Original subtitles

The original Stelly Dan band was formed in 1971. There were five of us,

and Donald and l wrote the songs.

We toured a while to support the first albums, but we didn't like it

so we stopped in 1974 and didn't tour again for 19 years.

By the time we released ''Aja'' the other band members were gone,

except for Denny Dias.

We'd replaced them with session musicians and some favorite soloists .

We started recording the ''Aja'' album in 1977 in California.

lt took a little over a year to finish.

When we were making ''Aja''

we'd figured out sort of what we wanted to do musically.

We needed session musicians who had a larger

pallet of abilities and who could read well, because they were coming in cold.

lthink the ''Aja'' album has so much great playing,

in terms of what we were trying to do combining ...

session players and soloists

to produce these ideal tracks for our songs.

lt was the best the most consistent the most successful example of that

The songs started to become more sophisticated and individual.

There would be a particular piece we thought X musician would shine on .

And we wanted to be able to utilize the musicians who were available.

l kinda like ''Josie,'' because it sounds like a good rhythm and blues record .

lt has all the stuff l like about a good Junior Parker record ,

or a Bobby Bland record . lt has a lot of that stuff in it

Plus some other stuff.

Of the tunes from this album thats the one l like playing most now .

Sort of a minor blues based thing

that has a lot of typical writing devices in the way its played.

lts sort of a proto-typical Stelly Dan record , and its just fun to play.

''Josie'' is a perfect fusion record , a good dance record .

lt seems to be pretty funky or basic,

but great players who are revoicing certain chords ...

The bass line is ...

... a lot of me and a lot of Walter .

Great bass line.

Chuck Rainey.

l remember you and him working that out - Yeah.

You had a basic thing, and then ...

lt was another thing where the first 8 was a server part l gave him.

This is just a regular funk groove that more or less would sound like ...

With bass and guitar its just straight ahead.

Okay, thats very normal, but his ideas for the bass line were things like ...

They'd play something like ...

Which was more or less his idea to do something like that

lf l recall, he did hum those parts to me like ...

This went ...

Guitar doubling the bass, common arranging tool of the ...

Hollywood arrangers ... generation .

Henry Mancini would have been proud.

Early detective kinda thing happening.

Okay, thats that

l remember on the ''Aja'' album we would have 6-hour sessions,

two 3-hour sessions with a lunch break in between.

And we 'd rehearse for the morning session .

And l had the distinct feeling we'd never get a take with this band .

The song would not end up on the album, and it was gonna all fail.

We'd go to lunch and come back, and everything was in place.

We got some great takes after lunch.

The amount of information we processed to put this track together

and the various permutations ...

So l have to say, most of the scrutiny was on the drummer.

What they really wanted was to get a great drum track.

We got some drums here. This was ...

Jim Keltner. - Jim Keltner on this one.

Check this thing here.

Harp string ensemble of a primitive string simulator.

Sounds just as bad now as it did then,

but we listened to it ironically. - How about this?

Overdub - Overdub garbage can lid.

Garbage can lid, Jim Keltner.

''Aja's'' got sound that lifts your heart up.

lts the most consistently ''upful'' heartwarming,

even though its a classic LA kinda sound.

You wouldn't think it was recorded anywhere else in the world.

lts got California through its blood,

even though those boys are from New York .

lts a record that sends my spirits up. Really. When l listen to music,

l don 't wanna hear people moaning. And l don 't want music that moans.

We moved out to the West Coast in '71 or ' 72.

We got a job there,

staff writing for A BC Dunhill Records.

We were these two English major type guys out in LA.

that was a much more visual culture in a way. l think

the clichéd illustration of that is

Woody Allen movies where he's transported out to Los Angeles,

and he becomes very ill and feels very disoriented .

lthink that probably is close to our experience as well.

We ended up working with bands that had New York and LA musicians,

because there were great elements we were finding in LA session players:

a kind of precision , the savviness about recording processes and so on .

Back in New York , the drummer'd show up with his trap case,

with the snare drum, cymbals, his pedals and some sticks.

ln Los Angeles, a drummer would show up with a truck,

and two guys would set up a huge drum set and the guy had two more sets ,

so he could make the next dat he'd already set up.

So we loved that about the LA players, but ...

lots of New York musicians had a certain style, a hard-hitting attitude.

They took chances during performances in a way

that didn't happen on the West Coast

Jazz rock was a fundamental part of the 70s landscape.

On the one hand, you got groups which were rock bands with horn sections,

like Chicago and Blood Sweat And Tears.

On the other hand, you got jazz musicians following Miles Davis' lead.

They were working in an area called fusion .

People like Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke

and preeminently Weather Report .

Stelly Dan weren't like any of those.

lt wasn't rock or pop with ideas above its station .

And it wasn't jazz as slumming.

lt was a very well-forged allo of the two

You couldn't separate the pop music from the jazz in their music.

lfeel nothing but pride for that track, one of the best l ever played on .

As far as drums were going at that time,

if you had a club in your right and one in your left and clubs for feet

you could play.

l'd just open my high hat a hair every couple of beats

with what l was playing with my right hand,

and l created this little sound. Now l'd done that

but never ever heard it on the record ,

because engineers and sounds at the time ...

lt was a nuance, and those things didn't exist

As l remember, this was a written bass part he fixed up

on his own. -This part was written.

This first part. Just a great musician.

Slapping and fretting with his thumbs . Chuck had a unique ...

There's the chorus. - Ask Chuck about the thumb business.

They didn't want me to slap, because slapping was becoming popular.

lt was on a lot of records.

Me being a player, there are some songs where slapping sounds good.

No matter who you are, you wanna keep in the fold of whats happening.

''Peg'' ... that bridge just seemed to be a slapping thing for me.

They said, ''No play it with your fingers.''

Something like that And then you played it so many times

that after a while l remember turning just a little bit ...

either this way or this way ...

and putting up a partition . They were about that high,

of course sitting in a much lower chair. And l remember ... slapping.

They never knew it went down,

except afterwards you can tell the difference in that bridge.

Alright here's the ...

l'll put in the keyboards here, so you got ... - A rhythm section .

A little trio here.

Rick Marotta on drums. - One thing l'm listening to now

that you don 't really hear ...

Lots of groups have lots of doubling between the kick drum and the bass.

Here the kick drum is sort of syncopated . lts not really ...

lts not doubling so much the strong beats of the bass line.

You gotta love 'em, but its not like ...

You 're just really good friends, and you 'll play and try to get into it

and they'll say, ''Really good.''

And the next day a whole other band is doing it

They didn't play musical chairs with the guys in the band .

They played musical bands. Awhole band would go

and a whole incredible other band would come in.

We never came up with a band we felt was the right combination .

lt was just me and Walter .

You 'd hear somebody on a record , and you 'd say, ''Wow !

This guy's a great soloist Let's have him come in.

What would he be good on ? What would suit his style?''

This tune is infamous among studio players.

We hired some guitar players to play the solo

but it wasn't what we were looking for

until we got through 3, 4 or 5 players. - 6 or 7 . - 8 players.

To me, it was like ... Some of us started getting foggy.

lwould come into the studio and go ''Okay, another day of this.''

Some of it would just go by like

days of the week. Here we go again, another guitar solo

Oh, there it is.

Lets check this out Go back,

and lets hear it in the track.

There you go ln other words ...

lt speaks for itself - Lets look for another one.

This is probably the last guy to try it before Jay did it

There's another one.

Whats that? Some kind of envelope filter he's got on his guitar?

Wouldn't you hate to have someone do this to you ?

Then finally Jay Graydon came in and did it with no difficulty whatsoever.

Kind of Hawaiian. - Yeah, kind of Polynesian.

He prefigured my later residence in Hawaii.

l'd worked with them enough to know what l was in for

Certain words they just wanted to hear a certain way.

Under normal circumstances, people wouldn't ... They'd kind of ...

This is the words, here the parts, you sing it ... thats the phrasing.

But for those guys, phrasing could have such a nuance.

Singing a line like ''half as much as'' you 'd think,

how many different ways can you say it in that phrasing?

But it would come down to such fine points like pronunciation ,

exact rhythmic, vibrato , no vibrato , things like that

lt was always challenging.

He did a couple of parts on top of himself

Lets check out his high part just to embarrass him. - Cool.

Sorry , Mike. There it is. Here he is, too

''Peg'' doesn't sound like much, but the harmonies were so close.

that was a real learning experience for me to sing a chord

part by part with myself

When you go in for that next harmony its so close to what you 're singing.

lt was real hard to discern that interval and keep it in pitch.

We had a pretty specific idea about this ...

how these background parts would work, the ''swing band '' rhythmic approach,

and how we wanted to phrase it

You 're only hearing one of them.

Those were the days when l was singing like Jerry Lewis, remember? - Yeah.

that was a very fertile period for you .

l'm going to take this out of solo now .

''Deacon Blues'' is a great track. They've always had an affection

for these faded hipsters.

But ''Deacon Blues'' takes that affection to the almost philosophical level.

lt brings a nobility to that kind of faded hipster attitude,

which l think has deep roots in their own personalities.

They were both young kids most influenced really

by bohemian beatnik attitudes of the late 50s and early 60s.

Guitar.

The electric guitar over here, Larry Carlton.

Tasty. - Yeah.

Larry played live on a lot of these dates .

He was very good at rhythm dates and holding ...

... being a core pulse for tunes and holding them ...

from moving around too much rhythmically.

And he had usually done the charts on tunes he was playing.

lthink of myself as the liaison they wanted between themselves

and the studio musicians.

They would give me their demo tape with those wonderful piano parts,

and many of the bass parts were on there also And l was the one

who took those notes off the tape,

filled in the blanks where they weren't sure what they wanted ,

and l took that chart to the session .

lwas the person who was familiar with the song out in the studio

with the studio musicians, so if Donald or W alter would say,

''Larry, when we go to the bridge ...'' l could tell the musicians,

''thats bar nineteen B flat a seventh with a raised ninth .''

You can sort of hear the bass. lts sort of floating along.

lwas overdubbing over an existing track ...

Usually a bass player has to work harder to drive the track,

but it was already there. l kinda liked the idea of floating along in the verse.

Here it goes to a more conventional ... - Later we added ... - Rhythmic beat

We added an acoustic guitar, Dean Parks. - Yeah.

thats nice.

lts interesting that Donald and Walter are not after perfection .

They're after something you wanna listen to over and over again.

So we would work past the perfection point until it became natural,

until it sounded almost improvised in a way.

So it was a two-step process. One, to get to perfection ,

and then to get beyond it and loosen it up, so that

it didn't have to be the perfect squeaky clean goal.

lt is quite an amalgamation , for sure.

And its interesting to note that it can be a hit

''Deacon Blues'' is about as close to autobiography as our tunes get

We were both kids from the suburbs . We both felt fairly alienated ,

like a lot of kids in the 50s out looking for an alternative culture,

some kind of escape from where we found ourselves.

And l think ''Deacon Blues'' is a nice kind of example of that

The protagonist is not a musician.

He just imagines that it would be one of the mythic f

of loserdom to which he might aspire.

Who' s to say that he's not right?

There's a synthesizer pad on here ... - Yeah, here. - Whats it all about?

Go right back a second, Roger. -There it is.

Department store is what l'm thinking. lt has that bing bing.

lts like that big toy store on 58th . - FAO Schwartz.

They keep playing the same song. Kids like it 'cause its Christmassy.

lts the audio equivalent of a primary colo

lts kind of a pheremone for tots, bringing them in.

Why did we put that in there?

There was a flute part on top, and we needed trumpets that didn't cut

To cover it up. - l put a high end on it - To clarify.

Without the synthesizer it goes like this.

Maybe we couldn't find a flute player.

Okay, now lets play it again, and l'll put this guy in.

Sort of a flute simulation .

lts marked here as a celeste

So maybe we were thinking of bells or something

going along with that thing, although it doesn't sound like a celeste

lwas always amazed that they heard in their heads

what it was going to be like completed .

So they knew right away. You 'd get musicians together cutting the tracks

and Donald and Walter in the control room saying, ''thats not it

So maybe we 'll try this other tune with these guys.''

Then they'd get another band in to try the tunes that didn't work out

And all through the project they'd say, ''No thats not it thats not working.

This is what l want ''

lt was amazing when it got done, l could see

what everything was going to be like.

But they knew from the very beginning.

lts beautiful.

Basic gospel.

Response type of thing.

l'll put in the lead and we 'll see.

Part of the reason lwas driven towards jazz

was that the radio stopped playing Chuck Berry

and Little Richard when l was still quite young,

but l still noticed that something was wrong with the music

when they started playing white singers

like Frankie Avalon ... and that kind of thing.

l like black music essentially whether it be R & B or gospel or jazz.

My mom was a singer

in the hotels in the Catskills when she was a little girl.

She did it every summer until she became a teenager.

And she used to sing around the house, so l'm familiar with the repertoire.

Walter and l have a background including songwriting from the 20s to the 50s,

mostly in jazz versions.

There's people who' ve read books and people who haven't

They've got a skill

to make images that aren't puerile. You haven't heard them before .

Very Hollywood filmic. The imagery is visually very imaginable.

lt does sound familiar, doesn't it? - Yeah.

''l saw you in Rudy's. You were very high.''

''You were high. lt was a crying disgrace.''

lt starts out the guy's talking about this girl

he's involved with ,

and she's sitting at a counter .

He describes her behavior and habits ,

so you begin to see her character

and their relationship.

Self explanatory.

This tune really does speak for itself doesn't it?

Black Cow ,

an ice cream soda ...

We were confused about it actually. lthought it was a soda.

There seem to be regional variations on the formula.

Root beer and vanilla ice cream. - A soft drink. - Something like that

Frothy soft drink. - Very big

when we were kids.

''Like a gangster ... on the run,

you will stagger homeward to your precious one.''

''l'm the one ... who must make everything right ''

''Talk it out till daylight ''

Chorus.

Walter and l both grew up in and around the New York area.

Walter 's origina lly from Westchester , and they moved out to Queens,

but went to school in Manhattan. And l'm from New Jersey,

maybe 20 minutes over the bridge. We both grew up

in this area.

So l think New York life is

what we most know about Here's a very good solo by Victor Feldman.

Live on the tracking day.

We answered an ad in the ''Village Voice'' that said ''must have jazz chops.''

''Keyboard ...'' - ''No hang ups.'' - ''Keyboard ...''

''Keyboard and bass player needed for working ...

working jazz rock combo .'' - Something like that

''Must have jazz chops.'' - ''No hang ups.''

So we answered the ad and went out to Hicksville, Long lsland,

which for us was quite a haul, because we never left Manhattan.

We went out and into the basement

and it was a kid with a basement band .

We liked some of the material, early fusion type material,

before there was jazz fusion in a way.

lts like when they're in the same room at the same time,

they're like one person with two brains.

Highbrow intellectual humo

You don 't get any fart jokes or anything of the kind.

They can usually finish each other's sentences.

lfirst met them when l put an ad

in the ''Village Voice'', because my band needed a bass player and a piano player.

And they answered the ad, so they joined my band at first

And then one by one we realized some of the players had deficiencies.

We started playing their songs right away,

and l immediately saw that these were great songs.

lf truth be told, we kinda took over his band .

We wrecked it - We threw out the others guys and kept Denny.

And that was the core of the Stelly Dan group,

because when we got a job out in LA we sent for Denny.

When we got to California, l don 't know that we were nostalgic f

New York so much as we were as writers for the milieu we left behind.

We weren't finished writing songs with New York characters in them yet

and by the time we were finished we'd moved back to New York ,

at which point we immediately started writing lyrics about California.

A lot of our songs were about being homesick for New York .

l've noticed that actually.

l guess it was our natural inclination to write these stories really.

''Home At Last ' ... the central metapho was taken from Ulysses' big problem:

trying to get back home. We didn't take it so seriously. lts just the idea:

Have you read a little blues about Ulysses?

There's a guitar riff.

Chicago blues sort of ...

... item , Larry Carlton.

Donald and Walter loved sophisticated harmony,

but they're rock 'n' roll guys.

We're contemporaries, so we were all brought up listening to the 60s.

l know they love rock 'n' roll, but they also have a passion

for harmony, as do l. All the players they use ...

We love great-feeling rock 'n' roll, but we love harmony.

''Pretzel Logic'' was the first album we did with studio players.

We'd done some albums with our band , and we 'd heard these players

and done overdubs with them.

lfound myself in the room with these guys, and l thought ''Wow !

l'm really outclassed here, you know .''

Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, Donnie Hathaway,

James Brown, Llod Price, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra,

Hines, Hines and Ford ,

Barry Manilow , Dionne Warwick, The Animals, The Monkees, The Beatles,

B.B. King, Bobby Bluebird ...

Now they already told me they didn't want a shuffle.

They didn't want the Motown or the Chicago

They weren't sure what they wanted , but they wanted 1/2 time.

l said, ''Fine, let me do the Purdie shuffle.''

They said, ''Whats that? '' And l said, ''Well, l'll show you

where you can feel comfortable with it

and you 'll end up getting exactly what you asked for . .. 1/2 time,

funky, laid back, without thinking that its a shuffle.''

And it goes something like this ...

Lets isolate Bernard for a second and listen to that beat

Bernard, you know ... -This isn't easy.

You 'd come in with a tune and have something in mind,

but the way Bernard played stuff ...

He always had some unique stylistic thing he did

that you 'd never imagine in advance and nobody else would do

This tune was a good example of that

A lot of ...

Bernard's high hat in this tune,

particularly a real driving kinda ...

You 've got the backbeat you 've got double time,

And you have it almost ... shuffle.

Bernard has, you know ...

There's the famous story where he'd come to a session in the early 60s

with two signs. On one side of the drums the sign said:

YOU DONE lT And on the other side, it said:

YOU DONE HlRED THE HlT-MAKER BERNARD ''PRETTY'' PURDIE.

lts that confidence you need ... to get a good R & B track.

''Aja'' starts out very peacefully up on a hill, and its ...

kind of a trip to listen to it

Yeah, a journey through space and time.

''Aja'' was a combination of different tunes that were sewn together

to make a kind of suit and it was kind of sweet wasn't it?

We felt lucky that year and thought there wouldn't be any problem with ...

... moving into more ambitious extended composition .

But we immediately regrouped and went back to concise.

We didn't want too much of a good thing.

''Aja'' is the name of a woman.

l had a friend in high school, and he had an older brother

who went to Korea, married a Korean girl and brought her back.

Her name was Aja.

We thought that was a good name. lt was a romantic sort of image,

a tranquility that comes of a quiet relationship with a beautiful woman.

lts very existence is a contradiction .

When have you ever heard a song on a rock 'n' roll record

that absolutely cannot be played on a guitar?

lthink thats me playing the guitar. -thats Walter .

Freshly released piece of outboard equipment

Denny again.

There's clusters where the notes are so close together

that you can't stretch your fingers to get all the notes at once.

There are open voicings so wide apart that you can't reach the notes.

All you can do is pick a few and play 'em.

But you can't quite get the flavo of the chord ,

because it requires that contrast of a cluster chord

and an open chord in the way it progresses.

Jazz is a dangerous, double-edged thing.

You mustn 't do too much of it and l don 't think Stelly Dan does.

lthink they use the knowledge and love they've obviously got .

Parker and Mingus l can hear in there. l can hear Blakey,

l can hear Jazz Messengers in there, Bobby Timmons.

The subject doesn't matter, its the sound they're making.

And then we also added Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.

We were glad he came in. - lt took a while to persuade him.

He didn't really do dates . - And he felt the chances were ...

we would be asking him to do something not particularly appropriat

Well, a reasonable fear under the circumstances.

lwas invited to play on the record . lt was quite matter of fact

l said, ''Yes.''

And they asked me how l wanted to do it

l said, ''Just roll the tape in the section where l'll be playing,

and l'll get a reference about whats going on before

and what comes after.''

l listened to it and then l started to perform .

He was a little worried about playing the thing,

since he used to play with Miles.

Of course that didn't bother us at all.

lwalked into the studio and they were sitting.

They had the lights down low .

My mission was to do what l'm gonna do

Not to sit down and say, ''Hey ...''

ln fact when we grew up that was corny, in my neighborhood.

You know Miles said, ''Don't wear your heart on your sleeve.''

He said, ''Don't give too much away.''

The musicians were a key to the music that eventually got put out

lthink ''Aja'' probably was a point

a turning point where the music really became

uh ... another level of sophistication

of writing and performing for Donald and Walter .

lt was the most seamless joining of jazz and pop that had ever been.

There's nothing else as sophisticated as that in all of rock music.

When we first started we were more writing pop songs for the time

that maybe had an infusion of our interest in jazz,

but by the time we did ''Aja'' we knew more

what we enjoed doing really.

Certainly through the ''Aja'' album

our stuff improves. -The ''Aja'' album

was the most successful example

of what we were trying to do using studio bands.

There's a good possibility that it will fall flat on its face.

And that was a spectacular success, and we all knew it

thats what l hear when l listen to that record .

lf you ask songwriters from my generation ,

my and Donald's generation ,

about who were the important lyricists from their time,

you know Bob Dylan will always be mentioned.

l don 't think what we do sounds much like Bob Dylan, but ...

... he was the guy who opened the door to a larger world of possibilities

and realized by superimposing more interesting or more literat

or more obscure or more extravagant lyrics on rock 'n' roll beats ,

you would end up with something intriguing.

We were the first TV generation .

lwas interested in TV music, movie soundtracks.

l could sometimes tell who wrote the score just from hearing the music,

if it was Elmer Bernstein or Dave Grusin ...

... or A lex North or whoever.

There was cheap music, like TV music or movie music.

By ''cheap'' l don 't mean it in a disparaging way.

lts not pure music. lts written to support visual information .

There was something also funny about that music.

There was something funny about ''The Twilight Zone'' theme,

something funny about the jazz score for . ..

''The Sweet Smell of Success.''

lt was like fake jazz essentially.

So l like real jazz and fake jazz and also fake fake jazz.

My favorite thing is when they come up and say, ''Hey!

Are you that guy in Stelly Dan?'' And l say, ''Yeah.''

And they say, ''No you 're not him.'' thats what l like.