Donald Fagen and Walter Becker meet at the Bard College in New York in 1967. Fagen, a piano player, hears someone playing blues guitar in the student lounge and decides he must introduce himself. He discovers Becker playing a red Epiphone guitar and finds that they share the same interests in music and ironic senses of humor. A partnership is born.
They form several college bands including “The Leather Canary” (which fellow Bard student Chevy Chase sat in with a couple of times) and “The Don Fagen Trio.” Fagen and Becker also start to write songs together.
Fagen graduates Bard in 1969 with an English degree. Becker also leaves Annandale. The two of them move to Brooklyn, New York and decide to peddle their songs at the famous Brill Building in Manhattan. They don’t meet with much success, but they make an important early connection with Kenny Vance of Jay and the Americans. Vance helps them record some demos of their early material and gets them some odd jobs including doing the soundtrack for the low-budget Richard Pryor film “You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It.” Vance also gets Becker and Fagen gigs as back-up musicians on Jay and the Americans’ 1970-71 tour. Jay Black disaffectionately labels Donald and Walter as “Starkweather and Manson.”
Fagen and Becker also meet another aspiring producer, Gary Katz, in New York. Shortly afterwards, Katz gets a job as staff producer at ABC Records in Los Angeles and also secures two staff songwriter positions for Fagen and Becker. With the hopes of making it big as songwriters, Donald and Walter move to L.A. in November 1971.
But their songs are too sophisticated for the other bands on the label, such as Three Dog Night, and Dusty Springfield, so they secretly put together their own band a long with an other guitarist, Danny Dias.
But what to call them?
Well, having a sense of humor, they decided to name the band “Steely Dan”, after a dildo in William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch“.
My Old School
In its March 24, 2006 edition, Entertainment Weekly details a return trip to Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York by Donald Fagen, in which he describes a raid by sheriff’s deputies in May 1969. Fagen, his girlfriend Dorothy White, Steely Dan bandmate Walter Becker, and some 50 other students were arrested. Charges were dropped, but the harassment was the origin of the grudge alluded to in “My Old School”. Fagen was reportedly so upset with the school being complicit with the arrests that he refused to attend graduation. The same article speculates that a Bard professor’s wife, Rikki Ducornet, was the inspiration for “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”.
Because of the reference to The College of William & Mary in the lyrics, “My Old School” has long been a favorite of W&M students and alumni, although the song is actually about Bard College.
I remember the thirty-five sweet goodbyes
When you put me on the Wolverine
Up to Annandale
It was still September
When your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls
In the county jail
I was smoking with the boys upstairs
When I heard about the whole affair
I said oh no
William and Mary won’t doWell I did not think the girl
Could be so cruel
And I’m never going back
To my old schoolOleanders growing outside her door
Soon they’re gonna be in bloom
Up in Annandale
I can’t stand her
Doing what she did before
Living like a gypsy queen
In a fairy tale
Well I hear the whistle but I can’t go
I’m gonna take her down to Mexico
She said oh no
Guadalajara won’t doWell I did not think the girl
Could be so cruel
And I’m never going back
To my old school
California tumbles into the sea
That’ll be the day I go
Back to Annandale
Tried to warn you
About Chino and Daddy Gee
But I can’t seem to get to you
Through the U.S. Mail
Well I hear the whistle but I can’t go
I’m gonna take her down to Mexico
She said oh no
Guadalajara won’t do
Well I did not think the girl
Could be so cruel
And I’m never going back
To my old school
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