There were three reasons (besides wanting to keep the faith) I decided to go. One was the sudden (and unexpected) availability of very cheap tickets, without which I couldn't have afforded the show. The second was the fact, and I admit this in all honesty, that backup singer Carolyn Leonhart was not going to be performing with the band Saturday night. Her brother Michael Leonhart (SD trumpet player and ostensible arranger) was getting married, and she was going to be absent, so the boys were going to use a sub. (See below for explanation.)
The third, and main, reason was the venue. Roseland was the place where Ellington, Holiday, Lester Young, Bird, and Coltrane had played...the boys would be jazzed (literally and figuratively) to be on the stage where their heroes of the night had blown. And of course the audience would be a New York audience, hip to the nuances, there to share the things they know and love with those of their kind. Jones Beach had been full of picnickers and beach bums with sand in their flip flops, a good bunch maybe but yahoos just the same. I expected a different crowd, and a different atmosphere, at Roseland.
So off to the city via train, change at Hiscksville (appropriate since Becker and Fagen started there c. 1970, playing in a band called Demian with Denny Dias), past Forest Hills station, which I never see without thinking "birthplace of W. Becker", then to Penn and down into bowels of subway, brief jam into 8th St. car, finally out into the rain and two blocks walk up 8th Avenue..."52nd Street's the junction"...on gray rainy Kerouackian night of buzzing neon and jumping sidewalk, everybody out for a good time..."these are New Yorkers, you think a little rain bugs 'em?" said Eric. Crowds jammed the theatre district, limos and taxis everywhere, people in evening clothes ducking under awnings to escape the intermittent downpour or just marching along getting wet, fuggit. We slid into the bar at the Novotel across the street from Roseland to pick up tickets from New Jersey Dan fan, thanks Jed! Had a couple of drinks, checked out the scene, didn't seem to be much happening. Guess all the Danfest action had been the night before.
And so across the street to Roseland. Got right in, no line, through lobby past the "swag" stand hawking SD-approved merch: T-shirts, mousepads, mugs, messenger bags (I wouldn't have minded one of those but didn't have the requisite $55) and bam! right into the ballroom. Balcony overhead, exposed bricks and degenerating plaster columns, dim lights, old scraped-up wood dance floor, long benches flanking one side of the room, VIP bar/tables, slightly elevated for best view, on the other side, that's about it. Big long stage across west wall. Network of light rigging overhead, giant monitors left and right, screens for video overhead and in four positions back and front. PA softly playing some eccentric reggae/house type groove, very anonymous.
Crowd was gathering toward front of stage, getting thicker and thicker. We managed to squeeze into a spot about 60 feet from stage, in reasonable view of Fagen's extremely beat looking Fender Rhodes stage model piano. Becker's amp rig was to the left of it, mic in front. Numerous music stands (with clip lights) across stage. Luckily Eric and I are both tall and the average New York music lover isn't. We could see pretty well. I'd have preferred being right up under Fagen's Rhodes so I could watch him and Becker play, but Eric didn't want to do any elbowing, so we stayed where we were.
Very close to starting time of 8 p.m. the house lights dimmed and the band came onstage, minus Becker and Fagen of course, and performed a Ray Bryant instrumental, "Cubano Chant." Toward the end of it there was a huge cheer throughout the house as Becker entered from the left and Fagen from the right, Becker being handed his Sadowsky custom Strat copy by a stagehand and Fagen sitting down behind the Rhodes and both finishing out the song with the band. Huge applause. Band then kicked off with "Aja". Sound was rather similar to that at Jones Beach, distorted and not well mixed. I could barely hear Fagen's vocals, and his Rhodes was inaudible. Horn section (two tenors, trumpet, 'bone) was good and loud. Becker (guitar and vocal) was somewhat audible.
Backup vocalists were three young black girls, two of them the regular backup singers (Cynthia Calhoun and Cindy Mizelle), the third (Tawatha Agee) the sub for C. Leonhart. They sounded great. Re Leonhart, I watched her on three different shows of the 2000 Dan tour, appearing to be in desperate need of first a square meal and then maybe some vocal coaching but certainly not in the market for a course in self esteem. On the “Everything Must Go” CD she is featured prominently, her brittle, almost pharyngeal vocal color dominating songs like “Pixeleen” and “Blues Beach,” for what reasons only Becker and Fagen must know. Judging by the rich, full harmonies of the three singers on Saturday night, B & F would be well advised to retain Ms. Agee and drop la Leonhart. And if anybody wants to give me a hard time about it, no sweat. I call ‘em as I hear ‘em.
As the first set progressed I continued to be distressed by the muddy, distorted mix. I wondered why it was so ill balanced, until I started paying closer attention to the drummer, Keith Carlock. Carlock himself was visible during the show chiefly as a pair of broad shoulders and a burly left arm whacking the cymbals with intense ferocity, but his presence was impossible to ignore: a particularly nasty neanderthal with no sense of dynamics, polyrhythms, or (God forbid) the actual structure of the songs. He didn’t play, he annihilated. Tom Barney, the bass player, faced away from Carlock, which I thought was a bit strange until I realized that he was deliberately ignoring him. Had he tried to lock into Carlock’s relentless thumpage, the show would have rapidly degenerated into a heavy metal concert, so evidently Barney’s avoidance strategy was his way of trying to maintain his integrity and keep the rhythm section honest and the bottom end clean...which he more than succeeded in doing. But that also explained why the mix was such a muddy swamp...because Carlock played every tune as if it were “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida”, the other players were overcompensating, and the overall sonics went to hell as the house mixer struggled to make sense of it all.
But quibbling aside, it was great to watch Fagen, that scruffy pawnbroker in Ray Charles shades, pounding like a madman on his war-torn Fender Rhodes, sometimes standing up and holding an odd looking blue portable keyboard with a fake “guitar” neck, sometimes blowing strange little lines on that much underutilized keyboard/wind hybrid, the Hohner Melodica. My heart went out to him, so unlikely a front man was he, so awkward and intent and strangely vulnerable in his sheer lack of showmanship/MC BS. But then when he sang he really threw himself into the song, so you could tell he took the lyrics seriously, the tendons bulging in his neck as he reached for a high note, eyes invisible behind shades but maybe glowing with pain and fear, maybe with ecstasy, maybe both or neither. When he sang, he was the song, the idea, the message, and it went straight out into the audience like an electric current right through that old beat wood floor of Roseland, and they sang with him, and everyone knew, they felt what he was singing, lost, bittersweet, cooking, swinging, sanctified in unity.
And then “my partner Wal-tair Beck-air”as Fagen called him, balding, bespectacled, old black sportcoat and older T-shirt, looking studiously down at his hands and not out at the audience much, playing cool jazzy riffs on his Sadowsky...Walter Becker almost seemed nervous at times, afraid things onstage might get out of control, the turning point in all this chaos being the first time he played a wrong note or muffed a lick in one of his solos, after which it would be downhill all the way. No time for fun and games, this was serious, this was hard labor. I began to see concretely that these really were studio cats, used to endless punch-ins, re-dos, fix-it-with-Pro Tools conveniences that could mold the roughest performance into something as slick as snot on a doorknob. Up there onstage, naked, they felt they were working without a net...which they were, of course. Hence Becker’s concern.
There was a full horn section (two tenors, trumpet and 'bone) blasting, some good solos, Fagen joking about the trumpet sub who was sitting in for Michael Leonhart (who was getting married) and hinting that maybe they were going to fire Michael Leonhart and keep the sub; Ted Baker inspired as usual on Steinway, playing surprising unaccompanied intros to songs and amazing everyone with the brilliance of his ideas; Jon Herington doing his second tour with the band, playing cartoonish, squeaky, distorted second lead guitar parts (I realized, somewhat belatedly, he was there to make Becker look good, which he definitely did). The setlist was the same as at Jones Beach, from what I’d heard...but now the crowd was like a choir, singing along loudly and richly, so much so that at one point during “Don’t Take Me Alive” Fagen stopped singing and let the audience go on for most of the verse, and he turned to Becker with this incredulous expression, clearly not staged, it was real, these two big time guys with Grammys who still can't believe their luck, keep flashing back to old Brooklyn cold water walkup on President Street and being physically ejected from song publishers' offices in Brill Building...they still feel like zhlubs but they write this music that speaks so eloquently of time and place, of being lower than low, of knowing loss and pain like you know the back of your hand...and when you've been in that place and time, you hear what they're saying and feel transformed, included, uplifted. The Roseland crowd knew, and Fagen saw that and looked over at Becker and for me that was the high point of the evening, even better than when Becker said “This is the best Steely Dan show I can remember” or words to that effect (some guy next to us said “He says that at every show”).
And so there’s probably not much more to be said. I was glad I went. Reservations or no, my faith in Steely Dan, in Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, was renewed and I understood a few things now better than before, which was good reason for going and the outcome I’d hoped for. And so goodnight and hope to see the boys again next time, hopefully in NYC but anywhere else would be fine.
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