Steely Dan News

'SCAM' ARTISTS: Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, left, and Walter Becker will perform their "Aja" and "The Royal Scam" albums from start to finish.

This is the era of the "album live." That's very different than the "live album," which is just a recording of a live performance.

Photos by Nick Vlcek, click here for slideshow. Waiting in the cavernous Northrop Auditorium for Steely Dan to take the stage Sunday night on the Minneapolis stop of their "Rent Party '09" tour , I felt a little out of my element.

Bruce Springsteen is doing it. So are Van Morrison, the Pixies and Steely Dan. Playing a classic album in its entirety in concert -- along with random favorites, of course.

On tour this fall, Bruce Springsteen has been playing complete albums from his back catalog: for his shows last month bidding farewell to Giants Stadium, for example, he did "Born to Run," "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "Born in the U.S.A." But that's not all.

The definitive Phoenix-area Steely Dan show is, and always will be, the duo's windswept performance at Cricket Pavilion in 2006.

The jazz-rock duo Steely Dan has brought its comeback tour to the South Bay. Tuesday afternoon, the band's Walter Becker and Donald Fagan unveiled a picture local fans have chosen for display on the San Jose Civic Center's Wall of Fame.

Tonight, Steely Dan plays their 1976 album The Royal Scam at the Nob Hill Masonic Center.

"We practiced the hard parts and studied the big charts/There were days when we thought we had it in the canS/We'll never give up/Now we're leaving it upS.to dumb luck" These lines from the title track of The Brilliant Mistakes' 2003 release capture the dilemma faced by an interesting and intrepid indie band that very few people know.

I remember the day, in 1977, grabbing the new Steely Dan from the album racks at a lower Manhattan record store: "Aja." Score! My friends and I - we already had heard the sounds on the radio, lush and warm and perfect, like beauty set in amber, but surprising, too, rising up in waves, like jazz.

Neither Walter Becker, 59, nor his Steely Dan partner, Donald Fagen, 61, has ever been a pinup rock star, making the scene and extravagantly sharing their fabulousness.

The multi-Grammy- winning, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees have survived a 19-year break in public performances and a 20-year break between studio albums in a willfully uncoventional career.

Music is the best thing that ever happened to Walter Becker. "It's so full of feeling ... It's a really unique mode of expression and enjoyment.

Steely Dan architects Donald Fagen and Walter Becker may be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but they are so washed in the blood of jazz that they can't stop spewing mind-bending ideas even when they put aside their instruments.

MEN OF STEELY: Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are set to perform 'Aja' album live.

Monday night, just as his band concluded the all- Aja portion of its show at the Paramount , keyboardist/vocalist Donald Fagan revealed that the historic theatre was where Steely Dan performed its "first professional gig" in 1972, opening for The James Gang.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will perform their classic Born To Run album in its entirety Nov.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio . Tonight, for your delectation, here are Steely Dan performing Reelin' In The Years on The Old Grey Whistle Test show in 1978 .

Halloween is coming, and that means many, many costuming mistakes will be made by normally sane adults.

Steely Dan will kick off the second leg of its Rent Party '09 tour October 12 with the first of two shows in Seattle.