Eminent Hipsters

July 29, 2013
In these entertaining sketches, Steely Dan keyboardist and front man Fagen pays tribute to the “talented musicians, writers, and performers” from beyond the suburban New Jersey of his youth. In one chapter, Fagen recalls his early fascination with now-forgotten jazz singers the Boswell Sisters. He singles out Connie—whose career was affected in some measure by an early brush with illness (likely polio)—and praises her last recording, saying that she sounds like a “toned-down Wanda Jackson or Brenda Lee.” Fagen sends a kind of love letter to Henry Mancini, telling the composer of the theme from the television show Peter Gunn—a theme whose first notes every neophyte guitarist tried to learn back then—that his music continues to be young and fresh. Fagen vivaciously recalls his college days at Bard, meeting his future Steely Dan bandmate Walter Becker, and playing at a Halloween party with Walter and actor Chevy Chase on drums. In 2012, Fagen, Michael McDonald, and Boz Scaggs toured as the Duke of September Rhythm Revue; during the months of the tour, Fagen kept a journal, included in these pages, that’s filled with irony, sarcasm, humor, anger, and flat-out honesty about what it’s like to be on the road playing to houses filled with aging hippies: “Tonight the crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers. By the end of the set, they were all on their feet, albeit shakily, rocking.... So this, now, is what I do: assisted living.” Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

September 1, 2013
Not really a rock memoir, but rather a book as distinctively peculiar and edgy as one might expect from the co-founder of Steely Dan. The literary debut by keyboardist Fagen, a former English major who has written pieces on popular culture for magazines, opens with essays concerning his formative years as a skinny, anxious nerd immersed in jazz and science fiction, rebelling against 1950s suburbia as a self-described "subterranean in gestation with a real nasty case of otherness." He writes of radio hipsters and jazz clubs, of the "mendacity on the part of adults that was the most sinister enemy of all." Fagen ends this section with a reminiscence of his years at Bard College, where his underachieving bohemian classmates included Walter Becker, who became his musical partner. And that's pretty much it for Steely Dan, since "that's another story," one that perhaps he is saving for another book. Instead, the second half is what he understatedly calls his "grouchy tour journal from the summer of 2012," when he teamed with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs as the Dukes of September, performing their own hits and older R&B for an audience he appears to dislike. The younger ones are "lazy, spoiled TV babies" who have "ultimately turned us into performing monkeys." Other fans are the same generation as the headliners: "Mike, Boz and I are pretty old now and so is most of our audience. Tonight, though, the crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers." On another, there "were people on slabs, decomposing, people in mummy cases." Some of this is acerbically funny in a self-lacerating sort of way, and some of the essays, particularly the one on hero worship and disillusionment ("I Was a Spy for Jean Shepherd"), are very incisive, but much of it is a downer. It's characteristic that the author knows what his readers want--the story of Steely Dan--and refuses to give it to them.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2013

Fagen is cofounder of the literate jazz-pop-rock band Steely Dan, and his first book is a wry compendium and "art-o-biography," as he coins it, consisting of pieces that illuminate the musical, literary, and cultural influences on the young Fagen and a hilariously cranky tour diary from 2012. His appreciations of Henry Mancini, the Boswell Sisters, jazz clubs and radio, sf, and the comedy of Jean Shepherd are all tempered with reminiscences of growing up in suburban 1950s New Jersey. Fagen's portrait of his college years at Bard in the piece "Class of '69" superbly evokes a time and place and serves as a capsule memoir of the college experience. In the lengthy diary from a tour with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs last year, Fagen comes across as an avuncular misanthrope as he describes mostly offstage moments filled with dreary hotels, long travel, frustrating audience reactions, shabby venues, and the resultant anxiety (along with some musical joy) that all of these things bring. VERDICT Rather than a straightforward memoir, this collection provides music fans a distinctive perspective on an artist's inspirations and life, written in a sardonic and uniquely entertaining voice.--James Collins, Morristown-Morris Twp. P.L., NJ

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2013
Since the popular music group Steely Dan produced its last album in 2003, founding member Fagen has been keeping busy performing in occasional reunion tours and channeling his celebrated, lyric-generating talents into penning crafty and incisive essays. In his first collection of these distinctively droll and erudite pieces, Fagen covers a wide range of topics, from boyhood memories to musical criticism. The eminent hipsters referred to in the title are Fagen's early idols, such radio personalities as Jean Shepherd, best known for narrating A Christmas Story, and late-night jazz DJ Mort Fega, the cool uncle you always wished you'd had. Class of 69 recounts his momentous years at New York's Bard College, where he met Steely Dan cofounder Walter Becker, and With the Dukes of September excerpts his journal notes from a recent musical tour he took with fellow music legends Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald. While Steely Dan devotees will, of course, revel in Fagan's barb-edged observations, any observer of popular culture will find his essays informative and trenchantly amusing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)