"The first album, The Nightfly, was sort of from the point of view of a younger person, maybe an early teenager, and Kamakiriad was… although it had a science fiction framing, it was actually about midlife. And, you know, now I’m 58, so this sort of looks toward the last years of life. But that Kamakiriad, actually the midlife album, ended with — this guy was driving this sort of futuristic car–and ended up about to drive out into the unknown, not knowing where he was going, so it has this kind of suspenseful quality at the end."Steely Dan had been parked since Gaucho but Kamakiriad was produced by Walter Becker who had moved to Hawaiian island of Haleakala in 1981. Becker spoke to Giles Smith about the Dan and Kamakiriad in 1994:
"It was the Gaucho album that finished us off. We had pursued an idea beyond the point where it was practical. That album took about two years, and we were working on it all of that time - all these endless tracking sessions involving different musicians. It took for ever and it was a very painful process."*How painful? This painful. Donald Fagen on Gaucho:
"We started using sequencing and stuff on Gaucho out of desperation really. We were having trouble laying down 'Hey Nineteen'. We tried it with two different bands and it still didn't work, so one of us said something like 'It's too bad that we can't get a machine to play the beat we want, with full-frequency drum sounds, and to be able to move the snare drum and kick drum around independently.' Roger [Nichols] replied 'I can do that.' This was back in 1978 or something, so we said 'You can do that???' To which he said 'Yes, all I need is $150,000.' So we gave him the money out of our recording budget, and six weeks later he came in with this machine and that is how it all started.
"This was in the days when digital was still very primitive ... Roger's machine did not even have any switches, it only had a regular computer keyboard and he had to type all these bytes out, huge lists of numbers, which took him 20 minutes, and at the end he would hit Return, and we heard this one snare a beat. It took so long. It got a little better during The Nightfly, but it was so horrible, I have tried to figure out how to get out of sampling ever since."Becker in 1993 joked (ha ha) he was going to stay in Hawaii and bunk off the Steely Dan tour:
"It turns out that show business isn't really in my blood anyway, and I'm looking forward to getting back to working on my car ..."Becker had gone to Hawaii to deal with his "social ills". In 2003 he and Donald Fagen talked to George Varga about living in Hawaii:
Q: You talked about how you left L.A. in '78 and then you wrote about it and when you got here to L.A. in '71 you wrote about New York. I haven't seen anything to overtly reflect the reality of life in Lahaina or Maui in the songs. Is there in fact anything directly or indirectly...?
BECKER: "Well, a song like 'The Last Mall' is — mall life for Donald is certainly somewhat associated with being in Hawaii. If you live in New York, there are no malls in New York City. And Hawaii, as you know, is kind of a quasi-suburban environment with a few curves thrown in, in the middle of the ocean, as it is. But basically, a lot of this sort of textural stuff of contemporary American life — that non-urban, non-New York, non-L.A. kind of reality — is something that we both see there."
FAGEN: "It's funny, Hawaii has become kind of a..."
BECKER: "Middle America."
FAGEN: "If you need to do research for suburban America, do it in Hawaii. I have occasionally tried to encourage Walter to draw more on the musical environment, but he doesn't seem to have that much interest in it, really."
BECKER: "Well..."
FAGEN: "I think you've lived there long enough so that, you know, you could maybe..."
BECKER: "Well, mostly what happens in Hawaii now is reggae music."
FAGEN: "Well, I know, but just like we go back into the jazz of the '20s and '30s...
BECKER: "Yeah. Well, I think it was Groucho Marx said it best: 'All Hawaiian music was recorded on the same day.' That's the thing.
I don't care if the whole scene is five pages of two people in a car sipping coffee from paper cups as long as there's a fascinating power dynamic and I learn something about them. And I do not care if the car is doing somewhere between 25 and 35 miles per hour.Joe Penhall talks about writing and not writing the series here:
[Fincher] wanted me to hire English writers and I couldn't find English writers that I liked enough to do it or to get their head round it. He's one of those, he likes the English, he's an anglophile, he thought it was much better I was able to look them in the eye when we were working.
It ended up much better for me to get LA writers. The women that I wanted were all from LA and lived 2 miles from the office it turned out. They were very classy writers, they'd written Mad Men, had Emmy awards. They couldn't really be part of a writers' room and be bossed around and paid a pittance and made to rewrite these 25 times. I commissioned them, I paid them, I got them to do 2 rewrites and then after that I had to do it.
You'll hear a song and it'll get different thoughts happening that are away from what's bothering you. You'll get into this feeling of the song and that will transform your thoughts. The serenity of whatever the song is projecting takes your thoughts and puts them in a different direction. That's pretty much the same as meditation where you're saying, "Okay, let's have a mantra that's repeated." I really believe in musical therapy and things like that, and I think there's something to the vibrations of it.
Q: What are other consequences of fans knowing more about the musicians they love? And also of being able to communicate with them?
A: Another problem is it's too easy to listen to the opinion of the anonymous basement-dweller, and that's bad for art. Criticism hurts. Hearing someone say that you're a piece of shit or that the song you're insecure about sucks is harmful. And I have a hard time unhearing that stuff, so I really had to learn not pay attention. When I did Pretty Hate Machine, I didn't think anybody was going to hear it. Then suddenly it was, "Hey, X amount of people bought your record and it's time to write a new one." And you're thinking, I wonder what they liked about that other record I made? What if I want to take a detour into free jazz? How is that going to go over? When you're not thinking about the audience, you can make more pure art.
They loved it overseas, but in those days, that didn’t matter that much. It made exactly zero dollars in the United States. I remember the studio had this huge sheaf of Xeroxed reviews they’d handed me – you could stop a fucking .45 slug with this stack, it was so thick. And of all the reviews in this six-inch thick pile, there was only one good one. And now, whenever they show retrospectives of my stuff, it’s usually the first thing they show. Sometimes you just have to wait it out.