) The group's first lineup was assembled in December 1971 in Los Angeles, where Becker and Fagen had relocated to work as staff songwriters for ABC/Dunhill. (Fans of Beat Generation literature, Fagen and Becker named the band after a "revolutionary" product mentioned in the William S. Dias was immediately impressed by the pair's abilities, and especially that they already had a whole stack of original material. In the early 1970s they worked as pop songwriters for ABC/Dunhill Records, which released all of Steely Dan's 1970s albums.īecker and Fagen began to form Steely Dan in the summer of 1970, responding to a Village Voice ad for "a bassist and keyboard player with jazz chops" placed by guitarist Denny Dias. The duo's early career included working with Jay and the Americans, for which they used pseudonyms. None of the groups lasted long, but the partnership between Fagen and Becker did. Fagen described his college bands as sounding like " the Kingsmen performing Frank Zappa material".
Becker and Fagen attracted a revolving assortment of musicians including future actor Chevy Chase, to form the bands Leather Canary, the Don Fagen Jazz Trio, and the Bad Rock Band. Īfter graduating from South Brunswick High School in 1965, inspired by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, he enrolled at Bard College to study English literature, where he met Walter Becker in a coffee house in 1967. He has also expressed admiration for the Boswell Sisters, Henry Mancini, and Ray Charles. In his late teens he was drawn to soul music, funk, Motown, and Sly and the Family Stone. He developed a lifelong fondness for table tennis. He learned to play the piano, and he played baritone horn in the high school marching band. He regularly took the bus to Manhattan to see performances by jazz musicians Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis. At age eleven, a cousin recommended jazz music and Fagen went to the Newport Jazz Festival, becoming what he called a "jazz snob": "I lost interest in rock 'n' roll and started developing an anti-social personality." In the early 1960s, beginning at age twelve, he often went to the Village Vanguard, where he was particularly impressed by Earl Hines, Willie "The Lion" Smith, and Bill Evans. The first record he bought was " Reelin' and Rockin' " by Chuck Berry. įagen became interested in rock and rhythm and blues ( R&B) in the late 1950s. It was probably the first time I realized I had my own view of life." His life in Kendall Park, including his teenage love of late-night radio, inspired his later album The Nightfly. He later recalled that it "was like a prison. His family moved to the suburb of Fair Lawn around 1958 and soon after to a house on Bedford Road in the Kendall Park section of South Brunswick, New Jersey. Fagen was born in Passaic, New Jersey, on January 10, 1948, to Jewish parents, Joseph "Jerry" Fagen, an accountant, and his wife, Elinor, a homemaker who had been a swing singer in upstate New York's Catskill Mountains from childhood through her teens.
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