FEATURE:
Do It Again: First The Dan…Maybe Don?
IN THIS PAINTING: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/University of Texas Press
One Final Look Inside the Remarkable Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan
_________
I am going to take….
another look inside Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. With text by Alex Pappademas and paintings by Joan LeMay, I bought three copies of the book. I was lucky enough to get a couple of signed copies from LeMay when there was a book launch in London last year. I was instantly immersed in this book. I have been a Steely Dan fan since I was a child. Now forty, I am as amazed and obsessed by them as I was back then. I am going to come onto some points regarding Steely Dan and their influence. For any Steely Dan fan who does not have this book in their collection, I would urge them to go and get it. Here is some more detail:
“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”.
The language used throughout the book is beautiful and evocative, Beautifully written and phrased, you are stunned by the words of Alex Pappademas! These rich and interesting characters from Steely Dan’s songbook brought vividly to life. We get insight into the songs and the period in which they were written. Accompanying these characters are the paintings of Joan LeMay. Many of us have images in our mind of various characters. What Rose Darling, Jack (from Do It Again) or Kid Charlemagne looks like. Her artwork, together with Pappademas’s words, are a match made in Heaven. So wonderful to see alongside one another, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan is such a wonderful and gorgeous book. One that you will read over and over. I have often wondered about the influence of Steely Dan. Maybe still seen as an acquired taste, Alex Pappademas felt the world was much more Steely Dan-esque now than it has ever been. In terms of the politics and sense of unease in the air. That their music and lyrics are more suited to the world today than maybe back in the 1970s. Because of that, they seem more relevant than ever! Maybe not as popular as they should be, you only hear the odd few songs of their played on U.K. radio. Something I argued recently is how many listeners and fans love Steely Dan and keep their music alive. Their influence is definitely felt there. Even so, how many artists in music now as obviously influenced by the group? How many take to heart the music of Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and crew?! I feel that there is nobody in modern music very obviously continuing the legacy of The Dan. That is a real shame!
I do think that artists need to read the book. The more you learn about the characters, songs and process of Fagen and Becker, the more you will listen to the albums. I hope that we do see Steely Dan’s music infiltrate into modern music. I have been inspired to write songs and think about an album similar to a Steely Dan one. Constructing ideas and thoughts very much influenced by reading Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. Kudos to Jessica Hopper for getting Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay together for this book. For manoeuvring them into each other’s orbit. There are interviews like this and this that go into detail and depth. Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay discussing Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan and their memories and love of Steely Dan. Prior to moving along, there is a portion of this NPR interview that struck me:
“The chapters in this book give such deep studies of the personalities who populate Steely Dan's songs (and, by extension, of the musicians who brought them to life). Did your relationship with any of these songs change while writing about them, illustrating them, or otherwise getting inside the heads of these characters? Did you learn anything about the songs that genuinely surprised you while working on this project?
LeMay: I learned so much. On our weekly calls, Alex always excitedly ushered me into the entrance of several wormholes he'd been traversing, and it was a constant delight. Thinking deeply about what these characters were wearing, what they might've been doing in the narrative beyond the narrative, thinking about their environment, how they held their faces, how they held their bodies — it was an immersive way to listen. I'd had ideas in my head about so many of the characters because I tend to think visually, but there were lots of fantastic surprises, like when we dug into Cathy Berberian, for instance. I'd never looked up what she looked like before.
Pappademas: I think what surprised me the most as I dug deeper into these songs was how much empathy Donald and Walter seemed to have for their characters. It's not something they're usually given credit for — the idea people have about them is that they're always snickering amongst themselves, making fun of the people they write about, but I think that's actually more true of somebody like Randy Newman than it is of Becker/Fagen. I think there's always a real sense of humanity's plight underneath whatever coldness or archness is more easily detectable in their work on first blush — even when the people they're writing about are doomed or deluded or depraved, you don't get the sense that they're judging these characters, most of the time. There's an attention paid to the human longing that motivates people to these weird actions and they don't judge the longing, of, say, the guy who's hung up on a sex worker in "Pearl of the Quarter" — whereas Frank Zappa, given the same storyline, would absolutely write about what a moron that guy is.
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.
IN THIS PAINTING: The El Supremo from Show Biz Kids/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/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”.
It is sad that we will never see new music from Steely Dan. The great Walter Becker left us in 2017. He would have been very proud of Joan LeMay and Alex Pappademas’s book. I am not sure what Donald Fagen thinks of it. The passion and detail does great justice to Steely Dan’s unique and genius music. Fleshes out these incredible and intriguing characters. As there is so much love for Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, and it is clear LeMay and Pappademas have this shared love and connection, it makes me wonder whether we will see them back together again. As of this month, there is no news as to whether Donald Fagen will follow up 2012’s Sunken Condos. We await a fifth studio album. I know he did interviews in 2022 where the subject of new music came up. He said how he has written some songs and spent some time in the studio. Still busy touring as Steely Dan, I guess we will hear new Donald Fagen music in the next year or two. Would Joan LeMay and Alex Pappademas do anything with Donald Fagen’s characters?! Steely Dan’s discography is more expansive and character-filled, though there are so many Donald Fagen songs with these Steely Dan-like characters that would be fascinating to know more about. From titular characters like Security Joan, Morph the Cat, Maxine; there is also the Slinky Thing from the track of the same name (from Sunken Condos), H Gang (Morph the Cat), Miss Marlene and Planet D'Rhonda (both from Sunken Condos), Morph the Cat’s Mary Shut the Garden Door and The Night Belongs to Mona; the album’s depiction of Death in Brite Nightgown. There is also Tomorrow's Girls (from 1993’s Kamakiriad) and Ruby Baby (from The Nightfly).
Donald Fagen as a solo artist has created some wonderful characters across his four solo albums so far. Even if Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay do not work on anything else Steely Dan-related/adjacent again, it would be epic if they came together for something. Such is the brilliance of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan we hope, like Donald Fagen and Walter Becker reuniting for 2000’s Two Against Nature – after Steely Dan went on hiatus after 1980’s Gaucho -, that the multi-talented LeMay and Pappademas do more. On 2nd March, Steely Dan’s third studio album, Pretzel Logic, turns fifty. It compelled me to dive back into Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. Not only an essential purchase for Steely Dan fans, I would advise anyone knew to the genius of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to read it. It made me think about Donald Fagen’s solo work and all the incredible characters in the albums. The history and background of the albums and how, in 2024, we look ahead to see if the master will grace us with any new music. Pages and pages of beautiful paintings, spellbinding words that do full justice to the songs of Steely Dan, I will keep reading Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. It offers up something new with each visit. It truly is a…
WORK of dedication and genius.