I spent the past few years on the trail of the long-lost film You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It. The only way to make journalism like this viable is through the direct support of subscribers. If you appreciate my work and want to help me do more of it, please upgrade to a paid subscription today. Thank you, as always, for your interest!

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Earlier this month, I published an in-depth oral history of You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat, Peter Locke’s gonzo 1971 counterculture film with a soundtrack by a couple of upstart songwriters named Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The movie had a brief theatrical run 14 months before Steely Dan came out with their debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, and by all accounts hasn’t been seen in the 55 years since. No home video release. No revival house screenings. No Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray. Nada.

Back in early 2022, when I was first mapping out the topics I wanted to explore in Expanding Dan, the origin story of You’ve Got to Walk It was immediately on the short list. Even better, I thought, would be finding a reel of the long-lost film and sharing it with Danfans who, like me, have been itching to see it, despite Becker and Fagen’s withering comments over the years about the movie’s substandard quality. I refused to believe that the film was really, truly gone. Perhaps no one had looked diligently enough or in just the right places.

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To my subscribers—

This is the kind of story I started Expanding Dan to publish: reporting that dives deeply into a piece of Steely Dan history that otherwise might never get told in full. These pieces take a lot of time and effort. For this oral history of the lost film You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It and its soundtrack by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, I spent months tracking down sources, digging through archives, conducting interviews, and assembling all of that research into a compelling, immersive narrative. If you enjoy this work and want to help me do more of it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today. You won’t want to miss what’s coming next: a significant reel of footage from You’ve Got to Walk It that hasn’t been seen since the film’s brief theatrical run in 1971.

Thanks, as always, for your support!

—Jake

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Neither of them wanted to discuss it. They seemed embarrassed to even acknowledge its existence, as if it were a youthful indiscretion that should be expunged from the cultural record.

For Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the sore subject was their first official album: the soundtrack to a low-budget counterculture satire bearing the comically protracted title You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat (also known as You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat). Made in New York City in 1969 and 1970, the film premiered in theaters in September 1971, 14 months before Steely Dan would release their debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill.

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Nearly three years ago, I received a message from the British DJ, radio host, and Oasis cover boy Sean Rowley. He told me he had started curating compilations for the UK reissue label Ace Records. He’d put together Ladies Sing the Boss, which showcased Bruce Springsteen covers by the likes of Bettye LaVette and Emmylou Harris.

Next, Rowley said, he wanted to do a Steely Dan–related comp.

His initial inclination was to pull together a bunch of covers: Mike Mandel’s take on “Peg,” Ahmad Jamal doing “Black Cow,” and so on. While Dan covers can be enjoyable if done right, we landed during a follow-up conversation on more stimulating thematic territory: songs by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen that never appeared on a Steely Dan album and were released by other artists. We began sending examples to each other and soon had an inventory of about three dozen. Rowley handed over the list of our favorites to Ace.

A few months went by, and word came down that licensing hurdles—which I’d feared might eventually gum up the works—had brought the project to a halt. The news bummed me out; I’d wanted to give listeners high-quality access to the rarities, and it would’ve been interesting to present the songs together in context through the liner notes.

Recently that project was again on my mind, and it reignited my desire to bring the comp to fruition, if only in the digital sphere. The 11 songs discussed below, organized roughly by date from the years 1969 to 1981, are limited to Becker-Fagen collaborations. Future volumes will explore the boys operating in their own lanes: Fagen-penned compositions being cut by such artists as Diana Ross as well as Becker’s cowrites with the producer Larry Klein. Stay tuned!

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When Donald Fagen appeared on the call-in radio show Rockline in January 1983, the buzzword of the moment was “digital.” Still traumatized by the “Second Arrangement” erasure, Fagen had jumped at the opportunity to make his debut solo album using 3M’s cutting-edge digital recording system, which allowed for the creation of backup tracks without generation loss as well as sound quality with unparalleled crispness and clarity.

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When I interviewed the producer Larry Klein earlier this year about his work on Walter Becker’s 2008 solo album Circus Money, he casually dropped the news that a song he and Becker had written during that period had finally been cut after collecting dust for 18 years.

“Walter and I were doing writing jags in New York City, L.A., and on Maui,” Klein recently told me, retracing the history of the previously unrecorded tune, “Let Us Hang,” a seductive R&B peach that nods at Sly & the Family Stone’s “Family Affair.” “We were mainly writing for Circus Money but would do other things too. We wrote some things for Madeleine Peyroux as well. We started playing around with this groove, then thought, ‘Let’s write a song for Bonnie [Raitt]!’ We had a ball writing it. We were writing in L.A., which meant that we’d set up in my kitchen each evening, drink wine and write. I had written a song with some friends called ‘The Fundamental Things’ that ended up as the title song of one of Bonnie’s albums, Fundamental, and I could easily get a song to her. I don’t think that we ever gave her the song after we finished, as I heard from her manager that she wasn’t looking for songs, and she wanted to write everything for the album that she was working on. The song just kind of hung around after that.”

Klein plucked “Let Us Hang” off the shelf and offered it to the Grammy-winning jazz vocalist and songwriter Nicole Zuraitis while producing her new album, The Devil I Knew, which will be released on Friday.

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“When I was working with Nicole, I realized that we needed some levity to balance out the group of songs, and suddenly ‘Let Us Hang’ came to mind,” Klein says. “I thought that it was a great way to finally get this song of Walter and mine out into the world.”

This week I spoke to Zuraitis about the decision to record “Let Us Hang,” her experience performing The Royal Scam with legendary drummer Bernard Purdie, and the lessons she’s gleaned from listening to the music of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. In addition to the interview, below you’ll also have the chance to hear the original “Let Us Hang” demo, courtesy of Klein, and see the music video for the song in its exclusive world premiere.

The Devil I Knew will be released on July 17.

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At the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles last month, photographs of Steely Dan taken by the audio engineer Roger Nichols in the early 1970s were exhibited for the first time. “Reelin' in the Early Years of Steely Dan” also included a panel discussion with founding guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, session legend Dean Parks, vocalist Royce Jones, Cherokee Studios cofounder Bruce Robb, and former ABC/Dunhill Records A&R chief Steve Barri. I had the pleasure of serving as co-moderator alongside Roger’s daughter Cimcie, who discovered the more than 800 photo negatives among her late father’s possessions in 2023.

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The Clive Davis Theater, which seats only 200, was packed. The event sold out soon after it was announced in early May. A handful of Expanding Dan subscribers managed to nab a seat, but others told me they were frustrated when they weren’t able to get a ticket or couldn’t make it to L.A. on such short notice.

“Will there be video?” they asked. “Please tell me there will be video!”

Well, I’m happy to report that the good folks at the Grammy Museum recorded the whole shebang, and for the next 24 hours the Nichols family is giving Expanding Dan subscribers early access to the video via the link below.

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The H is most definitely O. Much of Europe is currently in the throes of a record-setting heatwave, and triple-digit temps are expected throughout the eastern half of the U.S. next week.

Here is CNN’s actual, highly scientific computer model of the heat dome now forming over the country on the eve of its semiqui…

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Early this month, I had the honor of cohosting a discussion at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles with some of the towering figures in the history of Steely Dan. The panelists included founding guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, legendary session guitarist Dean Parks, vocalist extraordinaire Royce Jones, Cherokee Studios cofounder Bruce Robb, and ABC/Dunhill Records A&R chief Steve Barri. The organizer of the event and my co-moderator was Cimcie Nichols, the daughter of the late Steely Dan engineer Roger “the Immortal” Nichols.

We gathered at the sold-out Clive Davis Theater for “Reelin’ in the Early Years of Steely Dan,” the first-ever exhibition of Roger’s photographs of the band from 1972 through 1974, which Cimcie discovered a few years ago in her father’s archives. As I said in my introduction to the program, what Roger was able to capture, because of his position as a trusted audio engineer and friend, is Steely Dan like we’ve never seen them before—almost completely unguarded while in the studio and onstage. His intimate shots make you feel as if you’re right there with the musicians as they’re cutting tracks on Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Pretzel Logic.

The Grammy Museum filmed the whole event, and I’ll send the video in a newsletter once it’s available. In the meantime, I wanted to share some of my favorite stories as told by the esteemed members of the panel.

Limited-edition prints of Roger Nichols’s photos are now for sale. (Use the code REELIN15 for 15 percent off.)

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In late April, Sotheby’s auctioned a work of art well known to Steely Dan fans: a painting by the artist Zox, featuring skyscrapers capped by the heads of monstrous beasts. Originally made for Van Morrison’s album Naked in the Jungle, the piece was repurposed for the cover of The Royal Scam in 1976.

Over the phone recently from his home in Los Angeles, Zox told me it was difficult to let go of what is probably his most famous work after having it in his possession for 50 years.

“There weren’t very many paintings of that size that were done specifically for album covers,” he said of the canvas, which measures eight and a half feet square. “It was one of those pieces that didn’t fit in anywhere, partially because of its size. It was shown in art galleries over the years, but it didn’t get displayed very often. There was no place in my studio that I could put it without it sticking out into a room.”

The winning bid was $28,000. “I thought I’d get more, and everyone around the auction said they thought so as well. But hope springs eternal,” Zox said with a chuckle. “Things are only worth what people are willing to pay, and you’ve got to find those people.”

Ultimately he would like to see the painting hanging one day in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. “One of the guys at Sotheby’s who worked on the auction also works with the Rock Hall,” Zox said. “He told me he’d talk to the people over there and also talk to the guy who bought it,” to explore the potential for a donation. “I haven’t heard back about that yet.”

In 2024, Expanding Dan spoke to the photographer and art director Ed Caraeff about his work on the Steely Dan albums Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, and The Royal Scam. Zox’s recollections, meanwhile, were buried in that story as a footnote. Now, as we mark The Royal Scam’s semicentennial, here are the painter’s comments about his role in creating a haunting piece for the record’s cover.

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After reading the news of Sonny Rollins’s death this week at age 95, I took a look back at what Walter Becker and Donald Fagen said over the years about the Saxophone Colossus. Journalists trying to figure out Steely Dan’s secret sauce regularly asked Becker and Fagen about their primary influences, and they almost always mentioned Rollins in the company of Bird, Duke, Miles, Mingus, and Monk.

“Walter and I started with the idea that freedom was a given because our heroes were Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins,” Fagen told The Telegraph in 2006. When I asked Fagen three years ago about the albums he has listened to most often, his answer included, “All Sonny’s stuff through The Bridge”—nearly 20 albums over a wildly inventive 10-year stretch.

It can be tempting to see Rollins’s music as a “Rosebud”-like key to understanding Fagen’s inner life. On the cover of his debut solo album, The Nightfly, Fagen poses as the kind of after-hours jazz disc jockey he heard on the radio as a kid in the New Jersey suburbs, and the record he’s spinning is none other than Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders from 1959.

Around the age of 12, Fagen began taking the bus into Manhattan to attend shows at jazz clubs. “At the Village Vanguard, my distress at being the youngest person in the audience would dissolve as soon as the music started,” he wrote in his memoir, Eminent Hipsters. “In the early ’60s, gods stood on that tiny stage. A lot of them drank J&B and smoked Luckies, but they were gods just the same. Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane were still youngish, fearless, and working at the summit of their creativity.”

In the December 18, 1993, issue of Melody Maker, Fagen was asked to share some of the records he deemed essential. Among his dozen selections was a tune off of Rollins’s The Bridge. The list was first republished in a 1994 issue of Metal Leg, the original Steely Dan fanzine. Now, with this mixtape, you can listen to all of Fagen’s picks while reading his commentary below.

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In July 2024, I published a newsletter headlined “Donald Fagen: ‘There is no more Steely Dan.’” The piece included a transcript of Fagen’s November 1989 appearance on K-Rock radio, during which he spoke at length with “Rock and Roll Madame” Jo Maeder and spun some favorite records.

At the time Fagen was promoting the New York Soul concerts he was doing with an all-star band at the Lone Star Roadhouse, the precursor to the New York Rock and Soul Revue. “This is not—repeat, not—a Steely Dan concert of any kind,” he warned the station’s listeners, “so don’t come expecting that show which will never be, probably, and just doesn’t exist.”

That newsletter, part of the “From the Archives of Brian Sweet” series, would end up being the top Expanding Dan edition of 2024. So I was particularly excited, while recently digitizing more of Sweet’s collection of interview tapes, to stumble upon the recording of Fagen’s K-Rock spot.

Hearing the broadcast in full is a real treat because, between the conversation segments, Fagen and Maeder play so much great music. There are cuts by Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, Yellowjackets, Betty Harris, Willie Dixon, Joe Simon, Dr. John, and a live recording of Phoebe Snow singing “Bring It on Home To Me” during Howard Stern’s birthday broadcast at the West Bank Cafe.

Buy Reelin’ in the Years, by Brian Sweet, directly from the publisher, Omnibus Press.

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Cimcie Nichols couldn’t believe her eyes.

One day in August 2023, she was sorting through the archives of her father, longtime Steely Dan recording engineer Roger Nichols, who died in 2011. She removed the lid of one unfamiliar storage box, and inside she saw dozens of envelopes full of photo negatives. They were labeled in her father’s handwriting: “Steely Dan in Hollywood,” “Steely Dan Studio,” “Steely Dan Santa Monica Civic Concert,” and so on.

A former nuclear engineer and obsessive audiophile, Roger became the chief technician behind Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s quest to make perfect-sounding albums. Less known is the informal role he assumed as Steely Dan’s archivist. He squirreled away track sheets, recording notes, and rough mixes of in-progress songs. An auto racing photographer for many years, he would occasionally pull out his camera and hit the shutter during recording sessions and concerts.

After uncovering her father’s trove of photo negatives, Cimcie bought a light box and began examining the contents of each and every envelope, which totaled more than 800 images. The vast majority dated from 1972 to ’74, capturing moments in the studio throughout the making of Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Pretzel Logic, as well as a smattering of live shows.

“There was a moment when I got really emotional,” Cimcie says. “I was like, Omigod, there are hundreds of Steely Dan negatives. It was like finding treasure.”

Those photographs will be exhibited publicly for the first time during an event at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles on June 3. The program, titled “Reelin' in the Early Years of Steely Dan,” includes a panel discussion, moderated by Cimcie and me, featuring founding Steely Dan guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, legendary studio guitarist Dean Parks (who played on five Steely Dan albums), vocalist Royce Jones, former ABC/Dunhill A&R chief Steve Barri, and Bruce Robb, cofounder of Cherokee Studios, where Steely Dan recorded portions of Pretzel Logic.

“I’m excited to finally share my dad’s photos, hundreds of them, with the fans in a way that is thoughtful and brings together Steely Dan’s collaborators to tell the stories behind the images and celebrate the band’s origin story,” Cimcie says. Limited-edition prints will also be available for purchase.

The Nichols photo archive comes as a revelation in large part because Steely Dan, despite wide radio airplay and multi-platinum album sales, were one of the least documented popular rock groups of the 1970s. Becker and Fagen never plastered their faces on Steely Dan’s album covers, preferring to remain in the shadows. Aside from a few television appearances, virtually no footage of the group playing live during that era has been released. In photo shoots for magazines and newspapers, Becker and Fagen look to be enjoying the process about as much as they like having teeth extracted.

Roger’s candids, on the other hand, offer a view of Steely Dan like we’ve never seen them: unguarded in their natural habitat within the confines of the studio. In a series of stunning shots taken during the recording of Countdown to Ecstasy, he finds Dias, Becker, Fagen, and producer Gary Katz leaning over the mixing console, cigarettes in hand. You get a sense of both the rich creative tension and the mind-numbing tedium that was the Steely Dan recording experience.

Roger shot things that I assumed I’d never see: Fagen noodling on an electric guitar between takes on Can’t Buy a Thrill; Parks, drummer Jim Gordon, and bassist Wilton Felder laying down tracks on Pretzel Logic; drummer Jeff Porcaro, then only 19 years old, napping on a couch.

He also had an eye for the studio still-life. He found beauty in a console crowded with empty soda cans, rotary telephones, and ashtrays; knots of cables converging in a patchbay; the illuminated panels that made up the technologies of his trade.

There are some shots of Roger, too. Then in his late 20s, the California native is ruggedly handsome with fair hair and piercing blue eyes—a record exec’s idea of a rock band front man.

“I had never seen photos of him in the studio from that time,” Cimcie tells me. “There just aren’t many other photos of Steely Dan in the studio in the ’70s. This is pretty much it. No one else had a camera.”

“Reelin' in the Early Years of Steely Dan” will be held at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles on June 3 at 7 p.m.

There’s a lot of talk these days about a “male loneliness epidemic.” This may very well be a serious crisis, and I don’t mean to be flip, but men complaining about feeling sad and isolated is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Listen to music from the 1970s and early ’80s, and you will hear some of the all-time loneliest-sounding sonsabitches spilling their guts into very expensive microphones.

In the introduction to my recently published interview with Bill LaBounty, a master of this particular vein of emo AOR, I wrote, “LaBounty wasn’t making music to help listeners through bad breakups. He was instead creating the ultimate soundtrack for wallowing.”

The tracks on this mixtape feature wallowing aplenty—heartsick guys luxuriating in their own very deep feelings. Some try to look on the bright side but can’t see through the haze of melancholy. Others seem consumed by bitterness, jealousy, even fantasies of revenge. Whatever it is that’s bothering them, these fellas are getting it out of their systems and onto magnetic tape.

Maybe, just maybe, these songs point to one possible cure for our modern-day male loneliness epidemic: a guitar.

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I hadn’t yet taken a sip of coffee this morning when I received an email alerting me to a splashy New York Times Magazine feature: the 30 greatest living American songwriters, as decided by a panel of more than 250 “music insiders” and a half dozen Times critics.

I clicked and began thumbing through the list, which is in no particular order.

Stevie Wonder… Paul Simon… Taylor Swift…

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Brian and Eddie Holland… Dolly Parton… Diane Warren…

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Carole King… Outkast… Willie Nelson…

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Kendrick Lamar… Dylan… the Boss…

I zoomed past a photo of Smokey Robinson and his mesmerizing green eyes when my iPhone screen bounced. I’d reached the dead end of the page. Had I somehow missed him? I began the climb back up the list a bit more carefully this time.

Bad Bunny… Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis… Lana Del Rey… Valerie Simpson… Mariah Carey… Stephin Merritt… Babyface… Fiona Apple… Young Thug… Lionel Richie… Missy Elliott… Jay-Z… Lucinda Williams…

Where, I wondered, is the magnificent one, the one and only one, Mr. Steely Dan and whatever?

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At his commercial peak in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Bill LaBounty became a kind of avatar of boomer divorce. His best songs dwell on the emotional fallout of very adult relationships: fractured trust, obsessive jealousy, loss of identity, the ache of memory, even the desire for revenge. At the center of each tale of woe is his voice: soulful but slightly cracked, as if he’s been up all night crying. LaBounty wasn’t making music to help listeners through bad breakups. He was instead creating the ultimate soundtrack for wallowing.

His pain wasn’t a put-on. A particularly messy divorce provided enough material to fill four albums, which he recorded with some of the most elite studio musicians in Los Angeles.

“They always say you should write what you know, and if all you know is having your heart broken, that’s a good place to start,” LaBounty told me during an interview last February at a dimly lit bar and grill he frequents near his home in southwest Nashville.

It wasn’t long ago that LaBounty came to believe he was more or less retired from music. He turned to other pursuits, including his lifelong passion for cartooning, and with a partner launched a digital greeting card business as an outlet for his art. But today marks his comeback, as he releases his first LP in 12 years, Love at the End of the World.

He recorded the album in Paris with members of the French Steely Dan tribute group Dr Wu. Their musicianship, arrangements, and production prowess have given the project a level of sophistication and polish that rivals LaBounty’s early L.A. records. Now in his 70s, LaBounty is still singing about heartache, but after decades of a contented marriage to songwriter Beckie Foster, his lens has widened beyond the domestic. On songs such as “People Are Human,” “Keep the Planet Spinning,” and the album’s title track, he acknowledges the struggle to forge bonds and maintain sanity amid the storms of modern life.

Over fish tacos, LaBounty spoke in depth for the first time about how the breakup of his first marriage informed his divorce-core classics. He also talked about his regard for Steely Dan, his collaborations with Jeff Porcaro and other session players, and the circumstances that led to his return to the studio.

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Break out the hats and hooters: Steely Dan’s Alive in America is being released today on vinyl for the first time. The 1995 album, documenting the band’s return to live performance after an absence of nearly 20 years, has been refashioned as a 180-gram double LP in a limited-edition pressing of 4,000 being sold as a Record Store Day exclusive.

Earlier this week I talked separately with two of the most revered musicians featured on Alive in America, drummer Peter Erskine and bassist Tom Barney, who shared their experiences on the 1993 and ’94 tours captured on the album. Erskine was speaking from his home in California on the heels of this month’s release of Peregrine, an album he recorded with pianist Alan Pasqua and bassist Scott Colley. Barney was calling from New York, where he has played in the orchestra for The Lion King musical on Broadway for nearly 30 years.

They spoke about the pressures of serving as the rhythmic backbone of Steely Dan’s comeback, the thrills and quirks of playing with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and why “Fuck Bernard Purdie!” was once given as a performance note.

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In April 1976, the song “Moonlight Feels Right,” by an obscure Atlanta band named after a character from Moby-Dick, made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100. By the middle of that summer, the first single from Starbuck would peak at number 3, and it has never really gone away. We’ve been basking in its soft, synthy glow now for half a century.

From the moment it entered the charts, “Moonlight Feels Right” was lumped into the shaggy, mid-’70s AM gold now peddled in the wee small hours on Time Life compilation infomercials. But what separates Starbuck from the likes of Bread is that beyond the music’s slick surface listeners can find sly pop subversion—a distinctive sonic palette of Moog and marimba, artfully deployed innuendo cut through with a mischievous sense of humor. Think less Air Supply, more 10cc.

Back in December 2022, Starbuck front man and songwriter Bruce Blackman spoke over the phone from his home in Georgia about the creation and long life of his career-defining hit. With the 50th anniversary of the first chart appearance of “Moonlight” approaching on April 17, it seemed high time to finally publish our conversation. Blackman goes deep on the freak accident that preceded him writing the song, his romantic pursuit of the woman who inspired the lyrics, his shoe-leather promotional campaign for radio airplay, and the rushed recording session that yielded the finest mallet solo in all of pop music history.

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At a rehearsal for the New York Rock and Soul Revue in 1992, Donald Fagen had just kicked into Steely Dan’s “My Old School” on his Fender Rhodes when he heard something amiss. The maestro signaled to the band to stop and yelled across the stage to the keyboardist Scott Healy, who was a substitute on Hammond B3 organ that day and would soon join the house band for the nascent Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “He said that I was rushing,” Healy recently recalled. “And I was.”

Fourteen years later, Healy found himself seated across from Fagen once more, this time as a journalist on assignment. In the first of his few feature stories for Keyboard magazine, Healy spoke to Fagen in February 2006, on the eve of the release of Morph the Cat, the final installment in Fagen’s so-called Nightfly Trilogy.

“I remember the interview well, because I was so nervous,” Healy told me the other day. “He really lit up when I started asking about jazz and his influences.” Keyboard had arranged for a Rhodes to be delivered to the room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City where they met, giving Healy the chance to go deep on music theory with one of his heroes. “That was my favorite part,” he says. “I felt we were connecting about this stuff, and I asked him questions that I’d always wanted answered regarding Steely Dan chords and harmony and how he approaches playing the piano, and also his unique approach to chord voicings and sounds.”

I’ve long considered Healy’s piece one of the most distinctive Fagen interviews, because it captures two pros talking shop. A few weeks ago, I reached out to Healy to ask if he had held onto a recording of the conversation. After some searching, he sent me a photo of a RadioShack microcassette tape. On the label, he had scrawled Fagen’s name in pencil. He kindly digitized the 20-year-old tape and agreed to share the audio with Expanding Dan.

“I ended up playing with Donald again in Woodstock, when he started showing up at Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble, where I was playing a lot. I think it was 2009. He was really into playing the blues,” Healy said. “Now I’m living in Woodstock, and he’s living right above me in Bob Dylan’s old house, where he’s been for years.”

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At the Academy Awards last Sunday, when Nicole Kidman announced One Battle After Another as Best Picture, the orchestra did not play a piece from Jonny Greenwood’s inventively jittery score. Instead the musicians kicked into a 54-year-old pop song from the film’s soundtrack: “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan. It seemed an inspired choice by the ceremony’s producers, the strings swelling as director Paul Thomas Anderson and his collaborators took the stage to accept the night’s top Oscar.

In One Battle, Anderson drops the needle on “Dirty Work” as the narrative leaps forward 16 years, from the incendiary days of Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the revolutionary group the French 75 to his humdrum present as a perma-stoned single parent to his teenage daughter, Willa.

I saw the film during its first week in theaters having read nothing about it, so the appearance of “Dirty Work” came as a delightful surprise. As did Bob’s subsequent reference to hanging out with a former bandmate who “bought all this old equipment from Steely Dan’s studio to try to get that sort of vintage crackling tube sound.” (PTA Danfan status: confirmed!)

At the same time, I wondered why Anderson, presumably operating with a formidable music licensing budget, had decided to pull such a well-worn track from the songbook of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. “Dirty Work” has popped up over the years in everything from Euphoria and The Sopranos to David O. Russell’s American Hustle. Meanwhile, deeper but no less affecting cuts like “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” and “Here at the Western World” and “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” and “Don’t Take Me Alive” and “Sign in Stranger” and “The Royal Scam” and “Home at Last” and “Time Out of Mind” and “Third World Man” all sit virtually untouched by Hollywood’s music supervisors.

But the more I thought about “Dirty Work” in relation to One Battle After Another, the more fitting it seemed. The combination of Wurlitzer electric piano and Hammond B3 organ carries an undeniable emotional charge. It’s an instant mood-setter. And although the song is told from the perspective of a guy who is some woman’s on-call side piece when her man is out of town, it nonetheless conveys the generalized sense of paranoia and resignation felt by DiCaprio’s Bob, who foresees terrible trouble but seems to have lost the desire he once had as a younger man to fight for substantive change.

After One Battle’s triumphant night at the Oscars, I was compelled to revisit other films whose soundtracks or scores include music by Becker and/or Fagen. This is not meant to be an exhaustive inventory. Some intentional omissions include You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat, Peter Locke’s 1971 hippie flick, which is presumed lost (though my hunt for it continues in earnest); documentaries such as I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not and The Kid Stays in the Picture; and the 2000 Farrelly brothers joint Me, Myself & Irene, whose soundtrack is packed with Dan covers by the likes of Wilco, Ben Folds Five, and (sigh) Smash Mouth. The list includes masterpieces and flops, romantic comedies, family fare, even experimental animation.

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Earlier this month Donald Fagen made a rare appearance on the internet. He was spotted in the background of a video his stepdaughter Amy Helm posted on social media to promote the Helm Family Midnight Ramble. The event is a sort of jam session in Woodstock, New York, and in the absence of new Steely Dan tour dates, Fagen has become a regular participant. In Helm’s video, he wears dark sunglasses and coolly chews gum without so much as acknowledging the presence of the camera.

At age 78, the maestro is more or less terminally offline. Walter Becker was the more internet savvy member of Steely Dan, and since his death in 2017, the band’s official online footprint has amounted to little more than a rarely updated Facebook page and a stagnant website. But even as the group has little formal web presence, they are, paradoxically, well-suited for a moment when humorous viral imagery has become cultural currency. As Alex Pappademas put it in the must-read book Quantum Criminals, “Steely Dan are an endlessly meme-able band because they’re a hilarious concept on paper—two grumpy-looking guys obsessed with making the smoothest music of all time.”

That memetic quality is among the reasons the recent Steely Dan revival, the so-called Danaissance, took root online in the early 2020s. Photographs of Becker, Fagen, and their associates make easy grist for the social media mill. Over the years I’ve developed a habit of pulling these offbeat, often low-resolution JPEGs into a folder on my computer’s desktop. The collection has grown to more than 350 images. Many of them have become familiar to denizens of the digital Daniverse.

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