, the same stuff that made them so scared has also contributed to their creative nature, though I’ve found that the most unpleasant ones are usually mediocre artists as well. This is because real art—I’m generalizing here—requires a certain level of empathy.

  Of course, an artist has to maintain control. This means making sure conditions are right, which includes being unsentimental about tossing people who aren’t doing their job or who reveal themselves to be psychos or whatever. But even firing folks can be done with kindness.

  In his autobiography, Charles Mingus remembered the graceful way Duke Ellington canned him after he got into a fight with the trombonist Juan Tizol:

  “Now Charles,” he says, looking amused, putting Cartier links into the cuffs of his beautiful handmade shirt, “you could have forewarned me . . . For a moment I was hopeful you’d decided to sit down and play but instead you slashed Juan’s chair in two with a fire axe! Really, Charles, that’s destructive. Everyone knows Juan has a knife but nobody ever took it seriously—he likes to pull it out and show it to people, you understand. So I’m afraid, Charles—I’ve never had to fire anybody—you’ll have to quit my band. I don’t need any new problems. Juan’s an old problem. I can cope with that, but you seem to have a whole new bag of tricks.”

  Duke was a true artist.

  Then again—just every once in a while, no matter how bad it makes you feel—there’s no option but to come down on some ungrateful, arrogant, persistent little punk like you’re Godzilla on angel dust.

  JULY 2

  There was something intensely creepy about the Canary Hotel in downtown Santa Barbara, so I moved to where the band is staying, out by the beach, Fess Parker’s DoubleTree Resort. All us boomers know that Fess played Davy Crockett on TV in the fifties and started a national craze for coonskin caps.

  Once in my room, I couldn’t seem to get online. When I called the front desk, they told me that, in the space labeled “Promotional Code,” I had to type in the password RAYTHEON2012. The girl at the desk had obviously mistaken me for a corporate conventioneer or some such thing. Then I remembered that Raytheon makes a lot of cool, deadly stuff, like, for instance, Stinger missiles and torpedoes and cruise missiles and even a giant laser cannon that, so far, the military’s been too scared to actually use. Maybe, with this password, I could go home with a little ray gun in a goodie basket or something. Seriously: I wonder if the lingering image of Fess Parker with that coonskin cap, that symbol of an innocent yet strong America, had something to do with the choice of the DoubleTree for a Raytheon corporate powwow.

  • • •

  Tonight Pasqual took me and a couple of other band members to a funky little Mexican restaurant. Afterwards, waiting for a cab, we stood around staring at a green 1964 Porsche convertible parked outside.

  • • •

  It’s late. I woke up and heard an ominous noise in the hall, several times now. It sounds like an amplified exhalation, or some steam escaping from a locomotive, followed by a double thump or knock. Now I’ve imagined there’s a terrible Hound from Hell running loose in the hotel. Maybe it was that Mexican food. I’d give my right arm for a cigarette. I’m turning on all the lights.

  JULY 3

  Eleven a.m. I’m awake. Horrible dreams. I realize I’ve been sleeping on the white square thing that’s on the Apple AC cord that’s hot as a charcoal briquette.

  I’m fairly certain that I’m now suffering from some of the anxiety symptoms on the ATD list, the psychological stuff: the insomnia, a little paranoia, maybe a touch of mania. I just ventured out to find some breakfast and check out the pool. The vast lobby had several dining areas with many tables, couches, nooks and so on, but only one couple was seated and they seemed to be having cocktails. Fighting a nameless terror, I asked a doorman how to get to the pool and he directed me outside, where I followed a path that led through an underpass to a medium-sized one already cluttered with kids. I was still hungry but the poolside stand seemed to be selling only burgers and hot dogs. I ended up making my way through the winding, expressionist hallways back to my room, settling for a warm Snickers bar and a Sprite. I’m just going to wait for Vince to call and tell me what to do next.

  JULY 4

  I’m feeling better this morning, having slept many hours on the bus during the eleven-hour trip to—where?—the Plaza Inn and Suites in Ashland, Oregon, a quaint sort of place, a college town and the home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. When I got off the bus, stiff and bleary eyed, there was a July Fourth parade in progress, featuring sorrowfully overweight teenage girls holding tiny flags. I just heard the loud crooosh of a fighter jet streaking overhead.

  Geoff went off immediately to sleep. By the way, McDonald and Boz also have their own buses. The band, twelve players in all, is split between two buses. The crew also has a bus, plus there are the two trucks that carry the sound and lighting gear.

  When Steely Dan started touring again in the early nineties, the band divided naturally into two distinct social groups, which gave the two buses their names: the Soul Bus and the Horn Bus. The current Soul Bus is mostly the rhythm section, including Freddie, guitarist Jon Herington, keyboard man Jim Beard and Catherine. It’s more of a party bus sort of situation. The Horn Bus, which I call the Nerd Bus, is dominated by the more neurasthenic, introspective types—you know, the Jewish people: trumpeter Michael Leonhart and his sister Carolyn, and reed men Walt Weiskopf and Jay Collins. I’ve ridden both buses on short runs and they’re both fun. Shannon, the drummer, and an old pal of McDonald’s, usually rides with Mike.

  Predictably, the Soul Bus is good for kidding around, funky playlists, singing, a really nice hang. Freddie watches old movies on TCM. The Horn Bus is a little quieter. They also watch films, try to decimate each other at Scrabble and there are a couple of wickedly funny people. Horn players talk about their mouthpieces and reeds a lot. As far as I can tell, there’s about the same amount of (generally moderate) alcohol consumption on both buses. You couldn’t ask for a mellower bunch of cats and kitties. And they’re all mighty road warriors, not puny malcontents like myself.

  As I’ve mentioned, when Steely Dan is touring, Walter and I stay in nice hotels. The band usually stays in somewhat cruddier hotels, and the crew, God bless ’em—I don’t know where they stay. On the Dukes tour, though, I’m often with the band on the cruddy level, though not tonight in Ashland, where Vince and I are in our own cruddy hotel.

  Okay, not cruddy—sort of charming, really, but someone did only perfunctory research: no room service at the Plaza Inn. After threading our way through the intense holiday crowd scene on the streets of Ashland (bands, food concessions, etc.), Vince and I found a sort of fern bar that was open for lunch. Passing the town square, we were surprised to see an operational “lithia fountain” spewing out water from an underground spring that’s apparently rich in lithium salts.
Being aware of the salubrious effect of pharmaceutical lithium on manic-depressives, I considered taking a sip, but was finally put off by sanitation concerns. Oh, well.

  In the evening, having zero interest in the town fireworks display, Vince and I saw a film at the cute little movie theater, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which was intelligent and carefully made, as his films always are. Walter and I once had a bizarre interaction with Anderson’s fans over the Internet, which started when we posted a couple of humorous letters (we thought) on the Steely Dan website.

  I think one of the reasons we’re intrigued by Anderson is that he seems to be fixated on the sort of geekish, early-sixties adolescent experience that he’s too young to have had but that Walter and I actually lived through. And yet he nails the mood precisely, using comic exaggeration and fantasy to do the job. Although it was no picnic, it’s too bad everyone’s coming-of-age can’t take place in the early sixties. Seeing the scouts in Moonrise Kingdom, I was reminded of my own experience at Boy Scout camp. I remember spending a lot of time in my tent worrying over a huge pot of boiling water in which I was trying to brew just the right blend of herbal tea, mostly wintergreen picked in the forest, following some recipe in the Scout handbook.

  JULY 5

  Speaking of tea, I guess some Snapple leaked onto my MacBook Pro keyboard so that now some keys are sticky and make a disturbing sucking noise. Plus, we’re at an uncomfortable gig in Medford, Oregon. Backstage, there’s heinously bad feng shui or whatever you call it, cramped dressing rooms (the girls’ room is in the kitchen), two little bathrooms for, like, fifty backstage people. Can’t wait to crash out of here.