Donald Fagen Talks Candidly About Life on The Road
Donald Fagen Talks About Being On A Long Tour
Ron Bennington: Well, the reviews tend to bring up the fact that the word “cranky” gets used quite a bit, I notice, in the reviews. Because we’re used to an entertainer who will go up on stage and say, “Akron, you’re the best audience in the world,” and, “No one rocks like Pittsburgh,” and get those cheap pops. You actually go through what your mood is on this tour.
Donald Fagen: Yeah. What musicians often don’t tell you is that when you’re about three weeks into a tour – and I can’t say all musicians experience this, but the ones I know all do – there’s a moment where you lose your mind, essentially. And it has to do with the traveling, playing the same set every night – or even if you’re changing the set – with the general curve of touring, which means play a set, get on the bus, drive all night, stay in a hotel, get up, do the soundcheck, play the set, get on the bus… and it’s just this cycle that goes on for several months. About three weeks in, something snaps. I call it “Acute Tour Disorder,” and in fact, at the end of the piece I have a medical description including all the symptoms. I think what a lot of reviewers seem to be missing – I guess they don’t read very closely – is the various symptoms I describe, which include dissing the audience and things like that – that’s not the thing that’s important. What’s important is that I’m essentially temporarily insane, and all these things are symptoms of my insanity.
Ron Bennington: Well, I don’t know anyone who is a performer, whether it’s a comedian, a dancer, an actor, a musician, who hasn’t said, “Why the hell did this crowd come out tonight? What were they looking to connect?” I think the whole thing that makes performance great is that some nights it works better than other nights, and there’s no real way to understand why.
Donald Fagen: Yeah, that’s true, it’s totally unpredictable. I’ve tried to find some kind of like a unity theory – what was Einstein always looking for – this kind of one theory that would work for everything. But I’ve never found it. It’s like, I can’t understand why on Tuesday night you’ll go out and there’s a screaming, wild audience from the moment – even before you walk out. And they don’t stop until you’re done, and it’s just a wonderful experience. And then on Wednesday night, you come out to a quiet crowd. You’re maybe a city 60 miles away from the last one, the weather’s the same, and they just sit on their hands and stare at you through the whole thing and there’s no… I can’t figure that out.
Ron Bennington: I used to have a comedy club, and we used to try to figure out, is there certain tables we want to put extroverts, or what… We never figured it out either. Sometimes it would be a first show versus a second show, and people will leave there and sometimes they’ll think that the band is off at shows, but really the crowd can be off.
Donald Fagen: Yeah, it’s the unified field theory, that’s what I was looking for. If anyone out there knows the unified field theory of crowd behavior, I think we’d like to know what that is.
* * *
Donald Fagen Talks About Touring With The Dukes Of September
Ron Bennington: But that’s a lot of what gets into your head, and that starts to wear down on you during these tours.
Donald Fagen: Yeah, especially since I wasn’t out with Steely Dan, but rather the Dukes. The reason Boz and Mike and I did this is we love soul music, we love old rhythm and blues, and the idea was to go out and play this music that we loved when we got into the music business and all that. But we knew to make it economically feasible we’d also have to do tunes from our own repertoire. That is to say hits, which we didn’t really mind either. But what happened in I would say 70% of the audiences is that they just sat there staring at us while we did old Ray Charles tunes and tunes by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Chuck Berry, and so on, and just waited until we played the hits at the end of the show there. It was depressing, having grown up with this great music. Music that was perhaps better than the music that we play. I’m sure all of us, the idea of playing our music along with that music, we feel sort of privileged to play that music along with this great Ray Charles music, and all that. So, it was so bizarre that we’d play the introduction to this Ray Charles tune, and then Mike McDonald, who’s a great interpreter of Ray Charles, would start just wailing this tune and we’d get nothing. And after awhile I’d start to hate the crowd, because going through my mind on stage was, “These people have no taste. They’re too young to appreciate it. But even then, they’re not even curious to know what we’re doing. They’re essentially marking time until we do one of the hits they know. And what’s more, they’re taking pictures of us on their cell phones and transmitting it to their friends, thereby replacing real life with some kind of virtual experience while we’re playing.” And it was just very frustrating.
* * *
Donald Fagen Talks About Losing His Stepson
Ron Bennington: Yeah. So much of the book is – the strangeness, I think, of the tour part is that while you’re going through this tour, you find out that you lost your stepson on the way.
Donald Fagen: That’s true, yeah.
Ron Bennington: What a shocking thing that has to be.
Donald Fagen: That actually happened in an earlier tour. What it was is, we were going to play in Tampa where he died, and so I have bad associations with it. I actually try to somehow get out of playing there.
Ron Bennington: Just try not to even come close to that. That’s the thing that I think we also forget. If you really want art, true art, there’s all kinds of emotion that come into every show.
Donald Fagen: Yeah, and my editor actually questioned whether I should mention that in the piece. But I felt I should keep it in because I think people should know that – I thought people would be interested in knowing the kinds of things that – show business, essentially, you have to go out there and do a show, you have to essentially, even in something as far from real show business as our band – both these bands, actually – it’s not what you would call serious show business, but… You have to go out there and pump yourself up and perform, and sometimes the circumstances are… Like, I remember I was out with Steely Dan when I heard that my stepson Ezra killed himself in Tampa, but I had to perform that night. And it’s the old “show must go on” thing. I would’ve had to have stood up my whole band and the crowd that was coming to see it and all that. So, unless I’m dying, unless I have – I missed a couple of shows because I just couldn’t get out of bed because I had the flu or something – but unless you’re actually disabled, you do the show. That’s kind of the ethic there. So, even though I couldn’t be more depressed and discouraged, you have to do the show. I guess I put it in there to tell people that when they say, “Oh well, he seemed like he was phoning it in,” or when they criticize various things, they never know what’s going on behind the scenes. It could be anything. It could be anything.
* * *
Ron Bennington: “Eminent Hipsters,” Donald Fagen’s new book. Thank you so much for coming in, man.
Donald Fagen: Thank you. It was fun.
Ron Bennington: It was fun for me as well. I think the book is so interesting for people who just want to think about the way we think, sometimes. I think one of the more interesting things about this is the fact that some things that you were exposed to at a certain age you’re still working out now. Great to see you, and I’ll see you next time coming through.
You can order “Eminent Hipsters
” at Amazon.com.
.
You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? Click here for a free trial subscription.
.
You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.
