Note: I have a few book-length projects in various states of planning. One is dedicated to Steely Dan. As TBVO readers know, I'm fond of writing of Walker Becker and Donald Fagen, in both their Dan and solo incarnations. Below is a short excerpt of the book-length work-in-planning, which deals with how the image of Backer and Fagen as anti-rock stars so seamlessly supports the experience of listening to Steely Dan's perfectly crafted studio albums -- an alignment of image and sound not true of many of their contemporaries. 

Listening to Steely Dan isn’t like listening to any other band.

To truly hear a recording, you have to consciously embrace the artifice of studio. The entire purpose of modern recording is to trick listeners into forgetting that artifice. To cite just one example, drums can be mixed from the perspective of the audience, not the drummer. This sonic image, in turn, invites us to recall the band on stage, playing together in the same place, at the same time, facing you, the audience-cum-listener.

When you hear Robert Plant growling “Black Dog” or cooing "Stairway to Heaven," you picture him on stage at Madison Square Garden in The Song Remains the Same. Insofar as you picture Plant anywhere else when listening to Led Zeppelin IV, it’s not in front of microphone at Island Studios. No. It’s from the top of the mountain suggested by the pile of reverb on his vocals. To visualize Plant belting out “And it's whispered that soon / If we all call the tune / Then the piper will lead us to reason / And a new day will dawn / For those who stand long /And the forests will echo with laughter” at the same microphone where Harry Nilsson recorded “Without You” and Cat Stevens cut “Peace Train” is not only vaguely comical, it also seriously undermines the inherent grandiosity and ineffable mystery that surrounds Led Zeppelin IV — a grandiosity and mystery that the band actively worked to cultivate over years.

But unless you’re willing to picture Led Zeppelin IV being tracked in the same place that unabashed pop-rock studio creations were cut, you can’t really hear all of the strained vocal overdubs stacked in the center of “The Battle of Evermore,” the left-to-right delayed echo on that vocal, or the rather boxy snare sound on “Stairway to Heaven.” Once you picture the studio, all of the decisions that went into capturing and crafting every sound come into view. Page isn’t up there on stage at MSG playing his wonderfully ostentatious six- and twelve-string double-neck Gibson SG. No, he’s sitting on an office chair beside a carefully positioned acoustic baffle on Island Studios' floor. He’s laying down track after track of guitars. Electric, acoustic, six-string, twelve-string. You name it. That burbling keyboard buried deep in the center channel of “Stairway,” blending almost seamlessly with one of Page’s most chorus’d sounding twelve-string electrics? That’s John Paul Jones sitting at a Fender Rhodes in London's Notting Hill neighborhood.

The image of the artist in the studio serves to render a band like Zepplin slightly diminished.

In contrast, to imagine Steely Dan in the studio is to imagine them I’m their natural element. The canonical image of Steely Dan is of two scruffy, sneer-smirking reticent geniuses who rarely ventured outside of the carefully controlled, airless confines of the studio. They weren’t the first artist to master this technological environment, of course. Famously, The Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds were studio creations. However, listeners still had an image of the candy stripe shirt-clad Beach Boys boys bopping along in harmony fresh in their minds. Even more indelibly, record buyers could vividly recall those four loveable mop-tops shaking their heads in unison on the Ed Sullivan Show. “Woooo!”

Sure, in it’s six-piece iteration, Steely Dan may have toured a little in the early years and appeared on Don Kirscher’s Rock Concert and Midnight Special. But it’s not like most of Steely Dan’s fans came to them in the time of “Dirty Work” or “Any Major Dude.” No. The Dan’s bestselling albums were made by the studio duo of Becker and Fagen. When you hear “Peg or “Hey Nineteen,” you don’t imagine Becker fingering his bass on Madison Square Garden’s stage or Fagen belting his vocals from the top of Kilimanjaro. No. You imagine them overseeing meticulous overdubs at The Village Recorders Studios in Los Angeles. Of course the Fagen you’re hearing was standing in a vocal booth, not sitting at the piano in a smoky bar. Of course Walter Becker is plunking on his base DI’d into the studio console, not hooked into a Ampeg stack in front of adoring fans. Everybody knows that.

Steely Dan’s image isn’t diminished by visualizing Becker and Fagen in the studio. It’s enhanced. Becker and Fagen’s achievements are those of pluck, persistence, and technological prowess. Their successes aren’t witnessed by throngs gazing at the stage; they’re achieved alone in a studio, seen only by engineer Roger Nichols. In that way, Steely Dan is more like us. We can’t imagine commanding a crowd of thousands, but we can convince ourselves that, just maybe, with the help of a lot of technology, a lot of time, and a lot of patience, we could create something great. It doesn’t matter whether that’s true. It feels true. Or at least it feels truer than placing yourself in Zeppelin. Becker and Fagen are the kind of guys you’d find looking through albums at the record store, not the kind of guys whose photos adorn those records’ sleeves.

Because of this, it’s easy to hear the minute, perfect detail in every Steely Dan record. It’s not just that they were better-recorded than almost every other album. (Though, of course, they were.) It’s also that there’s no mental picture besides the studio to distract you from hearing each sound as the contrived stimuli that it is. Even better, it’s precisely because Steely Dan's albums are so meticulously recorded that to draw your attention to these details is to deepen your awe for each song. In contrast, to actually pay attention to the artifice of Led Zeppelin IV is to gaze at the stitches, to notice the join marks and the flaws that are audible even in a sonic masterpiece like IV.

Listening to Steely Dan isn’t like listening to any other band because when you picture them in the recording studio, that’s where you’re supposed to picture them. It’s the only place they could be. Because of that, you can really hear the sonic brush strokes on Aja or Gaucho in a way you'll always struggle to hear them on an album like Led Zeppelin IV. That's part of what makes Steely Dan the ultimate audiophile band. That's part of what makes their albums so good.