Steely Dan’s Becker by Half

They were elusive titans, hunkering down in studios to turn out pop songs with liberal references to the languages of jazz and literature. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, twin architects of the ‘70s super-group Steely Dan, rarely surfaced in much of a public way. Mystique and inaccessibility only served to enhance their legend, without damaging their commercial potential. They were heroes in the dark, invisible pop stars.

That was then, this is now. The main reason that Becker is sitting in the sheer daylight of a seaside hotel in Santa Monica is to talk to the press about his own recent milestone, the release of his debut solo album, “11 Tracks of Whack” on Giant records. He has sent his son, Kawaii, off to a movie with a friend, has settled down on a couch in his suite and is as affable and lucid as can be. The dark ages, it seems, are over.

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After the Dan split up in 1980, Becker headed to Hawaii to clean up his life and start a family before easing back into music as a producer. Fagen headed Back East and sat out much of the ‘80s, finally surfacing with last year’s solo album, “Kamakiriad.” Steely Dan had been all but relegated to the annals of classic rock and fond collective memory.

All that changed a year ago when an expanded incarnation of Steely Dan embarked on a successful tour. One good tour deserves another; Becker, Fagen and company are on the road again and will be at Irvine Meadows tonight and Saturday.

This is no simple case of comeback fever, of grabbing a chance to cash in on a nostalgia-driven market. For this notoriously studio-bound group, the stage was an alien place, and most of the songs the band is playing had never been heard live before. It has been, in essence, a kind of virgin voyage.

“The only time we’d ever heard a band play these songs was the day we laid the track,” Becker said. Touring last year “was a very exciting thing. A big part of the excitement was the way the audience was reacting. They were so eager to hear these songs.

“There were guys in the band, Peter Erskine and others, who obviously have played for huge audiences all the time, and even they, I felt, sensed the intensity of focus the audience put into the shows. It made the experience striking and special for them. That’s why we’re going to do it some more. It was so much fun.”

Steely Dan fans may or may not be disarmed by Becker’s solo project. “Whack” is full of musical designs that are simpler and more rock-oriented than Fagen’s work but still offer lots of quirky musical twists. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of wry references to life on the edge, a place Becker has visited at length.

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With an album so full of cryptic touches and murky connections, questions inevitably arise. For instance: Where does that title come from?

Becker answered the question patiently; he already had heard it more than once that day, and he knew he’d be hearing it again. He said the key word stuck in his brain after he read about John Gotti, whose definition of “whack” has nothing to do with ironic songwriting.

“I came up with that title when I realized that a lot of the songs I wrote were not motivated by my love of my fellow man. As much as anything else, they rank on people or are lashing out or, in some cases, are about people who are dead. So I got into this ‘whack’ idea.”

Closing the album on an uncharacteristically upbeat and non-whacky note is the cowpoke waltz “Little Kawaii,” dedicated to his son. “For somebody like me to write and record and put on the album a song like that,” Becker noted with a smile, “is a bit of a new phase.”

A newfound innocence?

“Right,” he laughed at the thought. “A newfound innocence.”

Actually, he said, when he began the project he was dealing with happier notes than those he ended up with. But he found he “had too many songs with a strong major tonality. Having that many songs and having too many of them be major, I thought, was a little bit obnoxious. I had to leave out a few of the real cornerstones of the domestic bliss picture--although even those cornerstones were cracked.

“Nevertheless, it did come out seeming perhaps a little bit darker than it might have. The picture got a little skewed toward the other side. I intend to remedy that in the future. I have some bliss left over, which I’ll be presenting shortly.”

The album marks the first time Becker’s voice has been heard singing upfront and at length and also presents the first examples of his songwriting without his partner (Fagen has released two albums of his own songs: “Kamakiriad” and 1982’s “The Nightfly”).

“There’s a great freedom in writing by yourself,” Becker discovered. “You can write anything you want. When you’re collaborating with somebody, there has to be a spirit of cooperation. There are a lot of times when you just can’t persuade someone to write a certain type of song, either musically or lyrically. So I grew to enjoy it for that, because I could write very simple songs or offbeat lyrics or do pretty much anything I wanted.”

His primary ally in the songwriting process turned out to be his computer. “It got to be a very creative process where you could quickly capture any fleeting idea that you had and then edit it up into some kind of finished form. Computers change the way writing text goes. If you’re typing and are going to have to retype the whole page, you’ll be more careful with what you do and more deliberate. You’ll have a whole sentence in your mind before you start or whatever.

“The same thing turned out to be the case with the computer musically. It allowed me to be very intuitive and free about it, and then I could just edit out the garbage or edit the good stuff together.”

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One of the memorable, and peculiar, songs on “11 Tracks of Whack” is “Girlfriend.” Becker uses the verses to ramble in an almost free associative way, punctuating his discourse with allusions to TV (“there was a time in my life when one aspect of my lifestyle called for watching a lot of television,” he said with a grin). Along comes the chorus, an infectious R&B; haiku extolling the virtues of a romantic foil. There lies the basic Steely Dan paradox: pop music that is at once arcane and hooky.

Becker and Fagen entered the business as pop songwriters for Jay and the Americans and others before launching their band, which they named after a William Burroughs term for a marital aid. From the start, they clearly were strange bedfellows with the pop Establishment. And although their meticulously crafted and increasingly sophisticated albums managed to enjoy both commercial and critical success, Becker said “the only time I ever really remember being thrilled by hearing something on the radio was the very first time. When the first album came out and I heard ‘Do It Again’ on the radio, that was the greatest thing that had ever happened. After that, it was all downhill.”

As the band amassed its revered body of work through the ‘70s, Becker the guitar player began to emerge more and more. His minimalistic attack at the end of “FM” and the signature solo on “Josie” were heard anywhere hits were played. His style, which shows up amply on his new album, could be called lanky and languid, squirming between jazz, blues and rock.

“Donald wanted me to play guitar because he felt that we’d end up with something weirder and more interesting if I did it. A lot of times, we’d get somebody to come in and try something and we’d listen to it, and it would be too ordinary or (the guitarist) wouldn’t understand it in any unusual tonal way. That was the problem we had a lot of time back then. The guys who had the kind of sound and technique that we wanted on guitar didn’t understand some of the tonalities we were working with.

“At least I understood what I thought could happen, and that it was important to land on that unlikely note, a note outside the chord or scale. I had that going for me.”

One strong contribution to the pop tradition made by the band was its careful way of weaving complex instrumental solos and passages into otherwise pop-friendly settings. Live, they continue to give generous improvisational leeway to their musicians.

“We felt that in the context of the times, most of the solo playing you heard was long, indulgent soloing over not very interesting chord changes or not very concise frameworks. We had the idea of getting a maximally exciting, striking solo in a condensed, designed-for-the-purpose little chunk of music. In some cases, it was just a piece of the song, but in a lot of the cases it was a specially-written section, as was the case in ‘Kid Charlemagne.’

“So a lot of these things were already set up (in such a way) that they would help propel a guy into playing something good and have a built-in structural strength. We thought those parts should be just as good and hooky as the other parts of the song.”

Having successfully re-emerged both as a solo artist and in a reaffirmed connection with his old cohort, Becker seems to have his life in a healthy perspective. His is a not-atypical saga of the entertainment figure succumbing to debauchery and excess, only to escape and eventually mend his ways. One half expects Becker to shrug it all off as a personal case of life-as-tawdry-literature. But he is earnest and expansive on the subject of his long trek back to the business of making music.

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His fall from grace, he said, began after the release of Steely Dan’s last album, “Gaucho.”

“Making ‘Gaucho’ was an extremely painful process, as a recording. By the time it was finished, because of that and because of various personal things that were going on in my life--and probably in Donald’s, too--we were ready to do something else besides working with one another.

“I was at a point where I could either continue on the path I was going on, but not for very long,” he said with a laugh, “or I could make an abrupt change of course and perhaps persist a little bit longer. That’s what I decided to do.

“I think with a lot of people who are drug abusers, one of the problems they have is that they feel like they never get enough. No matter how much they get, they never feel as though they’ve had enough of it and have seen this thing through and are satisfied with it. And I was. I had had all I wanted, and I was through with it.

“I got to the point where there was no doubt in my mind that this was never going anywhere. So I moved to Hawaii and stopped smoking, stopped drinking and stopped taking all kinds of drugs. Lo and behold, as I came out of all of that, I found this whole other world to live in.

“Donald and I spent most of our time in studios, or in little dark rooms, in New York or Los Angeles writing songs. In Hawaii, here was this big blast of light hitting, the outside world and the sparkling bejeweled light of the Pacific. I was completely fascinated with that for years, and I didn’t feel any need to do anything. Musically, I played the guitar a little bit, but that was it, basically.

“Another thing is, when you have those kinds of transitions in your life, when you stop those kinds of addictions, it’s very useful to be in a different place, to sever your ties with the things that you associate with those things. It was helpful to be in a completely different setting and function in a completely different way, thinking of myself as not being part of this team, whose sole purpose in life was to make records, but to think of myself in more of a human kind of way.”

* Steely Dan plays tonight and Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $22.50 to $40. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster). Pop music: After a head-clearing and a whacky solo album, the guitarist- songwriter is enjoying touring with Fagen. They play in Irvine tonight.