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Eminent Hipsters
In Eminent Hipsters, musician and songwriter Donald Fagen, best known as the co-founder of the rock band Steely Dan, presents an autobiographical portrait that touches on everything from the cultural figures that mattered the most to him as a teenager, to his years in the late 1960s at Bard College, to a hilarious account of a recent tour he made with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald.
Fagen begins by introducing the 'eminent hipsters' that spoke to him as he was growing up (and desperately yearning to be hip) in suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The figures who influenced him most were not the typical ones – Miles Davis, say, or Jack Kerouac – but rather people like Jean Shepherd, whose manic, acidic nightly radio broadcasts out of WOR-Radio had a tough realism about life and ‘enthralled a generation of alienated young people’; Henry Mancini, whose chilled-out, nourish soundtracks, especially to films by Blake Edwards utilised the unconventional, spare instrumentation associated with the cool jazz school; and Mort Fega, the laid back, knowledgeable all night jazz man at WEVD, who was like ‘the cool uncle you always wished you had’. He writes of how, growing up as a Cold War baby, one of his primary doors of escape became reading science fiction by such authors as Philip K. Dick, and of his regular trips into New York City to hear jazz. Other emblematic musical heroes Fagen writes about include Ray Charles, Ike Turner, and the Boswell Sisters, a trio from the 1920s and 30s whose subversive musical genius included trick phrasing and way out harmony.
‘Class of ’69’ recounts Fagen’s colourful tumultuous years at Bard College, the progressive university north of New York City that attracted a strange mix of applicants, including ‘desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills but appalling high school records’ (like himself). It was at Bard that Fagen first met Walter Becker, with whom he would later form Steely Dan. The final section of the book, ‘With the Dukes of September’, offers a day-by-day account of a tour Fagen undertook last summer across America with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, performing a programme of old R&B and soul tunes as well as some of each of their own hits. Told in a weary, cranky, occasionally biting and always entertaining voice, Fagen brings to life the ups and downs and various indignities and anxieties of being on the road – The Dukes were an admittedly ‘low-rent operation’ compared to a Steely Dan tour – as well as communicating the challenges and joy of playing every night to a different crowd in a different city.
Fagen begins by introducing the 'eminent hipsters' that spoke to him as he was growing up (and desperately yearning to be hip) in suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The figures who influenced him most were not the typical ones – Miles Davis, say, or Jack Kerouac – but rather people like Jean Shepherd, whose manic, acidic nightly radio broadcasts out of WOR-Radio had a tough realism about life and ‘enthralled a generation of alienated young people’; Henry Mancini, whose chilled-out, nourish soundtracks, especially to films by Blake Edwards utilised the unconventional, spare instrumentation associated with the cool jazz school; and Mort Fega, the laid back, knowledgeable all night jazz man at WEVD, who was like ‘the cool uncle you always wished you had’. He writes of how, growing up as a Cold War baby, one of his primary doors of escape became reading science fiction by such authors as Philip K. Dick, and of his regular trips into New York City to hear jazz. Other emblematic musical heroes Fagen writes about include Ray Charles, Ike Turner, and the Boswell Sisters, a trio from the 1920s and 30s whose subversive musical genius included trick phrasing and way out harmony.
‘Class of ’69’ recounts Fagen’s colourful tumultuous years at Bard College, the progressive university north of New York City that attracted a strange mix of applicants, including ‘desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills but appalling high school records’ (like himself). It was at Bard that Fagen first met Walter Becker, with whom he would later form Steely Dan. The final section of the book, ‘With the Dukes of September’, offers a day-by-day account of a tour Fagen undertook last summer across America with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, performing a programme of old R&B and soul tunes as well as some of each of their own hits. Told in a weary, cranky, occasionally biting and always entertaining voice, Fagen brings to life the ups and downs and various indignities and anxieties of being on the road – The Dukes were an admittedly ‘low-rent operation’ compared to a Steely Dan tour – as well as communicating the challenges and joy of playing every night to a different crowd in a different city.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published October 22, 2013
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November 18, 2021
I love Steely Dan, so please indulge a bit of fangirling before I begin my review proper. Donald Fagan and Walter Becker were the greatest song writing duo of the 1970s. I want to write a review of every song in their catalog. And I may yet do so. But Eminent Hipsters is such a good book that it deserves to be reviewed on its own without reference to the music.
For a book assembled from assorted writings, Eminent Hipsters has a solid structure. Fagan wrote two pieces specifically for this book (“Boswells’ Version” and “Class of ‘69”) and they are the pillars that support the autobiographical structure of the collection.
“Boswells’ Version” is an origin story. (The hero always has an origin story.) On the surface, it is about the birth of Fagan’s love of jazz. A little deeper, it is an homage to his mother. Deeper still, it offers a key to interpreting the book. Writing about Connie Boswell, Fagan cites Edmund Wilson’s theory of art: “the themes of an artist’s work represent a healing reenactment of some primal injury” (12). Surely this applies to Fagan’s art as well.
The first half of the book is a personal and artistic journey through the 50s and 60s.
“Not long ago, in the absence of any books, film, music, and so on, that seemed to give off any light, I started looking back at some of the things that used to inspire me as a kid ...” (45).
This appeals to me, for I have also been doing a lot of looking back. There is a pattern to this looking back and I see that pattern in Fagen’s memoir. There seems to be a point somewhere in middle age where the memory reverses its poles. The distant past become clearer and the recent past and present lose focus.
Fagan writes: “I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between” (xii).
This is the beginning of nostalgia. It is paired with a feeling of unease with the present, a feeling of alienation, like waking up in a strange new world after having been asleep for a very long time. Fagan is uninspired by the things of the present, so he looks back to the things of his youth.
As often as not, we fail to appreciate our formative years while we are living them. They seem pedestrian in contrast to some half-real/half-mythic earlier time. That which is only ever experienced peripherally peaks curiosity and admiration, leading to an idealization. There is a mistiness, a fuzziness, a dreamlike quality that, by blotting out much that is mundane and incidental, cuts to the heart of the era, to its essence, and thereby comes closer to its spirit than facts alone ever could.
Fagan observes this effect in his tour journal when he comments on Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom:
“I think one of the reasons we’re intrigued by Anderson is that he seems to be fixated on the sort of geekish, early-sixties adolescent experience that he’s too young to have had but that Walter and I actually lived through. And yet he nails the mood precisely ...” (105).
This is also what Fagan does. In the age of television, he preferred radio. In the age of rock and roll, he preferred jazz. As a child he was “a subterranean in gestation” (13-14). As a young man he was a beatnik in the Age of Aquarius.
Fagan’s reminiscences begin in mid-1950s suburbia. Squaresville.
“Beige was the default color of the decade” (26).
In his essays on Henry Mancini, science fiction, and the radio shows of Jean Shepherd, Fagan tells the story of his youthful rebellion against the beige decade. It begins with him constructing a “Disneyland of Cool” (17) from Peter Gunn, reading science fiction novels, and staying up half the night listening to Shep and jazz on the radio.
In high school, he went to jazz clubs in the West Village. He stopped watching television. Instead he read books and magazines, played piano, and listened to jazz. Although he describes himself as a lonely bookworm, there is a melancholy beauty in these reminiscences. Speaking of the ambience of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he writes:
“In high school I would have given anything to preserve that sanctified state, to rescue Holly from herself (from growing up, being corrupted), to goof around an enchanted Manhattan with some wild thing forever, scat singers always on call to back us up” (19).
Then comes the disillusionment. By the time he went off to Bard College in ‘65, Mancini seemed quaint. On Christmas break that year he saw Jean Shepherd perform, but he left early. Shep live was not the cool cat he was on the radio
“Anyway, the cool early sixties were over and the boiling, psychedelic late 60s had begun” (45).
In ‘66, Fagan and pals took a road trip to San Francisco to see the hippie scene. In ’67 they went to the Human Be-in in Central Park. Fagan was unimpressed.
“The hippie stuff was fun for about five minutes and then, by late ’67, the barbarism had set in” (94).
Then his years at Bard ended with betrayal by the college.
In these more or less autobiographical essays, Fagan idealizes the early 60s, not the beige mid-50s, not the psychedelic late 60s. I get this. My own middle age nostalgia is also focused on my formative years. The difference is, he grew up on Miles and Monk. I grew up on Steely Dan. But the pattern is the same.
There are things, experiences, and ideas that are more fully appreciated in retrospect. Looking back, Fagan sees his formative years through both his youthful eyes and his mature eyes, getting a different perspective, a more holistic perspective.
The second half of the book is a journal Fagan kept in the summer of 2012 when he was on tour with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs. Unlike the first half of the book, it has no structure. There are a few memories of the 70s, but Fagan mostly writes about contemporary concerns. The entries are raw and sometimes bitter. I believe they reveal as much of Fagan as would a narrative of the thirty or so years between Steely Dan and 2012.
The continuity of self seems not to need much middle. Such is the lesson of nostalgia.
The portrait of Fagan that emerges from the journal is but a grayer version of the boy he presents in the essays. In “Class of ’69,” he describes the type of girls he was attracted to in college. Surely what he is drawn to in others is also what he values.
“... I’d always been drawn to those damaged, incandescent originals who seemed to have, out of necessity, created themselves from scratch, whose core beauty reveals itself in the way they describe themselves and their world” (77).
I believe Fagan is describing himself as well. I believe he is one of the “damaged, incandescent originals.” And Eminent Hipsters is his description of himself and his world.
How does he describe himself and his world? Throughout the book he calls himself “subterranean” (13), “hyperaesthetic” (15), “bookish ” (39), “introverted” (74). Little seems to have changed over the decades. His values then are his values now. His grievances then are his grievances now— especially his loathing of television.
Boy oh boy does Fagan hate the idiot box. His childhood memories of the mid-50s include the tale of his mother’s transformation into a 1950s housewife who wore a hairsprayed beehive and served fish sticks, Twinkies, and Bosco.
In his college memories, he deplores everything that contributes to “the Big Stupid,” above all, television and its “insidious brainworm commercials.” He prefers his older classmates— the ones who didn’t grow up with television, the ones who grew up with books and imagination and “non-corporate-developed toys” (79). More than forty years later, his tour journal includes endless irritation with the ‘TV Babies.’
The journal ends with the end of the tour. Fagan is tired and grumpy and missing his wife. I wish I could have seen the Dukes at the Beacon in 2012, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to get to know Fagan through Eminent Hipsters. And I’m grateful to Fagan and Becker for the music.
You can’t go home again. But at least you can listen to the music.
Postscript: Two years ago the street around the corner from my old apartment building was renamed Walter Becker Way.
For a book assembled from assorted writings, Eminent Hipsters has a solid structure. Fagan wrote two pieces specifically for this book (“Boswells’ Version” and “Class of ‘69”) and they are the pillars that support the autobiographical structure of the collection.
“Boswells’ Version” is an origin story. (The hero always has an origin story.) On the surface, it is about the birth of Fagan’s love of jazz. A little deeper, it is an homage to his mother. Deeper still, it offers a key to interpreting the book. Writing about Connie Boswell, Fagan cites Edmund Wilson’s theory of art: “the themes of an artist’s work represent a healing reenactment of some primal injury” (12). Surely this applies to Fagan’s art as well.
The first half of the book is a personal and artistic journey through the 50s and 60s.
“Not long ago, in the absence of any books, film, music, and so on, that seemed to give off any light, I started looking back at some of the things that used to inspire me as a kid ...” (45).
This appeals to me, for I have also been doing a lot of looking back. There is a pattern to this looking back and I see that pattern in Fagen’s memoir. There seems to be a point somewhere in middle age where the memory reverses its poles. The distant past become clearer and the recent past and present lose focus.
Fagan writes: “I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between” (xii).
This is the beginning of nostalgia. It is paired with a feeling of unease with the present, a feeling of alienation, like waking up in a strange new world after having been asleep for a very long time. Fagan is uninspired by the things of the present, so he looks back to the things of his youth.
As often as not, we fail to appreciate our formative years while we are living them. They seem pedestrian in contrast to some half-real/half-mythic earlier time. That which is only ever experienced peripherally peaks curiosity and admiration, leading to an idealization. There is a mistiness, a fuzziness, a dreamlike quality that, by blotting out much that is mundane and incidental, cuts to the heart of the era, to its essence, and thereby comes closer to its spirit than facts alone ever could.
Fagan observes this effect in his tour journal when he comments on Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom:
“I think one of the reasons we’re intrigued by Anderson is that he seems to be fixated on the sort of geekish, early-sixties adolescent experience that he’s too young to have had but that Walter and I actually lived through. And yet he nails the mood precisely ...” (105).
This is also what Fagan does. In the age of television, he preferred radio. In the age of rock and roll, he preferred jazz. As a child he was “a subterranean in gestation” (13-14). As a young man he was a beatnik in the Age of Aquarius.
Fagan’s reminiscences begin in mid-1950s suburbia. Squaresville.
“Beige was the default color of the decade” (26).
In his essays on Henry Mancini, science fiction, and the radio shows of Jean Shepherd, Fagan tells the story of his youthful rebellion against the beige decade. It begins with him constructing a “Disneyland of Cool” (17) from Peter Gunn, reading science fiction novels, and staying up half the night listening to Shep and jazz on the radio.
In high school, he went to jazz clubs in the West Village. He stopped watching television. Instead he read books and magazines, played piano, and listened to jazz. Although he describes himself as a lonely bookworm, there is a melancholy beauty in these reminiscences. Speaking of the ambience of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he writes:
“In high school I would have given anything to preserve that sanctified state, to rescue Holly from herself (from growing up, being corrupted), to goof around an enchanted Manhattan with some wild thing forever, scat singers always on call to back us up” (19).
Then comes the disillusionment. By the time he went off to Bard College in ‘65, Mancini seemed quaint. On Christmas break that year he saw Jean Shepherd perform, but he left early. Shep live was not the cool cat he was on the radio
“Anyway, the cool early sixties were over and the boiling, psychedelic late 60s had begun” (45).
In ‘66, Fagan and pals took a road trip to San Francisco to see the hippie scene. In ’67 they went to the Human Be-in in Central Park. Fagan was unimpressed.
“The hippie stuff was fun for about five minutes and then, by late ’67, the barbarism had set in” (94).
Then his years at Bard ended with betrayal by the college.
In these more or less autobiographical essays, Fagan idealizes the early 60s, not the beige mid-50s, not the psychedelic late 60s. I get this. My own middle age nostalgia is also focused on my formative years. The difference is, he grew up on Miles and Monk. I grew up on Steely Dan. But the pattern is the same.
There are things, experiences, and ideas that are more fully appreciated in retrospect. Looking back, Fagan sees his formative years through both his youthful eyes and his mature eyes, getting a different perspective, a more holistic perspective.
The second half of the book is a journal Fagan kept in the summer of 2012 when he was on tour with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs. Unlike the first half of the book, it has no structure. There are a few memories of the 70s, but Fagan mostly writes about contemporary concerns. The entries are raw and sometimes bitter. I believe they reveal as much of Fagan as would a narrative of the thirty or so years between Steely Dan and 2012.
The continuity of self seems not to need much middle. Such is the lesson of nostalgia.
The portrait of Fagan that emerges from the journal is but a grayer version of the boy he presents in the essays. In “Class of ’69,” he describes the type of girls he was attracted to in college. Surely what he is drawn to in others is also what he values.
“... I’d always been drawn to those damaged, incandescent originals who seemed to have, out of necessity, created themselves from scratch, whose core beauty reveals itself in the way they describe themselves and their world” (77).
I believe Fagan is describing himself as well. I believe he is one of the “damaged, incandescent originals.” And Eminent Hipsters is his description of himself and his world.
How does he describe himself and his world? Throughout the book he calls himself “subterranean” (13), “hyperaesthetic” (15), “bookish ” (39), “introverted” (74). Little seems to have changed over the decades. His values then are his values now. His grievances then are his grievances now— especially his loathing of television.
Boy oh boy does Fagan hate the idiot box. His childhood memories of the mid-50s include the tale of his mother’s transformation into a 1950s housewife who wore a hairsprayed beehive and served fish sticks, Twinkies, and Bosco.
In his college memories, he deplores everything that contributes to “the Big Stupid,” above all, television and its “insidious brainworm commercials.” He prefers his older classmates— the ones who didn’t grow up with television, the ones who grew up with books and imagination and “non-corporate-developed toys” (79). More than forty years later, his tour journal includes endless irritation with the ‘TV Babies.’
The journal ends with the end of the tour. Fagan is tired and grumpy and missing his wife. I wish I could have seen the Dukes at the Beacon in 2012, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to get to know Fagan through Eminent Hipsters. And I’m grateful to Fagan and Becker for the music.
You can’t go home again. But at least you can listen to the music.
Postscript: Two years ago the street around the corner from my old apartment building was renamed Walter Becker Way.
January 21, 2014
I read this slender volume in nearly a single run, having the day off (thank you MLK). It is an absolute hoot and had me rolling with laughter. Fagen is absolutely what you would expect, if you are of my generation and remember when those sweet and perfectly sharp Steely Dan (SD) riffs started coming through the newly sound-enhanced FM radio about 1975 or so. Donald Fagen is one half of the SD genius, and clearly 90% of the brain trust. What amuses me is that he is nearly exactly what I expected him to be: Erudite, disrespectful, sharp, hilarious, depressed, brutally honest, acerbic and all that you would expect from a modern day anti-hero.
The overused hipster is defined explicitly as "an artist "whose origins lie outside the mainstream or who creatively exploit material from the margin or who merely because they live in a freaky space have enough distance to see some truth". Some truth can be found in this quirky account by a faux Jewish kid with a past and perpetually lost in America.
The first few "stories" describe his chronic misfit status (a "subterannean" as he puts it) in modern times, ear to a transistor soaking up the airwaves in the New Jersey night of the 60s. I can relate to his disgust with suburbia, hunger for blood and guts musical ecstasy amongst stultifying "modernity". He is sickened by those "little phones" and all the trappings which separate humanity from itself. Fagen is a jazz music historian who was prescient enough to catch a few of the giants in the village in NYC toward their end, as the pop culture was emerging and consuming the remnants of non-commercial art. This explains the penchant for SD finding all those incredible virtuosos to play on their albums.
The last chapter is from his personal diary whilst touring with an assembled entourage including Boz Skaggs and Michael McDonald known as the "Dukes of September" as they toured America in 2012. This finds the 65 year old aging "rock star" enduring the agony of travels and finding some bliss in between all the sturm and drang.
Don on Canadians and manners:
"..they've inherited their culture from Britain. Brits, by necessity, had to evolve a system of rigorous interpersonal courtesy so that they wouldn't tear each other apart. Fine, except that there are side effects: the more civilization, the more repression. So, unlike typical American audiences presented with an irresistible groove, Canadians (at least when they're sober) just sit motionless for 2 hours, fighting every impulse to nod, tap a foot, say hooray or move any part of their bodies. That is, until the big finish of the show, when, as their superegos are no longer able to contain the furious directive of the lower brain, they rise to their feet and, at last, explode with bestial cries and applause. Of course, when islanders drink, it's a different story. AS Freud like to say, the superego is soluble in alcohol". Fagen's writing is reminiscent of the young Hunter Thompson, splashed with a Bukowski fluourish.
Don on persistence of conservatives and an Indifferent Audience:
"In the sixties, during the war between the generations, I always figured that all we had to was wait until the old, paranoid, myth-bound, sexually twisted Hobbesian geezers died out. But I was wrong. They just keep coming back, these moldering bloodless vampires, no matter how many times you hammer in the stake. It's got to be the amygdala thing. Period, end of story. The crowd sat through our versions of some of the great sixties soul tunes, hating them, waiting only for the amygdala-comforting Doobie Brothers hits that Michael sings, Boz's dance numbers and the Steely Dan singles that remind them of high school or college parties. They despised the old Ray Charles tune, and I started to despise them. Toward the end of the show, during McDonald's piano introduction to 'Takin it to the streets", .. as a way of venting my range, I'd begun imagining a slash theater fire that would send the entire audience screaming up the aisles, trampling each other ...ending up in a horrible scene outside on the sidewalk with people on stretchers, charred and wrinkled.... when I'm fighting exhaustion, putting everything into the performance and still feeling like I'm getting an indifferent response from the house, it's easy to morph into the Hulk. I guess I'm getting more and more thin-skinned as the tour goes on...." In case you think the performer doesn't need the audience - Don dispels that!
Don on being a curmudgeon:
"In '64 long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH and so on.... Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. .. the signal was stonr: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the 30s and 40s, all day and most of ht night. No soul-deadening porn or violence... yeah call me old uncle Fuckwad, I don't care. William Blake's 'dark Satanic mills' of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindf*&k. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People... those in the audience who can't experience the performance unless they're sending instant videos to the frinds: ' Looka t me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I'm filming this s*#t."
Don on the good nights and what makes it worth it:
"The Rochester gig turned out to be a solid gas. Joy trumps ATD*, for a change. Good crowd, good enough sound, nice vibe all around. In a house where I'm able to hear some detail in the monitors, there's no better job than being in a good rhythm section. If it's jazz, there's more freedom, but juicy groove music has its own thing. ...When everything's working right, you become transfixed by the notes and the chords and the beautiful spaces in between. In the center of it, with the drums, bass and guitar all around you, the earth falls away and it's just you and your crew creating this forward motion, this undeniable, magical stuff that can move ten thousand people to snap free of life's miseries and get up and advance and scream and feel just find... Wait, I'm in too good a mood. Somebody stop me please."
OK, I'm stopping here, this book is chock full of hilarious anecdote's, fresh from the mind of a master who created a great musical lexicon we can all enjoy today.
The overused hipster is defined explicitly as "an artist "whose origins lie outside the mainstream or who creatively exploit material from the margin or who merely because they live in a freaky space have enough distance to see some truth". Some truth can be found in this quirky account by a faux Jewish kid with a past and perpetually lost in America.
The first few "stories" describe his chronic misfit status (a "subterannean" as he puts it) in modern times, ear to a transistor soaking up the airwaves in the New Jersey night of the 60s. I can relate to his disgust with suburbia, hunger for blood and guts musical ecstasy amongst stultifying "modernity". He is sickened by those "little phones" and all the trappings which separate humanity from itself. Fagen is a jazz music historian who was prescient enough to catch a few of the giants in the village in NYC toward their end, as the pop culture was emerging and consuming the remnants of non-commercial art. This explains the penchant for SD finding all those incredible virtuosos to play on their albums.
The last chapter is from his personal diary whilst touring with an assembled entourage including Boz Skaggs and Michael McDonald known as the "Dukes of September" as they toured America in 2012. This finds the 65 year old aging "rock star" enduring the agony of travels and finding some bliss in between all the sturm and drang.
Don on Canadians and manners:
"..they've inherited their culture from Britain. Brits, by necessity, had to evolve a system of rigorous interpersonal courtesy so that they wouldn't tear each other apart. Fine, except that there are side effects: the more civilization, the more repression. So, unlike typical American audiences presented with an irresistible groove, Canadians (at least when they're sober) just sit motionless for 2 hours, fighting every impulse to nod, tap a foot, say hooray or move any part of their bodies. That is, until the big finish of the show, when, as their superegos are no longer able to contain the furious directive of the lower brain, they rise to their feet and, at last, explode with bestial cries and applause. Of course, when islanders drink, it's a different story. AS Freud like to say, the superego is soluble in alcohol". Fagen's writing is reminiscent of the young Hunter Thompson, splashed with a Bukowski fluourish.
Don on persistence of conservatives and an Indifferent Audience:
"In the sixties, during the war between the generations, I always figured that all we had to was wait until the old, paranoid, myth-bound, sexually twisted Hobbesian geezers died out. But I was wrong. They just keep coming back, these moldering bloodless vampires, no matter how many times you hammer in the stake. It's got to be the amygdala thing. Period, end of story. The crowd sat through our versions of some of the great sixties soul tunes, hating them, waiting only for the amygdala-comforting Doobie Brothers hits that Michael sings, Boz's dance numbers and the Steely Dan singles that remind them of high school or college parties. They despised the old Ray Charles tune, and I started to despise them. Toward the end of the show, during McDonald's piano introduction to 'Takin it to the streets", .. as a way of venting my range, I'd begun imagining a slash theater fire that would send the entire audience screaming up the aisles, trampling each other ...ending up in a horrible scene outside on the sidewalk with people on stretchers, charred and wrinkled.... when I'm fighting exhaustion, putting everything into the performance and still feeling like I'm getting an indifferent response from the house, it's easy to morph into the Hulk. I guess I'm getting more and more thin-skinned as the tour goes on...." In case you think the performer doesn't need the audience - Don dispels that!
Don on being a curmudgeon:
"In '64 long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH and so on.... Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. .. the signal was stonr: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the 30s and 40s, all day and most of ht night. No soul-deadening porn or violence... yeah call me old uncle Fuckwad, I don't care. William Blake's 'dark Satanic mills' of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindf*&k. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People... those in the audience who can't experience the performance unless they're sending instant videos to the frinds: ' Looka t me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I'm filming this s*#t."
Don on the good nights and what makes it worth it:
"The Rochester gig turned out to be a solid gas. Joy trumps ATD*, for a change. Good crowd, good enough sound, nice vibe all around. In a house where I'm able to hear some detail in the monitors, there's no better job than being in a good rhythm section. If it's jazz, there's more freedom, but juicy groove music has its own thing. ...When everything's working right, you become transfixed by the notes and the chords and the beautiful spaces in between. In the center of it, with the drums, bass and guitar all around you, the earth falls away and it's just you and your crew creating this forward motion, this undeniable, magical stuff that can move ten thousand people to snap free of life's miseries and get up and advance and scream and feel just find... Wait, I'm in too good a mood. Somebody stop me please."
OK, I'm stopping here, this book is chock full of hilarious anecdote's, fresh from the mind of a master who created a great musical lexicon we can all enjoy today.
January 20, 2022
CRITIQUE:
Fagen's Dozen
If you count the Introduction, there are a dozen pieces of writing in this book by Steely Dan's pianist and singer, Donald Fagen.
If you can believe Fagen, he wasn't "making a desperate bid for mainstream integrity by putting out a book of belles lettres."
Until he went to Bard College, he actually thought he'd "end up in journalism or teaching English or working in a bookstore or something else along those lines."
Once he met Walter Becker, he abandoned this ambition and started Steely Dan. Only when he had a long period of writer's block in the mid-eighties did he revert from music to writing for long enough to assemble this book (i.e., it took about 30 years).
What he arrived at was ten essays about "how the stuff I read and heard when I was growing up affected (stretched, skewed, mangled) my little brain." (The other two works are the Introduction and an amusing 2012 Dukes of September concert tour diary.)
The book isn't a platform for Fagen to showcase his talent for sarcasm or irony. There's an overwhelming sense of gratitude to, and admiration of, the people who influenced him.
The Language of Hip
The word "hipster" has had numerous different meanings and connotations over the course of its history. It's now quite pejorative. Fagen says he used it in the title of his book to "refer to artists whose origins lie outside the mainstream, or who creatively exploit material from the margin, or who, merely because they live in a freaky space, have enough distance to see some truth."
There is no sense of the hipster trying to be alternative or different for the sake of it, or scorning anything or anybody else that is "too popular".
The people Fagen calls hipsters are ones who form their own style, taste and opinions based on their own perspectives, rather than on the views of a coterie or herd of (in)dependent minds.
This difference in meaning is no more obvious than in his essay on the music of Henry Mancini. Mancini was ubiquitous in the late '50's and 60's. He was nominated for 72 Grammy Awards and won 20. He was nominated for 18 Academy Awards and won four. There was no way he wasn't happily ensconced in the status quo of the mainstream.
Ironically, the "Peter Gunn" series (for which he composed the soundtrack) was "darkened with a tablespoon of alienation and danger." Fagen describes the vision of director Blake Edwards as "anomie deluxe":
It's interesting that Fagen uses the language of both mainstream (Disneyland/hype) and alternative (Cool/hip) points of view to describe his approach.
Pretty soon, Fagen was listening to Ellington, Miles, Mingus and Monk. Later he turned to blues and soul music and Bob Dylan. Even then, "the language of hip was changing:"
Fagen had a similar bond with the Italian composer Ennio Morricone, although it seems to have lasted longer.
Going Mutant
Sometime during the early '60's, Fagen started to read science fiction magazines, and joined a science fiction book club, from which he received "A Treasury of Great Science Fiction".
He was particularly impressed by a Philip K. Dick story called "The Father-Thing". Later, he became obsessed with an A. E. van Vogt novel called "The World of Null-A" (which is set in a mutant utopia).
Pretty soon, Fagen started to see a similarity between this fiction and life in the second half of the twentieth century:
College (Bard), jazz and sci-fi had become the means by which he could and would escape the suburban doldrums.
Shep's Radio Show
Fagen also became obsessed with a nightly radio show hosted by Jean "Shep" Shepherd, from which:
Fagen was hooked until he realised that Shep had succumbed "to that very real disease of self-loathing and its accompanying defences".
Shep's greatest lesson to his gang of followers could have been:
Perhaps there is something of Shep in Fagen's horde of "midnite cruisers" and "gentleman losers", who populated the music of Steely Dan.
The Colossus of the Fender Rhodes
Fagen, himself, is a Colossus, who has always stood astride the mainstream and the hip alternative, although many would claim that the music of Steely Dan was trapped in the mainstream of smooth jazz. This book is an eloquent, entertaining and persuasive argument against that claim.
SOUNDTRACK [INSPIRED BY 'THE BIG LEBOWSKI']
[THANKS TO DONNY, WALTER AND THE DUDE]:
Fagen's Dozen
If you count the Introduction, there are a dozen pieces of writing in this book by Steely Dan's pianist and singer, Donald Fagen.
If you can believe Fagen, he wasn't "making a desperate bid for mainstream integrity by putting out a book of belles lettres."
Until he went to Bard College, he actually thought he'd "end up in journalism or teaching English or working in a bookstore or something else along those lines."
Once he met Walter Becker, he abandoned this ambition and started Steely Dan. Only when he had a long period of writer's block in the mid-eighties did he revert from music to writing for long enough to assemble this book (i.e., it took about 30 years).
What he arrived at was ten essays about "how the stuff I read and heard when I was growing up affected (stretched, skewed, mangled) my little brain." (The other two works are the Introduction and an amusing 2012 Dukes of September concert tour diary.)
The book isn't a platform for Fagen to showcase his talent for sarcasm or irony. There's an overwhelming sense of gratitude to, and admiration of, the people who influenced him.
The Language of Hip
The word "hipster" has had numerous different meanings and connotations over the course of its history. It's now quite pejorative. Fagen says he used it in the title of his book to "refer to artists whose origins lie outside the mainstream, or who creatively exploit material from the margin, or who, merely because they live in a freaky space, have enough distance to see some truth."
There is no sense of the hipster trying to be alternative or different for the sake of it, or scorning anything or anybody else that is "too popular".
The people Fagen calls hipsters are ones who form their own style, taste and opinions based on their own perspectives, rather than on the views of a coterie or herd of (in)dependent minds.
This difference in meaning is no more obvious than in his essay on the music of Henry Mancini. Mancini was ubiquitous in the late '50's and 60's. He was nominated for 72 Grammy Awards and won 20. He was nominated for 18 Academy Awards and won four. There was no way he wasn't happily ensconced in the status quo of the mainstream.
Ironically, the "Peter Gunn" series (for which he composed the soundtrack) was "darkened with a tablespoon of alienation and danger." Fagen describes the vision of director Blake Edwards as "anomie deluxe":
"At the time, West Coast jazz (essentially, white bop) was being offered to college kids as part of the same package that included the Beats, open-toed sandals and psychoanalysis...
"The music inspired me to learn more about jazz and the extramusical artifacts of the jazz life. I listened to late-night jazz jocks broadcasting out of Manhattan and got a subscription to 'Down Beat,' which had lots of live-action photos of the top players. I tried to get through a few Kerouac novels...
"Out of these fragments of hip and hype I constructed in my mind a kind of Disneyland of Cool."
It's interesting that Fagen uses the language of both mainstream (Disneyland/hype) and alternative (Cool/hip) points of view to describe his approach.
Pretty soon, Fagen was listening to Ellington, Miles, Mingus and Monk. Later he turned to blues and soul music and Bob Dylan. Even then, "the language of hip was changing:"
"By the time I left suburbia to go off to college in 1965, Mancini seemed a quaint enthusiasm.
"...by the late sixties Hank had metamorphosed, certainly in my mind, into an incredible square."
Fagen had a similar bond with the Italian composer Ennio Morricone, although it seems to have lasted longer.
Going Mutant
Sometime during the early '60's, Fagen started to read science fiction magazines, and joined a science fiction book club, from which he received "A Treasury of Great Science Fiction".
He was particularly impressed by a Philip K. Dick story called "The Father-Thing". Later, he became obsessed with an A. E. van Vogt novel called "The World of Null-A" (which is set in a mutant utopia).
Pretty soon, Fagen started to see a similarity between this fiction and life in the second half of the twentieth century:
"The remarkable technologies, intrepid spacers walking on the moon, the loud, wild music, the sex, the social and cultural upheavals, the colours, the freaks, the fun - in short, the adventure."
College (Bard), jazz and sci-fi had become the means by which he could and would escape the suburban doldrums.
Shep's Radio Show
Fagen also became obsessed with a nightly radio show hosted by Jean "Shep" Shepherd, from which:
"I learned about social observation and human types; how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of heirarchy; joy in struggle; 'slobbism'; 'creeping meatballism' nineteenth-century panaoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in 'trivia'; bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone."
Fagen was hooked until he realised that Shep had succumbed "to that very real disease of self-loathing and its accompanying defences".
Shep's greatest lesson to his gang of followers could have been:
"Things are not what they seem - including me."
Perhaps there is something of Shep in Fagen's horde of "midnite cruisers" and "gentleman losers", who populated the music of Steely Dan.
The Colossus of the Fender Rhodes
Fagen, himself, is a Colossus, who has always stood astride the mainstream and the hip alternative, although many would claim that the music of Steely Dan was trapped in the mainstream of smooth jazz. This book is an eloquent, entertaining and persuasive argument against that claim.
SOUNDTRACK [INSPIRED BY 'THE BIG LEBOWSKI']
[THANKS TO DONNY, WALTER AND THE DUDE]:
September 6, 2016
Say this for Eminent Hipsters: It does seem very authentic to Donald Fagen, permeated by snarky (often condescending) humor and a sincere love for jazz, and paying tribute to some of the formative influences in his life; there is almost nothing here that qualifies as truly revealing autobiography, but then, Fagen fans probably know better than to expect anything too earnest or personal.
The first half of the book includes a number of essays on his formative influences-- a somewhat interesting, technical appreciation of the Boswell Sisters, an interesting take on Jean Shepherd, and-- best of all-- an account of the times he spent in NYC jazz clubs, seeing folks like Mingus and Coltrane. Other sections here leave less of an impression; his tribute to Ray Charles is heartfelt, but all too brief and slight.
Then comes the back half of the book-- Fagen's cranky, complaint-filled tour diary, wherein he voices his disdain for the touring life-- and his audience-- on every page. It's essentially a long, whiny tirade about how much Fagen seems to hate the life he chose for himself; about how he feels entitled to something better. It's off-putting, to say the least.
All told? There are a couple of sections that make this worthwhile for the devoted, and the jazz clubs section is worth seeking out if you happen to enjoy lore from the 1960s jazz scene. Overall, though, the book is too sour and too slight to be particularly enjoyable.
The first half of the book includes a number of essays on his formative influences-- a somewhat interesting, technical appreciation of the Boswell Sisters, an interesting take on Jean Shepherd, and-- best of all-- an account of the times he spent in NYC jazz clubs, seeing folks like Mingus and Coltrane. Other sections here leave less of an impression; his tribute to Ray Charles is heartfelt, but all too brief and slight.
Then comes the back half of the book-- Fagen's cranky, complaint-filled tour diary, wherein he voices his disdain for the touring life-- and his audience-- on every page. It's essentially a long, whiny tirade about how much Fagen seems to hate the life he chose for himself; about how he feels entitled to something better. It's off-putting, to say the least.
All told? There are a couple of sections that make this worthwhile for the devoted, and the jazz clubs section is worth seeking out if you happen to enjoy lore from the 1960s jazz scene. Overall, though, the book is too sour and too slight to be particularly enjoyable.
September 3, 2022
Do you wanna hear the self-absorbed opinions of an aging, jazz-loving curmudgeon? Are conversational organizing principals overrated? Have you ever thought, "Well, it would be nice to know more about Henry Mancini, but why can’t I finally find an author who talks about him for the purposes of favorable self-comparison?"
Well, then this book is for you!
I bought this book at a library sale for a dollar. I'll pay them another dollar to take it back.
Well, then this book is for you!
I bought this book at a library sale for a dollar. I'll pay them another dollar to take it back.
January 25, 2024
I've seen some of the critics' reviews of Fagen's new book and it's puzzling because it just seems like they are reading each others' reviews and repeating what each other are saying. They keep complaining that the book seems "bitter" and "mean", including in the NY Times book review section. Of course, the NY Times book review section may still be respected but they have lost credibility over time, only giving air time to big publishers and to the big names - and it shows in some of their reviews and some of the shameless crap they promote.
So for them to slam Fagen's book was expected. But, in the book, Fagen himself describes the events and the emotions and the external circumstances that led to his feeling cranky most of the time - so it's plainly a book that is revealing - Fagen is showing us himself, warts and all. The critics and the other dummies who didn't get this, might also complain if the book wasn't forthcoming enough. This is the essential paradox of "The Critic" - they are, almost always, failed writers or filmmakers who have a very deep-seated anger and bitterness at those who create art so well and these critics quite often fail to appreciate something different or odd that is done by others. Occasionally there are decent reviews these days, if you find a reliable source or writer.
Fagen's book really delves into the heart of the matter - he explores, in a very concise and direct way, the ugly side of entertainment, music, and what it all means in a cultural context. I've read a few other rock star autobiographies lately and they all seem to be these epic tomes and mostly just blathering on about inconsequential horseshit, because their lives really aren't godlike or even that interesting. But when they get the book contract, they seem to feel compelled to mythologize themselves and pad the book with a hundred bloated tales that don't do much besides add to their already grandiose grandiosity. Keith Richards, for example. Boring book, his book "Life", most of which is either made up or embellished to be sensational by his ghost writer. Of course, Keith himself acknowledges that if it wasn't for his guitar talent, he'd be a "dead junkie", in his words. So we shouldn't expect wisdom from someone like that. And there's the gap in our celebrity culture - they aren't royalty, role models, or even intelligent, most of the time. But - Fagen is very intelligent - and his intelligence is abundant in his observations in this book.
Donald Fagen clearly didn't, as Richards did, resort to the laziness of a ghost writer or co-writer and has given us a great look into his day to day life on the road and his origins. Mind you, the whole book isn't a big complaint. The first half to two-thirds is his personal history and then the last part is a tour diary. But I found it to be a valuable bunch of tales and glimpses. It's extremely candid and it spares no emotions. Fagen thinks we can handle his cynicism - and, yeah, it's cynical - but based in reality, our shitty, over-digitized, somewhat soulless age of clusterfuck idiocy. So, Fagen does us the favor of being completely honest. Also, it may be important to remember that Fagen was heavily influenced by the caustic wit of William Burroughs - the Steely Dan band name was even derived from a phrase in one of Burroughs's books, as some people know. So, the sideways contempt for the modern world has always been a part of Fagen, which a lot of people very much enjoy.
I think anyone who knows much about Fagen will not be surprised at the book, either. He's always been a pretty revealing guy, for the most part. If you want a lot of bullshit and name-dropping, there are the other rock stars who whore themselves constantly - Jagger/Richards, McCartney, Madonna, Elton John, and so on. Fagen gives you something that will affect you and maybe even disturb you. He's not just trying to portray himself as some kind of superhero or god to make you go out and buy more of his albums, which is what so many cocky celeb books really are attempts at - tying themselves in with an album release or some other nakedly brazen marketing ploy. Fagen is giving you himself, undiluted and pissed off and honest.
So for them to slam Fagen's book was expected. But, in the book, Fagen himself describes the events and the emotions and the external circumstances that led to his feeling cranky most of the time - so it's plainly a book that is revealing - Fagen is showing us himself, warts and all. The critics and the other dummies who didn't get this, might also complain if the book wasn't forthcoming enough. This is the essential paradox of "The Critic" - they are, almost always, failed writers or filmmakers who have a very deep-seated anger and bitterness at those who create art so well and these critics quite often fail to appreciate something different or odd that is done by others. Occasionally there are decent reviews these days, if you find a reliable source or writer.
Fagen's book really delves into the heart of the matter - he explores, in a very concise and direct way, the ugly side of entertainment, music, and what it all means in a cultural context. I've read a few other rock star autobiographies lately and they all seem to be these epic tomes and mostly just blathering on about inconsequential horseshit, because their lives really aren't godlike or even that interesting. But when they get the book contract, they seem to feel compelled to mythologize themselves and pad the book with a hundred bloated tales that don't do much besides add to their already grandiose grandiosity. Keith Richards, for example. Boring book, his book "Life", most of which is either made up or embellished to be sensational by his ghost writer. Of course, Keith himself acknowledges that if it wasn't for his guitar talent, he'd be a "dead junkie", in his words. So we shouldn't expect wisdom from someone like that. And there's the gap in our celebrity culture - they aren't royalty, role models, or even intelligent, most of the time. But - Fagen is very intelligent - and his intelligence is abundant in his observations in this book.
Donald Fagen clearly didn't, as Richards did, resort to the laziness of a ghost writer or co-writer and has given us a great look into his day to day life on the road and his origins. Mind you, the whole book isn't a big complaint. The first half to two-thirds is his personal history and then the last part is a tour diary. But I found it to be a valuable bunch of tales and glimpses. It's extremely candid and it spares no emotions. Fagen thinks we can handle his cynicism - and, yeah, it's cynical - but based in reality, our shitty, over-digitized, somewhat soulless age of clusterfuck idiocy. So, Fagen does us the favor of being completely honest. Also, it may be important to remember that Fagen was heavily influenced by the caustic wit of William Burroughs - the Steely Dan band name was even derived from a phrase in one of Burroughs's books, as some people know. So, the sideways contempt for the modern world has always been a part of Fagen, which a lot of people very much enjoy.
I think anyone who knows much about Fagen will not be surprised at the book, either. He's always been a pretty revealing guy, for the most part. If you want a lot of bullshit and name-dropping, there are the other rock stars who whore themselves constantly - Jagger/Richards, McCartney, Madonna, Elton John, and so on. Fagen gives you something that will affect you and maybe even disturb you. He's not just trying to portray himself as some kind of superhero or god to make you go out and buy more of his albums, which is what so many cocky celeb books really are attempts at - tying themselves in with an album release or some other nakedly brazen marketing ploy. Fagen is giving you himself, undiluted and pissed off and honest.
April 23, 2014
I felt a point of contact with Donald Fagen, whose Eminent Hipsters provided a palate cleanser between novels. I’d kind of skimmed through it before Christmas, but I wanted to return to it when I had a little time on my hands. Okay, so there’s something mildly frustrating about one half of Steely Dan writing a kind of memoir in which Steely Dan is barely mentioned, but I can only assume that he’s saving the Dan years for another book, which is fine with me.
The essays that form the first part of Eminent Hipsters are curious and amusing, but the real meat is in the tour diary that takes up most of the book. I suspect that Fagen has partly created a character called “Donald Fagen” who is marginally more curmudgeonly than he is, but not by much. He clearly doesn’t care much for traveling, yet making a living requires that he tours. He gets annoyed that the audience for his tour with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald want to hear old Dan tunes instead of the R&B and soul that is the backbone of the trio’s set, yet also recognizes that the only reason that most of them have bought tickets is because he’s half of Steely Dan. Finally, he shares with me one of my own bugbears at concerts: the apparent inability of people to simply attend a concert without holding up a cellphone and watching it on a screen as they record it. As Fagen notes, it’s as though they can’t conceive of actually being present unless they have some physical evidence to remind them.
So put your phones away, or Fagen and I will do for you.
The essays that form the first part of Eminent Hipsters are curious and amusing, but the real meat is in the tour diary that takes up most of the book. I suspect that Fagen has partly created a character called “Donald Fagen” who is marginally more curmudgeonly than he is, but not by much. He clearly doesn’t care much for traveling, yet making a living requires that he tours. He gets annoyed that the audience for his tour with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald want to hear old Dan tunes instead of the R&B and soul that is the backbone of the trio’s set, yet also recognizes that the only reason that most of them have bought tickets is because he’s half of Steely Dan. Finally, he shares with me one of my own bugbears at concerts: the apparent inability of people to simply attend a concert without holding up a cellphone and watching it on a screen as they record it. As Fagen notes, it’s as though they can’t conceive of actually being present unless they have some physical evidence to remind them.
So put your phones away, or Fagen and I will do for you.
November 8, 2013
What a book. Indifferent, miserable childhood. Indifference in college. Drugs., then spends the bulk of the book reflecting in a journal while on the road about how much he hates being on the road: the rotten hotels, the rotten food, the rotten sound systems, the audiences: too old, too stupid, too young. I thought, early on, "WHY does he do this for a living if he hates it so much?"
December 14, 2014
I’ve been on a pretty major Steely Dan kick lately, so it was perhaps inevitable that I’d buy this as soon as I learned of its existence. It’s a short book which is split between a collection of semi-biographical essays, and excerpts from a tour diary written in 2012. On the whole, it’s an enjoyable and insightful read, and though there's nothing here that might compare with the stature of the author's musical career, it did lead me to discover some interesting stuff that I wouldn't previously have known about.
The title is presumably intended to be taken quite seriously, referring as it does to the primary subjects of the essays: these ‘hipsters’ were not the post-ironic posers of today but the effortlessly cool and talented men and women of the 1950s and early 60s who were the author’s key influences. Jazz music is the one thing which seems to tie them all together, and in particular the notion of the hipster as an interpreter or transmitter of something deep and vital about jazz culture. There’s some really excellent writing here on musicians like the Boswell Sisters and Harry Mancini, and comedians like Jean Shepherd, and the DJ Mort Fega; it’s the kind of thing which is so infectious in its enthusiasm that I felt compelled to go and seek out the work of these people, even when I previously knew nothing about them.
The prose style here is smart and quippy. He’s erudite, and thinks nothing of dropping a little Edmund Wilson into his thoughts on Connie Boswell. Though his music criticism occasionally lapses into some highly technical jargon, the writing always entertaining and often quite funny, even when the author is in the middle of an anguished what-is-the-world-coming-to breakdown. As with Morrissey’s recent autobiography, it is never quite clear how seriously we are meant to take these barbed asides, and the book is ultimately at its best when the author is expressing sincere enthusiasm rather than just venting his spleen.
That brings me to the tour diary, all of which is pretty much an extended exercise in spleen-venting. Shut into a variety of hotel rooms in between stops on what seems like a never-ending tour of middle America, the author castigates venues for their sloppy sound, his elderly audiences for their cloth-eared lack of appreciation, and lays into pretty much anyone else who catches him in the wrong mood on any given afternoon. The diary excerpts are generally short and bitter, but they’re still full of inspired put-downs and aphorisms. ‘Asking me to play golf would be like asking me to drive over to the town dump and separate all the wrongly placed bottles and cans from the regular garbage,’ he muses. (On the other hand, there’s also a dreadful racist joke about hotel sheets smelling like soy sauce which any sensible editor should have quietly struck out. )
The author is particularly harsh on those ‘TV Babies’, a term which he borrows from the movie Drugstore Cowboy to describe those Americans who he sees as being raised from birth under the influence of television and an aggressive corporatised media. Though that generation is relatively close in age to the author’s own, it’s the one which he considers himself most removed from. Perhaps it’s the product of a kind of buried resentment: the ‘TV Babies’ are, after all, the ones who would go on to buy all those Steely Dan records; the implication being that even though they might have made the author successful, those fans never entirely understood what it was that the music was doing in the first place.
And it’s TV culture that he really seems to hate most of all; later on he mentions that the TV Babies have ‘morphed into the Palm People’, with reference to the disagreeable habit of filming concerts with mobile phones. And while he states that ‘information technology is a pure mindfuck’, he’s not a total luddite: he always seems to be on the internet in the hotel, always listening to music on his laptop. Trying to figure out how he really feels about all this is fairly confusing. Here’s the closest to a coherent explanation we get of this philosophy:
’Actually, it always seemed to me that the class of ’68 was the last bunch of kids not seriously despoiled in their youth by television (with its insidious brainwork commercials) and drugs. Chances were they’d spent their first years of life without a TV and had to use their imagination to entertain themselves. Perhaps they’d even played with some non-corporate-developed toys and read a few books. Sans malls, they hung out at candy stores and had milk delivered by the milkman and the doctor came to their bedrooms when they were ill. Since then, TV and the malls and the drugs have annually compounded the Big Stupid we live with now.’
There’s a quaint sort of reactionary small-c conservatism here. On one hand there’s a bunch of semi-valid points about the dissolution of community, and the diminished expectations of a new middle-class which could only aspire to a crass commericalism; but there’s also a wistful, almost Edwardian sense of a loss of innocence, a regret that society has changed significantly and permanently for the worse. And it’s not clear what the author wants us to do about it, either: he just wants things to be like they were back then. He wants all his old stuff back! Whether any of this is actually true or fair is kind of irrelevant: it’s how the author feels, and only deserves to be taken seriously as a kind of bar-stool expressionism.
The title is presumably intended to be taken quite seriously, referring as it does to the primary subjects of the essays: these ‘hipsters’ were not the post-ironic posers of today but the effortlessly cool and talented men and women of the 1950s and early 60s who were the author’s key influences. Jazz music is the one thing which seems to tie them all together, and in particular the notion of the hipster as an interpreter or transmitter of something deep and vital about jazz culture. There’s some really excellent writing here on musicians like the Boswell Sisters and Harry Mancini, and comedians like Jean Shepherd, and the DJ Mort Fega; it’s the kind of thing which is so infectious in its enthusiasm that I felt compelled to go and seek out the work of these people, even when I previously knew nothing about them.
The prose style here is smart and quippy. He’s erudite, and thinks nothing of dropping a little Edmund Wilson into his thoughts on Connie Boswell. Though his music criticism occasionally lapses into some highly technical jargon, the writing always entertaining and often quite funny, even when the author is in the middle of an anguished what-is-the-world-coming-to breakdown. As with Morrissey’s recent autobiography, it is never quite clear how seriously we are meant to take these barbed asides, and the book is ultimately at its best when the author is expressing sincere enthusiasm rather than just venting his spleen.
That brings me to the tour diary, all of which is pretty much an extended exercise in spleen-venting. Shut into a variety of hotel rooms in between stops on what seems like a never-ending tour of middle America, the author castigates venues for their sloppy sound, his elderly audiences for their cloth-eared lack of appreciation, and lays into pretty much anyone else who catches him in the wrong mood on any given afternoon. The diary excerpts are generally short and bitter, but they’re still full of inspired put-downs and aphorisms. ‘Asking me to play golf would be like asking me to drive over to the town dump and separate all the wrongly placed bottles and cans from the regular garbage,’ he muses. (On the other hand, there’s also a dreadful racist joke about hotel sheets smelling like soy sauce which any sensible editor should have quietly struck out. )
The author is particularly harsh on those ‘TV Babies’, a term which he borrows from the movie Drugstore Cowboy to describe those Americans who he sees as being raised from birth under the influence of television and an aggressive corporatised media. Though that generation is relatively close in age to the author’s own, it’s the one which he considers himself most removed from. Perhaps it’s the product of a kind of buried resentment: the ‘TV Babies’ are, after all, the ones who would go on to buy all those Steely Dan records; the implication being that even though they might have made the author successful, those fans never entirely understood what it was that the music was doing in the first place.
And it’s TV culture that he really seems to hate most of all; later on he mentions that the TV Babies have ‘morphed into the Palm People’, with reference to the disagreeable habit of filming concerts with mobile phones. And while he states that ‘information technology is a pure mindfuck’, he’s not a total luddite: he always seems to be on the internet in the hotel, always listening to music on his laptop. Trying to figure out how he really feels about all this is fairly confusing. Here’s the closest to a coherent explanation we get of this philosophy:
’Actually, it always seemed to me that the class of ’68 was the last bunch of kids not seriously despoiled in their youth by television (with its insidious brainwork commercials) and drugs. Chances were they’d spent their first years of life without a TV and had to use their imagination to entertain themselves. Perhaps they’d even played with some non-corporate-developed toys and read a few books. Sans malls, they hung out at candy stores and had milk delivered by the milkman and the doctor came to their bedrooms when they were ill. Since then, TV and the malls and the drugs have annually compounded the Big Stupid we live with now.’
There’s a quaint sort of reactionary small-c conservatism here. On one hand there’s a bunch of semi-valid points about the dissolution of community, and the diminished expectations of a new middle-class which could only aspire to a crass commericalism; but there’s also a wistful, almost Edwardian sense of a loss of innocence, a regret that society has changed significantly and permanently for the worse. And it’s not clear what the author wants us to do about it, either: he just wants things to be like they were back then. He wants all his old stuff back! Whether any of this is actually true or fair is kind of irrelevant: it’s how the author feels, and only deserves to be taken seriously as a kind of bar-stool expressionism.
August 14, 2023
--2023 review --
Weirdly enough I believe that I actually bought this exact copy twice. Without divulging too many details, my ex sold or donated most of my library when she moved out of town. I was surprised when I found a copy of Eminent Hipsters at Phoenix Books in San Luis Obispo, and then I was doubly surprised when a bookmark I recognized fell out of it. It was only $8, so I re-bought it. (I checked around and also saw a Hadoop-related book with my initials on the spine in the Technology section.)
So that's how this weird little book wound up coming with me to Florida, where I reread it in pieces by the Gulf and by the pool.
This time I read about Mr. Fagen's jazz influences with a lot more interest. In an interview with New York Magazine, he offhandedly mentioned that he "basically listens to the same 40 albums that he listened to in high school," and I have been on a quest to figure out what these 40 albums are and acquire them on vinyl. In this book, he mentions specifically owning and listening to Getz Meets Mulligan in Hi-Fi. The timing of the recording (1957) matches up, too.
I was also more interested in the knowledgable radio hosts like Mort Vega and Ed Beach who would give college-level seminars in musicology while spinning records. It sounds like Mr. Fagen learned more about music listening to these radio shows than he did at Bard. I wonder if anyone has re-released these radio shows in a podcast format. If not, I can make do with Strong Songs and Rick Beato.
The last part of the book, which is a diary of his 2012 tour with Bob Scaggs and Michael McDonald as The Dukes Of September, did not charm me as much upon second reading. The whole aging, neurotic, misanthropic rock star thing read like a cross between an unfunny George Carlin routine and the beginning montage in a commercial for an antidepressant.
Mr. Fagen is much more charming and palatable when he is writing about the handful of people he admires, rather than the millions and millions of fans that he looks down on.
-- 2014 review --
Impulse buy at Kepler’s because someone left it sitting out on a random table because Steely Dan is awesome of course. I remember being struck by how funny Donald Fagan is on the Making Of Aja documentary, especially the part on Peg. (Search for it on YouTube.)
This book is divided into three unequal parts.
Part one is a selection of previously-published essays about people who inspired him during his youth in the suburbs of New Jersey. These are the Eminent Hipsters of the title.
As expected most are jazz greats, including an interesting essay on Henri Mancini, who I never really thought of as hip probably because there were at least ten of his records in my parents' collection. I agree with Mr. Fagan that Ike Turner’s biggest talent was for organization, though I doubt he really went down to the crossroads.
More interesting to me are the essays about radio figures: Jean Shepard and a local New York jazz DJ. Considering his solo album cover is a picture of him as a jazz DJ named the Nightfly at 4:09am, I wasn’t surprised that he spent a lot of nights in his hated suburbs with a radio under his covers. [[[Aside: This is a common thread among the musicians/artists I admire from John Lennon staying up for Radio Luxembourg to Jonathan Richman's “don’t feel so alone with the radio on.”]]]
No anxiety of influence with Mr. Fagan. He’s very generous in that regard.
Part two is a brief overview of diary of his years at Bard College. It begins with Mr. Fagan mentally freeing himself from Dylan’s tractor beam on the ride up and ends with him being framed for dealing by G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame. When California tumbles into the sea, that’ll be the day he goes back to Annandale.
Part three probably could have used some more editing, but I’m glad it didn’t get it. We suddenly jump forward about 45 years to a diary from a 2012 tour with Boz Skaggs and Michael McDonald (who sang back up on Peg, by the way).
The comedic sensibility is still there, but there are also some pretty plain and well-written struggles with depression and panic attacks too. These are exacerbated by the rigors of the tour, and there are times when Mr. Fagan has trouble getting out of bed. Other times he fantasizes about the crowd burning to death (in Arizona, so it’s okay). It’s sort of an AARP version of The Wall.
So while I understand that some may find it hard to sympathize with the poor little rock star out on tour, I liked the gallows humor and the honesty. With no ghostwriters and no eye on “posterity,” I’d rather read stuff like this than Keith Richards “A Life” or yet another McCartney hagiography.
But still, if you are going to goof on The Toledo Zoo, which is actually quite nice, don’t forget that you are just one of many performing primates providing entertainment to the nice people of Toledo.
Weirdly enough I believe that I actually bought this exact copy twice. Without divulging too many details, my ex sold or donated most of my library when she moved out of town. I was surprised when I found a copy of Eminent Hipsters at Phoenix Books in San Luis Obispo, and then I was doubly surprised when a bookmark I recognized fell out of it. It was only $8, so I re-bought it. (I checked around and also saw a Hadoop-related book with my initials on the spine in the Technology section.)
So that's how this weird little book wound up coming with me to Florida, where I reread it in pieces by the Gulf and by the pool.
This time I read about Mr. Fagen's jazz influences with a lot more interest. In an interview with New York Magazine, he offhandedly mentioned that he "basically listens to the same 40 albums that he listened to in high school," and I have been on a quest to figure out what these 40 albums are and acquire them on vinyl. In this book, he mentions specifically owning and listening to Getz Meets Mulligan in Hi-Fi. The timing of the recording (1957) matches up, too.
I was also more interested in the knowledgable radio hosts like Mort Vega and Ed Beach who would give college-level seminars in musicology while spinning records. It sounds like Mr. Fagen learned more about music listening to these radio shows than he did at Bard. I wonder if anyone has re-released these radio shows in a podcast format. If not, I can make do with Strong Songs and Rick Beato.
The last part of the book, which is a diary of his 2012 tour with Bob Scaggs and Michael McDonald as The Dukes Of September, did not charm me as much upon second reading. The whole aging, neurotic, misanthropic rock star thing read like a cross between an unfunny George Carlin routine and the beginning montage in a commercial for an antidepressant.
Mr. Fagen is much more charming and palatable when he is writing about the handful of people he admires, rather than the millions and millions of fans that he looks down on.
-- 2014 review --
Impulse buy at Kepler’s because someone left it sitting out on a random table because Steely Dan is awesome of course. I remember being struck by how funny Donald Fagan is on the Making Of Aja documentary, especially the part on Peg. (Search for it on YouTube.)
This book is divided into three unequal parts.
Part one is a selection of previously-published essays about people who inspired him during his youth in the suburbs of New Jersey. These are the Eminent Hipsters of the title.
As expected most are jazz greats, including an interesting essay on Henri Mancini, who I never really thought of as hip probably because there were at least ten of his records in my parents' collection. I agree with Mr. Fagan that Ike Turner’s biggest talent was for organization, though I doubt he really went down to the crossroads.
More interesting to me are the essays about radio figures: Jean Shepard and a local New York jazz DJ. Considering his solo album cover is a picture of him as a jazz DJ named the Nightfly at 4:09am, I wasn’t surprised that he spent a lot of nights in his hated suburbs with a radio under his covers. [[[Aside: This is a common thread among the musicians/artists I admire from John Lennon staying up for Radio Luxembourg to Jonathan Richman's “don’t feel so alone with the radio on.”]]]
No anxiety of influence with Mr. Fagan. He’s very generous in that regard.
Part two is a brief overview of diary of his years at Bard College. It begins with Mr. Fagan mentally freeing himself from Dylan’s tractor beam on the ride up and ends with him being framed for dealing by G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame. When California tumbles into the sea, that’ll be the day he goes back to Annandale.
Part three probably could have used some more editing, but I’m glad it didn’t get it. We suddenly jump forward about 45 years to a diary from a 2012 tour with Boz Skaggs and Michael McDonald (who sang back up on Peg, by the way).
The comedic sensibility is still there, but there are also some pretty plain and well-written struggles with depression and panic attacks too. These are exacerbated by the rigors of the tour, and there are times when Mr. Fagan has trouble getting out of bed. Other times he fantasizes about the crowd burning to death (in Arizona, so it’s okay). It’s sort of an AARP version of The Wall.
So while I understand that some may find it hard to sympathize with the poor little rock star out on tour, I liked the gallows humor and the honesty. With no ghostwriters and no eye on “posterity,” I’d rather read stuff like this than Keith Richards “A Life” or yet another McCartney hagiography.
But still, if you are going to goof on The Toledo Zoo, which is actually quite nice, don’t forget that you are just one of many performing primates providing entertainment to the nice people of Toledo.
March 15, 2014
The best way to describe this book is to say that it is almost exactly what you would expect when picking up a collection of essays-cum-tour diary written by Donald Fagen. Erudite, caustic, cynical and often genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, Eminent Hipsters covers everything from Fagen's fascination (eventually followed by disillusionment) with raconteur extraordinaire Jean Shepherd to a conversation with Italian film score composer Ennio Morricone to the unbearable "TV babies" in the audience at Dukes of September (Fagen, Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs) shows during a long slog through a summer tour of casinos and sheds. Don't pick this up if you want to read the autobiography of a member of Steely Dan–this book more closely resembles in form Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One or perhaps the better moments of Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace, but is far better than the latter and arguably as good as the former. A brisk read (I finished it in one sitting), I would recommend this without reservation to fans of Fagen's inimitable songwriting.
December 6, 2013
Read this book reluctantly since I despise the word "Hipster." But in this context it was the true meaning of the hipsters, the cool cats, musicians, the blues, jazz artists! I enjoyed the chapters relating to the jazz greats and anyone who knows who Anita O'Day is, I would presume to admire! The chapters regarding music variations and notes, etc., was way above my music ability. The author came off a bit pompous and his contempt for his fans and audience was palpable. The last diary entries could have been left out entirely since they showed more of his disregard for almost all of the people who admire him! I love to read biographies and memoirs but I could have lived without this waste of my time. Mr. Fagen coined the derogatory term "TV Babies" it left me speechless. Gosh darn, I missed the cutoff date by being born in 1959! Who are you? Do I care? No! An almost TV Baby!
I received this free book through Goodreads First Reads.
I received this free book through Goodreads First Reads.
May 23, 2014
I'm not a fan of Steely Dan, but I'm a fan of Donald Fagen's taste in music, and therefore I had more than a passing interest in this collection of writings by Fagan. First of all, this is not a memoir of sorts, but more of a collection of writings - including some memoir writing, as well as essays, and tour diary. The strongest part of the book is the essays. Here he covers the aesthetics and world of the Bowsell sisters, Henry Mancini, science fiction books, and a really nice piece on Jean Shepherd. Basically you're getting ground zero aesthetics by the man who co-made Steely Dan. The only low point of the book, disappointedly so, is his interview with Morricone, which doesn't really connect the two together, and I think they should have dumped this piece. Overall Fagen is hysterical, witty, knows how to put together a great sentence, and is acknowledgeable about his subject matters - which is generally jazz and old pop records. The diary or journal is OK, but not as interesting as his essays. What would be fantastic, if it ever happens, is a series of hardcore music essays by this gentleman. He also gets an extra star for mentioning Andre Hodeir!
February 23, 2021
I have had the pleasure of seeing Steely Dan live 6 times which is more than any other group and a band I thought I would never be able to ever see live after they gave up touring in the 70's.
This book by one half of the constant Steely Dan duo is part Donald Fagen autobiography and part road warrior travelogue as he details his touring time as a member of The Dukes of September sharing live billing with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs during a 2012 tour taking them across the U.S. and into Canada.
Fagen is quite the writer as one can imagine having listened to any Steely Dan album or any of his four solo albums. As he relates his love of jazz and a no holds barred history of his life the book put many smiles on my face and made me laugh out loud more than a few times.
This book by one half of the constant Steely Dan duo is part Donald Fagen autobiography and part road warrior travelogue as he details his touring time as a member of The Dukes of September sharing live billing with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs during a 2012 tour taking them across the U.S. and into Canada.
Fagen is quite the writer as one can imagine having listened to any Steely Dan album or any of his four solo albums. As he relates his love of jazz and a no holds barred history of his life the book put many smiles on my face and made me laugh out loud more than a few times.
February 22, 2015
Eminent Hipsters can only be defined as a compilation of essays and articles written by Steely Dan's mastermind Donald Fagen. These essays mostly verse on several musicians that shaped Fagen's taste in music. Fagen goes beyond strictly musical matters and throws in his own personal experiences. So the book has also a hint of autobiography, helped by the fact that each essay in this book is sorted chronologically.
As a closing chapter there's a piece entitled "With the Dukes of September", a diary Fagen kept for the 2012 summer tour he did with this band. This diary is an assorment of rants, that's how I can describe it, and it digresses from what the other essays talk about.
From my own point of view, I think the addition of "With the Dukes of September" takes away the little cohesion the book already had. So we end up with a work that seems a mish-mash of Fagen's up-and-downs during life, which to me could only appeal to Steely Dan's die-hard fans.
Incidentally, I happen to be one of those fans. And after listening to "The Nightfly" for the umpteenth time, I could not help but forgive Fagen for all his ranting.
I'm giving it 3 stars because I know this is not a book for everyone, and even for fans it may come across as lacking cohesiveness. However, if you are a fan of Steely Dan's acid lyrics, you can be sure you'll enjoy this one.
As a closing chapter there's a piece entitled "With the Dukes of September", a diary Fagen kept for the 2012 summer tour he did with this band. This diary is an assorment of rants, that's how I can describe it, and it digresses from what the other essays talk about.
From my own point of view, I think the addition of "With the Dukes of September" takes away the little cohesion the book already had. So we end up with a work that seems a mish-mash of Fagen's up-and-downs during life, which to me could only appeal to Steely Dan's die-hard fans.
Incidentally, I happen to be one of those fans. And after listening to "The Nightfly" for the umpteenth time, I could not help but forgive Fagen for all his ranting.
I'm giving it 3 stars because I know this is not a book for everyone, and even for fans it may come across as lacking cohesiveness. However, if you are a fan of Steely Dan's acid lyrics, you can be sure you'll enjoy this one.
November 5, 2014
Several disconnected essays masquerading as something interesting.
Very disappointing. So much that the book barely is worth talking about beyond my rule that 1 star ratings need some justification. The writing (and editing skills) on display would usually make this a 2 star book, at least.
Several personal statements or direct comments to the author could be made ranging from snarky to out and out hostile. None are worth the time it would take to be clever enough to overcome the time expended reading this little book.
But I will say this; "Donald Fagen, shut and do what you do well, play a tune or two. And quit whining!"
Very disappointing. So much that the book barely is worth talking about beyond my rule that 1 star ratings need some justification. The writing (and editing skills) on display would usually make this a 2 star book, at least.
Several personal statements or direct comments to the author could be made ranging from snarky to out and out hostile. None are worth the time it would take to be clever enough to overcome the time expended reading this little book.
But I will say this; "Donald Fagen, shut and do what you do well, play a tune or two. And quit whining!"
March 22, 2025
Exactly what I expected. As I lacked the patience to wait out the audio version, although admittedly, hearing his Jersey snarl might add verisimilitude, it's a mishmash of short pieces on jazzbos and the hipsters, those apart from the unwashed racists, heartland "TV babies" born after 1960, the boorish fans, the Christian-Fascists who watch Fox News, wait on him at poolside bars, and vacuum his suite.
Feel sorry for the likes of Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs, relegated to sleeping on tour buses to save on rooms, even as he and Becker stay in swanky comfort in L.A. or Chicago between Steely Dan gigs. Fagen acknowledges the disparity, but as you've already anticipated, justifies his selfishness at the tour-weary age of sixty-four. Which his band mates must have not been far from themselves, and crew stuck in red-state mud and blizzards. He self-diagnoses himself in an appendix as a sufferer of Acute Tour Disease. But I felt for those "service industry" grunts and roadies who did the real work.
Of course, nobody's opening this waiting for sunshine, given the saturnine source, the Bard College oracle of spite, the elegant scourge whose act is or was to skewer the straights, since his 50s boyhood. It's not a successful memoir, as he couldn't care less. But as my highlights show, as an heir to Catskills "Jewish Alps" postwar angst and schtick of Brill Building tunesmiths, he's delivering his spiel. Or phoning it in (he hates Palm Pilots and BlackBerry; think of how he'd revise this kvetching journal of the indignities of the road a few technologies hence), as the various venues wear him down.
In final fairness, he does receive terrible news about his stepson while so occupied making a living, and respect to his wife for enduring this loss. So, despite the Dan of Steel's co-founder's sangfroid, and his determination to pose as arch, aloof, and alienated from flyover country and those not lucky enough or smart enough to match his snobbery, Fagen does eke out a drop of my fresh milk of human kindness. After all, he and his musical colleagues (too few credited herein), gave us some great tunes.
Feel sorry for the likes of Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs, relegated to sleeping on tour buses to save on rooms, even as he and Becker stay in swanky comfort in L.A. or Chicago between Steely Dan gigs. Fagen acknowledges the disparity, but as you've already anticipated, justifies his selfishness at the tour-weary age of sixty-four. Which his band mates must have not been far from themselves, and crew stuck in red-state mud and blizzards. He self-diagnoses himself in an appendix as a sufferer of Acute Tour Disease. But I felt for those "service industry" grunts and roadies who did the real work.
Of course, nobody's opening this waiting for sunshine, given the saturnine source, the Bard College oracle of spite, the elegant scourge whose act is or was to skewer the straights, since his 50s boyhood. It's not a successful memoir, as he couldn't care less. But as my highlights show, as an heir to Catskills "Jewish Alps" postwar angst and schtick of Brill Building tunesmiths, he's delivering his spiel. Or phoning it in (he hates Palm Pilots and BlackBerry; think of how he'd revise this kvetching journal of the indignities of the road a few technologies hence), as the various venues wear him down.
In final fairness, he does receive terrible news about his stepson while so occupied making a living, and respect to his wife for enduring this loss. So, despite the Dan of Steel's co-founder's sangfroid, and his determination to pose as arch, aloof, and alienated from flyover country and those not lucky enough or smart enough to match his snobbery, Fagen does eke out a drop of my fresh milk of human kindness. After all, he and his musical colleagues (too few credited herein), gave us some great tunes.
January 15, 2015
I've been a Steely Dan fan for over 40 years now and there was no way I wasn't going to read this memoir by Donald Fagen, who is one half of the songwriting and recording duo, along with Walter Becker, who comprise the core of band.
The book is not an autobiography as such but is a collection of essays and stories on the 'eminent hipsters' including, Henry Mancini, Ray Charles and Jean Sheperd to name a few, who have influenced Fagen through his formative years. He also tells of his trips to various jazz clubs in NYC in the early 60's to see some of the greats of the time and also of his love of science fiction novels. There is also a hilarious interview which Fagen conducted with the composer Ennio Morricone, where Fagen seems to do most of the talking ! He also includes a story about his time at Bard College, where he eventually met Becker and his move from purely jazz to pop/rock/soul music.
The second half of the book comprises Fagen's tour diary from the 2012 Dukes of September American tour which he undertook with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, where they played old soul and R & B classics intermingled with a selection of the individuals 'greatest hits'. While on tour Fagen suffers from what he describes as ATD - Active Tour Disorder - a condition which he describes in great detail at the end of the book and which, when the tour is finished, normally morphs into PDT - Post Tour Disorder !
I have to admit that I just loved this book mainly down to Fagen's writing style, which is erudite, elegant and also very funny. He admits that he is a nerd/geek and his writing sort of reminds me of Woody Allen or should i say the character that Woody plays in his films. Five stars from me all the way !
The book is not an autobiography as such but is a collection of essays and stories on the 'eminent hipsters' including, Henry Mancini, Ray Charles and Jean Sheperd to name a few, who have influenced Fagen through his formative years. He also tells of his trips to various jazz clubs in NYC in the early 60's to see some of the greats of the time and also of his love of science fiction novels. There is also a hilarious interview which Fagen conducted with the composer Ennio Morricone, where Fagen seems to do most of the talking ! He also includes a story about his time at Bard College, where he eventually met Becker and his move from purely jazz to pop/rock/soul music.
The second half of the book comprises Fagen's tour diary from the 2012 Dukes of September American tour which he undertook with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, where they played old soul and R & B classics intermingled with a selection of the individuals 'greatest hits'. While on tour Fagen suffers from what he describes as ATD - Active Tour Disorder - a condition which he describes in great detail at the end of the book and which, when the tour is finished, normally morphs into PDT - Post Tour Disorder !
I have to admit that I just loved this book mainly down to Fagen's writing style, which is erudite, elegant and also very funny. He admits that he is a nerd/geek and his writing sort of reminds me of Woody Allen or should i say the character that Woody plays in his films. Five stars from me all the way !
November 13, 2013
Not that it's any surprise to those who love his songs but Donald Fagen is a very good writer. The book is part memoir (in that his own life creeps into his subject matter) and part dissertation (rant) about subjects he has an affinity for or in some cases despises. The final section is a tour diary from his 2012 outing with The Dukes of September. All of it provides insight into what makes Donald Fagen tick.
The piano playing (and vocals) half of Steely Dan is a complex guy. He loves jazz, R & B and blues and his appreciations of The Boswell Sisters, Jazz Clubs, Ray Charles, and Ike Turner are worthwhile pieces of historical ressurection. Equally interesting is his take on the Alfred Korzybski/ John W. Campbell / A.E. Van Vogt /L. Ron Hubbard strain of science fiction. There are also little gems like his being busted, along with several other students on bogus drug charges by G. Gordon Liddy of later Watergate notoriety. Fagen is not without his problems though and he discusses those pretty frankly in the tour diary, where his paranoia, anxiety, and phobias are released by the general madness of a rock and roll tour.
The book is disturbing, informative, interesting, always entertaining, and sometimes hilariously funny but never dull and that's what a reader wants. The only criticism I could level is that it's short at 159 pages and leaves this reader wanting much more. I'd gladly fork out for another (longer) volume. - BH.
The piano playing (and vocals) half of Steely Dan is a complex guy. He loves jazz, R & B and blues and his appreciations of The Boswell Sisters, Jazz Clubs, Ray Charles, and Ike Turner are worthwhile pieces of historical ressurection. Equally interesting is his take on the Alfred Korzybski/ John W. Campbell / A.E. Van Vogt /L. Ron Hubbard strain of science fiction. There are also little gems like his being busted, along with several other students on bogus drug charges by G. Gordon Liddy of later Watergate notoriety. Fagen is not without his problems though and he discusses those pretty frankly in the tour diary, where his paranoia, anxiety, and phobias are released by the general madness of a rock and roll tour.
The book is disturbing, informative, interesting, always entertaining, and sometimes hilariously funny but never dull and that's what a reader wants. The only criticism I could level is that it's short at 159 pages and leaves this reader wanting much more. I'd gladly fork out for another (longer) volume. - BH.
March 10, 2019
UPDATED REVIEW:
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. I entered to win this book because I knew a friend of mine would be interested in it. I wanted her to read the whole thing first, but never never got around to giving it to her, so I finally read the entirety of this book.
Probably the best part of this book is what Fagan refers to as his "grouchy tour journal". If you are a musician and have found yourself playing crappy gigs, this part is a must read. It doesn't matter if you are a founding member of Steely Dan or not, you will relate. Heavily. This is a look into how live music is doing today, my friend.
"The crowd, they know not what they do. But when I'm fighting exhaustion, putting everything into the performance and still feeling like I'm getting an indifferent response from the house, it's easy to morph into the Hulk." -pg. 123
The rest of this book is essays on things that inspired him growing up- the focus is mostly Jazz but there are other topics too. The writing in those essays is exceptionally Beat, and though I have little interest in Jazz, I found the history he goes into very interesting.
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. I entered to win this book because I knew a friend of mine would be interested in it. I wanted her to read the whole thing first, but never never got around to giving it to her, so I finally read the entirety of this book.
Probably the best part of this book is what Fagan refers to as his "grouchy tour journal". If you are a musician and have found yourself playing crappy gigs, this part is a must read. It doesn't matter if you are a founding member of Steely Dan or not, you will relate. Heavily. This is a look into how live music is doing today, my friend.
"The crowd, they know not what they do. But when I'm fighting exhaustion, putting everything into the performance and still feeling like I'm getting an indifferent response from the house, it's easy to morph into the Hulk." -pg. 123
The rest of this book is essays on things that inspired him growing up- the focus is mostly Jazz but there are other topics too. The writing in those essays is exceptionally Beat, and though I have little interest in Jazz, I found the history he goes into very interesting.
January 12, 2014
Have headphones and Spotify nearby for the first half of the book--fantastic to get some narrated note on jazz history through the eyes of a Steely Dan co-founder. This is far from a classic rock memoir: Fagen doesn't even mention the band that made him famous, Steely Dan, until page 87. For awhile I was inclined to give this a very strong review--you're practically bombarded with astute observations and love being led by this guy. Then you get to the 2012 tour journal that anchors this book, and you realize, 'Oh, this whole thing is just a random junkpile of words from Donald Fagen.' I can imagine the publisher's assistant's nose wrinkling at the first read of this collection from her company's client, and shrugging off the notion her Baby Boomer boss had that the book might be an epic. I'm not trying to be harsh--I actually think Fagen would agree with this entire description. Even a C+ book is worth a read by this A+ artist.
September 19, 2017
Not for everybody, but thoroughly enjoyable for me. Donald Fagan is roughly my contemporary, was raised in the same area of the country and has similar interests in music to me. The criticisms I have seen of this book don't work for me. Some people have complained that it is rambling and not really autobiographical. Isn't that trying to project your own structural views onto another artist? Rambling is a negative way of saying that it seemed disorganized to the reader. I didn't feel that. I felt he wrote what he wanted to write. With the structure he wanted. Kind of similar to his approach to music. A lot of people will find it interesting. Some won't. As a lot of people found Steely Dan interesting. I thought they produced the best commercially successful records of their time. They were one of the few pop bands interesting to jazz musicians. Very musically sound. some people missed the point of those records also. So just as those records weren't for everybody as is this book.
January 10, 2014
Any self-respecting Dan fan knows that Fagen and Becker met at Bard College while both were majoring in literature. If somehow that escaped a fan, it's quite clear just reading the sophistication evident in their lyrics:
"I crawl like viper
through these suburban streets,
make love to these women
languid, and bitter sweet."
So, for this master of suave jazz/rock to eventually find his way to publishing his writing was a natural progression. If you are a fan of his music, you will find this book indispensable. The writing is high quality, and it gives tasty insight into what influenced him as a musician, the jazz roots that created Steely Dan's unique sound, and it ends with a delectable journal of the tour made recently with "The Dukes Of September", along with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald.
If you love the Dan, buy this book.
"I crawl like viper
through these suburban streets,
make love to these women
languid, and bitter sweet."
So, for this master of suave jazz/rock to eventually find his way to publishing his writing was a natural progression. If you are a fan of his music, you will find this book indispensable. The writing is high quality, and it gives tasty insight into what influenced him as a musician, the jazz roots that created Steely Dan's unique sound, and it ends with a delectable journal of the tour made recently with "The Dukes Of September", along with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald.
If you love the Dan, buy this book.
July 26, 2015
I think a better title for this one would be "Erudite Grouser" -- that would really sum this one up. The first half of the book are short articles on topics of interest to the author, and one short story of Fagen's college days. The second half of the book is a reflection on his 2012 tour with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald where he recounts daily his issues with being on the road and aging, and his mental health. A few funny turns of phrase are great, otherwise I was glad this was a short book. I'd have been more interested in reading about his music than in his thoughts on hotels in Tulsa, but I get the impression that if he knew someone was interested in a topic, he'd write on something else. Fagen eminates a strong disdain of his audience. He's on his way to becoming an insufferable curmudgeon, but he's not there yet, since this still has some enjoyable parts.
July 18, 2022
As a fan of the Dan and Mr. Fagen's solo career, it pains me to now have this new cognitive facet added to my accumulated lore of the man. I have no idea why this book was published. The first half is a collection of short chapters in which Fagen memorializes some "eminent hipster" that was influential to his childhood and the direction of his interests. Fagen is a fine writer, as anyone familiar with his music knows, but these ruminations are not really worth reading. The second-half of the book is a series of diary entries written during a 2012 U.S. tour with Boz Scaggs, Michael McDonald and others. This portion of the book is painful to read and a waste of time. But, I still love the Dan!
You can soon find this book for sale at the Dusty Bookshelf in Lawrence, Kansas. If you are a fan of Steely Dan, Donald Fagen or just of using your time wisely, don't bother.
You can soon find this book for sale at the Dusty Bookshelf in Lawrence, Kansas. If you are a fan of Steely Dan, Donald Fagen or just of using your time wisely, don't bother.
April 13, 2016
A mild disappointment. Fagen writes well but the book is short (160 pages in a generous font) and over half of it is given over to a tour diary of a recent "Dukes" tour, which easily could have been edited to half its length. Fagen's essays on music and his childhood memories are engaging but there simply isn't enough of this material and very little on the Steely Dan years.
December 2, 2023
easy breezy read
December 2, 2025
Slaps yes daddy
July 5, 2017
My review for this book was first published by The New York Journal of Books in 2013. I reproduce it here:
The Steely Dan sound, a staple of FM radio and instantly recognizable, has been a canny blend of two ingredients: first, impeccably crafted, rigorously complex jazz-rock performed only by the best musicians money can buy.
But there has always been another, equally important element lurking beneath the smooth exterior: their lyrics, owing as much to Beat culture and science fiction as to Dylan, are the group’s real secret weapon, laced with black humor and cryptic allusions (and delivered in Donald Fagen’s inimitable sneer).
It’s as if Mr. Fagen and Walter Becker, Steely Dan’s masterminds, were actually fiction writers who preferred to tell their stories musically.
It comes then as no surprise that Mr. Fagen’s new quasi-memoir is several degrees more substantial than the typical musician tell-all.
Eminent Hipsters is not one of those “as told to” cash-ins detailing drug-fueled exploits or a groupie confessional. Dubbed by its author an “art-o-biography,” it’s a thoughtful collection of essays about the artists who most influenced a young Donald Fagen growing up in the Jersey suburbs during the 1950s, the folks “whose origins lie outside the mainstream or creatively exploit material from the margin.”
Opening with a profile of the obscure yet influential Boswell sisters, Mr. Fagen sets the tone for the book to follow: as he describes the “subversive genius” of this nearly-forgotten vocal group, a favorite of his mother’s, he writes with the knowing detachment of a hip critic who’s apparently heard every jazz album known to man. Any reader will be hard pressed not to queue up YouTube for the Boswells after reading this deserving tribute.
He follows with similar reminiscences of Ray Charles, Ike Turner, Henry Mancini, and jazz deejay Mort Fega. These pieces all feature the autumnal tone of someone who outgrew all of his idols long ago but still feels great affection toward them, as in the case of Jean Shepherd.
Best known for writing what would became the holiday standard A Christmas Story, Shepherd for years performed a series of monologues on WOR radio that belied the beloved film’s rose-colored wistfulness and instead offered up slices of childhood unvarnished for kids growing up during the height of the Cold War.
“Shep made it clear he was just as dazed, enraged and amused as you were, that he noticed what you noticed. He established himself as one of a handful of adults you could trust,” Mr. Fagen remembers, which makes the revelation felt after seeing his hero in the flesh years later all the more poignant.
The true highlight of Eminent Hipsters is its final piece, a tour diary of Mr. Fagen’s 2012 tour with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs as a rock-and-soul revue called the Dukes of September.
Taking up nearly half the book, the candidly funny travelogue documents the author suffering through what he calls Acute Tour Disorder, criss-crossing the country to perform for audiences filled with nostalgic baby boomers (“Tonight the crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers”) or younger people (“TV babies”) who have never heard the soul music the Dukes spend much of their shows covering.
This humor is tempered, however, by a genuine melancholy, putting in perspective the price paid by a spotlight-averse 64-year-old still on the touring grind:
“For a lot of performing artists, every night in front of an audience, no matter how exhilarating, is a bit of a ritual slaying. Without necessarily letting it show, you use every bit of your marrow, every last atom of your energy in an attempt to satisfy the hungry crowd. On some level, you’re trying to extinguish yourself. Because, corny . . . as it may seem, that’s what you are, and they need it. And it’s exhausting.”
Steely Dan is still a working outfit, having just completed a summer tour, though for how much longer remains unclear. But 40 years after asking if we were reelin’ in the years, Mr. Fagen proves with his generous collection that his wry voice is still worth listening to, with or without a killer rhythm section.
The Steely Dan sound, a staple of FM radio and instantly recognizable, has been a canny blend of two ingredients: first, impeccably crafted, rigorously complex jazz-rock performed only by the best musicians money can buy.
But there has always been another, equally important element lurking beneath the smooth exterior: their lyrics, owing as much to Beat culture and science fiction as to Dylan, are the group’s real secret weapon, laced with black humor and cryptic allusions (and delivered in Donald Fagen’s inimitable sneer).
It’s as if Mr. Fagen and Walter Becker, Steely Dan’s masterminds, were actually fiction writers who preferred to tell their stories musically.
It comes then as no surprise that Mr. Fagen’s new quasi-memoir is several degrees more substantial than the typical musician tell-all.
Eminent Hipsters is not one of those “as told to” cash-ins detailing drug-fueled exploits or a groupie confessional. Dubbed by its author an “art-o-biography,” it’s a thoughtful collection of essays about the artists who most influenced a young Donald Fagen growing up in the Jersey suburbs during the 1950s, the folks “whose origins lie outside the mainstream or creatively exploit material from the margin.”
Opening with a profile of the obscure yet influential Boswell sisters, Mr. Fagen sets the tone for the book to follow: as he describes the “subversive genius” of this nearly-forgotten vocal group, a favorite of his mother’s, he writes with the knowing detachment of a hip critic who’s apparently heard every jazz album known to man. Any reader will be hard pressed not to queue up YouTube for the Boswells after reading this deserving tribute.
He follows with similar reminiscences of Ray Charles, Ike Turner, Henry Mancini, and jazz deejay Mort Fega. These pieces all feature the autumnal tone of someone who outgrew all of his idols long ago but still feels great affection toward them, as in the case of Jean Shepherd.
Best known for writing what would became the holiday standard A Christmas Story, Shepherd for years performed a series of monologues on WOR radio that belied the beloved film’s rose-colored wistfulness and instead offered up slices of childhood unvarnished for kids growing up during the height of the Cold War.
“Shep made it clear he was just as dazed, enraged and amused as you were, that he noticed what you noticed. He established himself as one of a handful of adults you could trust,” Mr. Fagen remembers, which makes the revelation felt after seeing his hero in the flesh years later all the more poignant.
The true highlight of Eminent Hipsters is its final piece, a tour diary of Mr. Fagen’s 2012 tour with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs as a rock-and-soul revue called the Dukes of September.
Taking up nearly half the book, the candidly funny travelogue documents the author suffering through what he calls Acute Tour Disorder, criss-crossing the country to perform for audiences filled with nostalgic baby boomers (“Tonight the crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers”) or younger people (“TV babies”) who have never heard the soul music the Dukes spend much of their shows covering.
This humor is tempered, however, by a genuine melancholy, putting in perspective the price paid by a spotlight-averse 64-year-old still on the touring grind:
“For a lot of performing artists, every night in front of an audience, no matter how exhilarating, is a bit of a ritual slaying. Without necessarily letting it show, you use every bit of your marrow, every last atom of your energy in an attempt to satisfy the hungry crowd. On some level, you’re trying to extinguish yourself. Because, corny . . . as it may seem, that’s what you are, and they need it. And it’s exhausting.”
Steely Dan is still a working outfit, having just completed a summer tour, though for how much longer remains unclear. But 40 years after asking if we were reelin’ in the years, Mr. Fagen proves with his generous collection that his wry voice is still worth listening to, with or without a killer rhythm section.
January 12, 2016
Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen (Viking 2013)(780.92) is an excellent read from a truly eminent hipster: Donald Fagen, musician, songwriter, and co-founder of the legendary jazz-rock group Steely Dan. The first half of this slim volume is a series of interesting essays on some of the music and the experiences that shaped young Donald Fagen's musical sensibilities. The piece "In the Clubs" tells of the author's forays as a young teen into the New York jazz clubs of the 1950's; "Class of '69" speaks of the added influences of academia, classical music training, and drugs, while growing up in New Jersey and attending college in New York. "The Devil and Ike Turner" hints at the seasoning added to Fagen's musical mix by Memphis rhythm and blues and "Rocket 88." One can only wonder at the alchemy that created the groove that is Steely Dan.
The second half of this volume is a journal Fagen kept in 2012 while on the "Dukes of September" summer concert tour. Steely Dan did not tour in 2012, so Fagen took to the road with a side band - project of his creation which combined Fagen, Michael McDonald, and Boz Scaggs. These artists performed their old hit songs in addition to some of the best of the old R & B. Fagen's journal writings are both funny and revealing as he was forced to accustom himself to life on tour on a cut-rate scale as compared to the apparently much more lavish accommodations afforded on tour with Steely Dan.
Fagen's style of writing is straightforward and naturally funny. He seems to take pains to be frank and truthful. I heartily recommend this book. My rating: 7.5, finished 10/29/13.
The second half of this volume is a journal Fagen kept in 2012 while on the "Dukes of September" summer concert tour. Steely Dan did not tour in 2012, so Fagen took to the road with a side band - project of his creation which combined Fagen, Michael McDonald, and Boz Scaggs. These artists performed their old hit songs in addition to some of the best of the old R & B. Fagen's journal writings are both funny and revealing as he was forced to accustom himself to life on tour on a cut-rate scale as compared to the apparently much more lavish accommodations afforded on tour with Steely Dan.
Fagen's style of writing is straightforward and naturally funny. He seems to take pains to be frank and truthful. I heartily recommend this book. My rating: 7.5, finished 10/29/13.
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