Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. Happy Holidays. Thanks for sticking with us all year. Today I'm going to be bringing you interview I did with Donald Fagan of Steely Dan.

Steely Dan of course somehow keeps getting cooler, keeps getting a younger audience, a somewhat

unexpected turn of events but a very well deserved one. This is an

interview I did a couple years ago with Donald Fagan. It's a brand new edit of it.

He went deep on the history of Steely Dan, his relationship with Walter Becker, as well as revealing

for the first time some of his last interactions with Walter.

It's very much worth your time.

Let's jump straight into that interview. Steely Dan, except, you know, perhaps at the very beginning, was not so much a band as a sort of entity.

Its very nature was always fascinating to me that it was you and Walter and after the first couple of albums and you know whoever you felt could play the songs best.

Yeah, it started as a band, but after, you know, a couple tours in the road, Walter and

I weren't really having that much fun on the road in those days the conditions were harsh and we were opening for a lot of heavy metal groups and so on.

It wasn't ideal.

So we decided to just record and of course the other guys wanted to go out and play so you know basically we dissolve that particular band and then started working with studio musicians because because we started as staff writers out in LA for ABC Dunhill Records, they had their

own studio like built into this building, the ABC building, so we would get to see all these great studio players

come in and and do tracks you know starting nine o'clock in the morning for you know

they do jingles they do TV themes but the musicians were amazing you know Jim Gordon was often playing the drums and and Michael O'Martian was playing the piano and so on so we got to know these guys and we say let's bring these guys in to play. I mean the funny thing is in my estimation that

original band was although you have many unhappy memories of

touring in the live shows there's some documentation of that original band smoking live that record

plant bootleg is fantastic.

Yeah, we got pretty good towards the end of it, actually.

You know, they were all good players and I think it got, it took a leap when Mike McDonald joined the band as a you know a second singer and keyboard and it was great to be playing with him.

Just as a quick side note while we're in this era, there's the famous slash infamous spoken

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