Shadow Dancing With Steely Dan

Part One: Bard and the Fagen-Becker Connection

Forest Hills, Queens, NY, October 28, 2018. 72nd Drive becomes Walter Becker Way.

The first time I interviewed Steely Dan was in late 1973 or early 1974, in a studio in Hollywood on Yucca Street. I remember Yucca because it it looked to be on dark side of Hollywood. I had heard of it because Raymond Chandler had Philip Marlowe living on Yucca Avenue "The Long Goodbye." With both poetic and a private detective license, Marlowe lived in a Yucca Avenue house in Laurel Canyon, where it wasn't really. (There are Chandler tours of Los Angeles where one can see the house.)

It was either my first or second trip to Los Angeles. I know I soaked up the street signs like a tourist, and I'm pretty sure I stayed at the Continental Hyatt House, where a group of pre-teens, braces on teeth, on a "Teen Tour" claimed to be on acid and called my room at 1 am to see if I wanted to party. I already had a teenager in my room: she was 19.

ABC-Dunhill Records had flown me out to interview the band and paid for …