Rush and Steely Dan have nothing and everything in common. They each specialize in technically daunting recordings that other musicians envy; they’ve both recorded great songs about the emptiness of the suburbs (“Subdivisions” and “Deacon Blues”). Their lyrics are anomalously cerebral for rock, usually in very different ways, though Donald Fagen and Walter Becker‘s line about the chess piece in “Dirty Work” (“like a castle in its corner in a medieval game”) could easily be Neil Peart’s. Rush’s musical complexity leaned towards proggy adventures with time signatures and song structure, while Steely Dan were more inclined to wedge wild stacks of jazz chords into pop songs. Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart, of course, played every note on their albums, whereas Becker and Fagen eventually prided themselves on seeking out world-class session musicians.
And as it turns out, Geddy Lee is “a huge fan of Steely Dan,” the frontman and bassist tells Rolling Stone in a newly released interview from our recent cover-story sessions. “Almost named my daughter Aja after that record. I love that record so much. I wore it out.”
New touring drummer Anika Nilles is a major fan of the late drummer Jeff Porcaro, who played on three Steely Dan albums, including Katy Lied, while guitarist Lifeson is fond of another key collaborator, guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. “Has there been anybody more versatile than Skunk?” Lifeson says. “So many styles in his playing, and intelligence.”
Lee points to one of the Dan’s signature achievements. “What amazed me about Steely Dan was how commercial they were,” he says. “At the same time, just fucking really complex and interesting, you know? They were the exception of the rule that proves the rule, whatever that expression is. They were able to be challenging, to think like jazz artists, and yet produce music that was easily consumed. That’s a kind of amazing feat.” Rush also distilled their epic tendencies into tighter songs starting in the Eighties, though Lee jokes it wasn’t that much of a change: “from 14 minutes to seven.”
There’s no evidence, meanwhile, that Fagen or Becker (who died in 2017) ever commented on Rush’s music. But they did talk about prog, including Yes, one of Rush’s most direct role models — and it didn’t seem to bode well. “The more complex groups like Yes, or Jethro Tull or Emerson Lake & Palmer are… interesting,” Becker told Melody Maker‘s Chris Charlesworth in April of 1974. (Rush’s debut had been out for all of a month, and they were still playing with drummer John Rutsey.) “But I’ve yet to hear one of those groups that seemed to have developed into anything more than quick changes and super niceties.”
“Yes is a very polished group, but I don’t particularly like their music,” Fagen added back then. “Their music doesn’t seem to hold together. We might be prejudiced because we like short songs and they like long songs. It has a sort of artificial sound, though, like it was put together deliberately to appear complicated. A lot of those groups seem to me as if they picked up on Frank Zappa many years ago. Zappa puts a lot of complex things together which probably don’t make much sense but he looks at it with such a comical eye and the English bands don’t think it’s funny. They take it very seriously.”
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