FEATURE:
Drink Scotch Whisky All Night Long…
IMAGE COURTESY: University of Texas Press
Inside the Remarkable Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan
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ONE of the most exciting music book releases…
IN THIS PHOTO: Alex Pappademas
of this year comes from writer by Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay. Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan is not only a must-read for all Steely Dan fans: this book is great and accessible to anyone who has not really traversed the catalogue of the American duo (founded by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the played and recorded with a cast of rotating musicians). Released in the U.S. already, this essential book is available in the U.K. from tomorrow (23rd). I would everyone to seek out a copy! I know there are a few Steely Dan books on the market, but I think this is the most immersive, detailed, informative and vivid. You are drawn into the songs of the legendary if underrated group/duo. I think that there is this contrast and curiosity regarding Steely Dan. Most people know several of their songs, yet I feel they are not as embraced and played on radio as much as they should. Perhaps they are seen as too experimental or musical – their songs not as accessible as other artists’. Perhaps it is actually quite cool that they are not overplayed or overexposed. It is almost a secret treasure that fans can discuss…and others might not understand or know! I am going to drop in a couple of pages and images from Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, just as a taster and incentive! I will end up with a review of the book, but I want to open with some overview and promotional interviews.
IN THIS PHOTO: Joan LeMay
To start, University of Texas Press (who is the publishing house) let us know what you can expect when parting with your money. This is a beautiful and wonderfully evocative book that you need to have in your collection. I am really looking forward to my copy arriving:
“A literary and visual exploration of the songs of Steely Dan.
Steely Dan’s songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators—or imbued their characters with so much humanity. Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed people with complicated pasts, scars they don’t talk about, delusions and desires and memories they can’t shake. From Rikki to Dr. Wu, Hoops McCann to Kid Charlemagne, Franny from NYU to the Woolly Man without a Face, every name is a locked-room mystery, beguiling listeners and earning the band an exceptionally passionate and ever-growing cult fandom.
Quantum Criminals presents the world of Steely Dan as it has never been seen, much less heard. Artist Joan LeMay has crafted lively, color-saturated images of her favorite characters from the Daniverse to accompany writer Alex Pappademas’s explorations of the famous and obscure songs that inspired each painting, in short essays full of cultural context, wild speculation, inspired dot-connecting, and the occasional conspiracy theory. All of it is refracted through the perspectives of the characters themselves, making for a musical companion unlike any other. Funny, discerning, and visually stunning, Quantum Criminals is a singular celebration of Steely Dan’s musical cosmos”.
One says that you should never judge a book by its cover. In the case of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, that beautiful artwork by Joan LeMay entices you into the book where her unique and fascinating images almost soundtrack Alex Pappademas’s writing. NPR chatted with LeMay and Pappademas about a book that clearly comes from two people who are incredibly passionate and devoted to the music of Steely Dan! Rather than generally write about songs and do something ordinary, they spotlight the characters and figures mentioned in the tracks. That is used as a jumping off point to explore the albums and intricacies of the unmistakable music of Steely Dan:
“Steely Dan is a paradox. As writer Alex Pappademas puts it, it's a "cult band whose catalog ... includes at least a dozen enduring radio hits" — two guys who continually found a way to "embed blue-ribbon misanthropy in music designed to go down as smooth as creme de menthe." And like many great paradoxes, there's more to learn about the band the longer you spend considering it. This is true even if you only know a few of those enduring hits. You might recognize the chorus of "Dirty Work," for example — but did you know that the man singing lead vocals on that track, David Palmer, once played a high school show alongside The Velvet Underground — its first under that name? Did you know that "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" was written for the wife of a faculty member at Bard College, where Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen studied? Or that one of MF Doom's earliest solo tracks samples the opening song on Aja?
In the new book Quantum Criminals, Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay give a roadmap to the Steely Dan extended universe through the lens of the characters at the heart of the band's songs. Alongside Pappademas' explorations, LeMay's paintings render touching portraits of Steely Dan's influences and inheritors, and speculative illustrations of the personalities who populate its world. Their book uncovers the vast constellation of lyrical references, artistic influences and social and political contexts surrounding the band and its music. In this interview, Pappademas and LeMay answered a few questions about their personal histories with Steely Dan and how Quantum Criminals came to be.
ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
Marissa Lorusso: In one of the book's opening chapters, Alex details his evolving relationship with Steely Dan's music, from mild distaste to somewhat ironic engagement to sincere appreciation — a path he says has been followed by many Millennial and Gen Z fans. Joan, what's the story of your relationship with Steely Dan — did your fandom follow a similar road?
Joan LeMay: Listening to Steely Dan is, honest to God, my first musical memory. Growing up, my parents had a very limited record collection — a stack about five inches wide or so. In it was the entire Steely Dan discography (later to include [Donald Fagen's solo debut] The Nightfly; no other Fagen solo records nor any Becker records made the cut), plus lots of Linda Ronstadt, a couple of James Taylor records, The Best of the Doobie Brothers Vol. II, Carole King's Tapestry and Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick. At 2 years old, I was what one would call a tall baby. I would reach for things. And I'd get 'em, too. I clearly remember the day I was able to reach the turntable, my tiny arms at full stretch above my head, and heft an LP upon it until the peg snapped into the hole. That LP was Can't Buy A Thrill. I liked it the most out of all of my parents' records because of the colors on the cover. I plopped down on our diarrhea-brown shag carpet and was pleased. It seems unlikely that I would remember this so clearly, but I was reading the newspaper at that age — I peaked early.
ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
Steely Dan's lyrics are famously somewhat cryptic, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were quite averse to having their lyrics read as straightforward personal narratives. It's clear that so much research went into illuminating these songs, but there's also a healthy dose of creative speculation, too, both in how the subjects of the songs are described and how they're depicted.
LeMay: The only characters I painted that weren't 100% creative speculation (and really, less speculation and more my personal interpretation) were those having to do with actual, living people, like Cathy Berberian, Jill St. John and G. Gordon Liddy. I had a folder on my computer called "DAN CASTING GALLERY" full of images of people in my life, found photos, '60s and '70s fashion catalogs, advertisements and sewing pattern packaging. I painted from a melange of those images mixed with things that had been in my head forever, as well as from a ton of photos of my own body posing in different ways for reference. The most important thing to me was getting the humanity — the profoundly flawed humanity — of these characters right.
Pappademas: And it works — I try to get across that humanity in the text, but having Joan populate this world with real human faces made the finished product into something greater than I could have gotten to on my own.
IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
Anyway, my answer to the question above is that when I'm writing criticism, for sure, but also when I'm writing reported pieces, I feel like there's always an element of creative speculation in what I do. It's just more or less constrained by facts depending on what kind of piece it is. Even if you've sat in a room with somebody for hours you're ultimately imagining their inner life based on what they've told you, and sometimes on what they haven't told you. In terms of Quantum Criminals, yeah, Steely Dan definitely tried to discourage any attempt to read these lyrics autobiographically — and the fact that all their lyrics were composed by (or at least credited to) two writers was their first line of defense against that kind of reading, because even when they're writing in the first person you're conscious that the "I" in every Dan song is to whatever degree a fictional character and therefore a distancing device. But I think it's human nature — or at least it's my human nature — to intuit the opposite and look for places where the art seems to correspond to what we know to be the contours of an artist's life. Because the other thing about Steely Dan is they liked to obfuscate; the fact that they rarely owned up to their music having an autobiographical component (with certain exceptions, notably "Deacon Blues," which they admitted was pretty personal) doesn't mean it wasn't autobiographical. And at times — as with "Gaucho," a song about a duo torn apart by a third party who might be the personification of drugs or other forms of hedonism, recorded for the album Donald made mostly without Walter because Walter's addiction issues had pulled him away from the band — the correspondences became too tempting to not explore. Which is what happens when you write cryptically; it's human nature to decrypt.
I don't know; I guess I'm doing the same thing Taylor Swift's fans do when they decide that some opaque lyric is an Easter egg about this or that relationship of hers, or what A.J. Weberman was doing when he decided "The sun isn't yellow, it's chicken" was Bob Dylan confessing to faking his own death, or what the people who think The Shining was Stanley Kubrick exorcizing his guilt over faking the moon landing. The difference is that I think I'm right and I think those other people are all nuts, because I'm in my bubble and can't imagine the view from theirs”.
For Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield spoke with Alex Pappademas. Sheffield notes how Steely Dan are weirdly timeless. Maybe they were peaking in the Seventies and Eighties; maybe there was a slight dip in awareness and popularity after that. He notes how they are very much on trend and in vogue right now! Perhaps Steely Dan were so ahead of their time; that they had to wait for the world to catch up with them:
“YOU COULD FILL a book with all the shady characters you meet in Steely Dan songs. Quantum Criminals is that book. Journalist Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay take a deep dive into the genius of Steely Dan, and the strange world that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker built together. LeMay illustrates her favorite Dan characters, from Rikki to Kid Charlemagne, from Dr. Wu to Peg, all the way to the El Supremo in the room at the top of the stairs. Pappademas gives a mind-bending guided tour of the Steely Dan universe, exploring their songs, their legend, their negative charisma, their decadent love affair with L.A. Quantum Criminals is one of the sharpest, funniest, and best books ever about any rock artist.
People are more obsessed with these Seventies jazz-rock cynics than ever these days. As Pappademas writes, “Around 2020 an ongoing groundswell of semi-ironic Dan appreciation became a full-fledged revival.” Dan culture keeps growing, with newsletters like Expanding Dan, podcasts, and the brilliant Twitter account @baddantakes. Pappademas theorizes, “Steely Dan are an endlessly meme-able band because they’re a hilarious concept on paper—two grumpy-looking guys obsessed with making the smoothest music of all time.”
But maybe this revival also means they were ahead of their time. Pappademas writes, “If more people are ready for Steely Dan in the Twenties than they were in the Nineties—or even the Seventies—it’s because our fast-warming world is more Steely Dannish than it’s ever been.”
Pappademas spoke to Rolling Stone about the weirdly timeless appeal of Steely Dan, the current Danaissance, the “yacht-rock” question, the “Deacon Blues”/Star Trek connection, his favorite drum solo, and how ironic fandom can lead to the real thing.
IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
How did you begin your personal Steely Dan journey?
It all started with an ironic purchase. At the moment I was coming of age, Steely Dan’s stock was pretty low. I was a young man who consumed a lot of older rock-critic opinions, and I assumed this band was not for me, which is funny because it’s clearly SO for me. I would ignorantly make fun of Steely Dan and then go listen to Pavement, which is in the same vein—musical sophistication meets irony. But I bought Katy Lied because the Minutemen had covered “Dr. Wu” and I wanted to know what the original sounded like. I remember everything I bought that day: a Tortoise remix 12-inch, Miles Davis, Isley Brothers. But I thought, “Yeah, let’s take a flyer for a buck on a Steely Dan album.”
And that’s how the seed gets planted. Because you can try to ironically enjoy Steely Dan, but they’re already ahead of you on that. They were the first yacht-rock parody before yacht-rock existed. A song like “Any Major Dude” has more in common with the Blue Jean Committee or the fake Steely Dan song in Oh, Hello. It’s like they’re already making the parody version before the genuine article existed. And a lot of yacht-rock I think is just Steely Dan with like one less chord and a lot less irony.
Your origin story is just like mine. For me, it was ironically buying Pretzel Logic within days of turning 30. Totally stereotypical.
Yeah, that biological clock starts ticking and you gotta get a Steely Dan album. They are always waiting for you on the other side of 30. But with the Dan revival that’s happening now, it’s a product of the internet, where those prejudices don’t exist. They’re not something that people have to overcome in order to get into Steely Dan. So the 19-year-olds are into it. There was a post on the Steely Dan Reddit asking people for their age, and it was remarkable because they were all in their 20s. It’s not boomers making those Steely Dan memes we’re all passing around. Something has happened. It’s airborne and contagious, in a way it never was back in the day.
Why is this Steely Danaissance happening now? Why do they speak to our moment?
We’re more cynical. We’re all looking out at the world with a Donald and Walter-ish kind of dismay. So they make a lot more sense now. What seemed cold and remote and jerky about them back in the day—now, that’s just the way people talk. They’re also also writing apocalyptically about their time, and our time now seems so unavoidably apocalyptic. It really does feel like California is sliding into the sea along with the rest of America. So the time is is finally right for them. It only took 50 years”.
How did you two devise the format for this book—Joan LeMay illustrates the song characters, you write about them?
This was two projects that merged into one. Jessica Hopper started working as an editor on the American Music Series and asked me, “Is there somebody you could write a music book about?” So I thought, “Who am I never tired of thinking about? Steely Dan.” Meanwhile, Joan was gonna do a zine where where she drew every character in every Steely Dan song. Jessica said, “Joan, this is not a zine. This is a book.” So these two things came together. But we didn’t try to define these characters. Anything I wrote that felt like fan-fiction got cut immediately. You don’t wanna be filling in the holes in these stories too much.
Time to draft your all-star team. Your favorite drum break on a Steely Dan record?
I have to go with “Aja,” the amazing Steve Gadd. If I could play drums, just sit down like Garth from Wayne’s World and do any drum break, it would be that “Aja” break, including the little stick clicks in the middle of it. That song is peak after peak, with Wayne Shorter just blowing it out. But my favorite Steely Dan drummer has to be Bernard Purdie, playing the “Purdie shuffle” on things like The Royal Scam, when they came back to New York.
Best sax solo?
I don’t wanna say Wayne again, but it’s hard not to. Wayne’s the greatest. That’s the truest jazz moment—it’s like a cosmic wind is blowing through that song at that moment. But I might give it to Pete Christlieb on “Deacon Blues,” the sax player that they recruited from the Tonight Show band to play on this song. They were watching the Tonight Show, heard him, and said, THAT guy. He’s a working musician who happens to work on the song about learning to work the saxophone. In that moment, he IS Deacon Blues. He’s had an amazing long career—he ends up in the Star Trek orchestra, on The Next Generation”.
If you need more conviction to get this book, then the reviews should tip the scales! Even though Forward incorrectly assert Steely Dan have not aged that well (the Rolling Stone interview and huge acclaim for Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan proves otherwise!), they note how essential the book is. In terms of that phenomenal artwork, and the originality of the writing. It is far more compelling than a dry and formulaic telling of one of music’s greatest and most fascinating stories:
“Quantum Criminals — which gets its title from Becker’s wry, physics-derived explanation of a taxi accident that put him out of commission during the making of 1980’s Gaucho — dives deep into that well of weirdness and realness, with the author using the denizens of the Dan-iverse as his springboard. Steely Dan’s discography is so populated with seedy, venal and delusional characters that it would be easy enough for Pappademas to just list them all on a track-by-track, album-by-album basis, with a few lines of explanation and some humorous asides.
But the approach he takes here — zeroing in on a particular song’s subject, and then toggling back and forth between Dan past and Dan future to illustrate what, say, The Expanding Man or The Dandy of Gamma Chi really represent — is a far more engaging and illuminating way of telling the band’s history (and examining Becker and Fagen’s gleefully jaundiced outlook) than such a straightforward rundown would have been.
ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
Further fleshing out the sleazy parade are Joan LeMay’s colorful and often hilarious paintings, which depict both imaginary characters from the songs — like the pot-smoking Lady Bayside of “The Boston Rag” or the gun-toting Bookkeeper’s Son from “Don’t Take Me Alive” — and real-life characters from the Steely Dan story.
Erstwhile band members like Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Michael McDonald receive appropriately hirsute portraits, while The Eagles (whom Becker and Fagen would make fun of in “Everything You Did” before inviting them to sing backup vocals on “FM”) are humorously depicted as disembodied heads wafting out of a record player wearing self-satisfied leers. But LeMay also illustrates items like the Coral Sitar used on “Do It Again,” or “WENDELL,” the primitive 12-bit drum sampler developed by engineer Roger Nichols in an attempt to provide Becker and Fagen with perfect beats — because Steely Dan’s tools are ultimately just as important to their story as the fools who come alive in their songs”.
An essential addition to the Steely Dan world that I have been excited to own arrives on U.K. bookshelves tomorrow. It is, in my view, the go-to book for any diehards or new followers!! Make sure you grab your copy, as so much attention and love has been put into Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay. This is a gorgeous and engrossing book that you can enjoy and learn from…
FOR years to come.