Aja

When the Zoo Crew sets the needle down on this long, winding groove from Steely Dan, you Zoo Freaks know you are about to take a ride that feels like open highway under a big sky. The song is called Aja, the title track off the album of the same name, and it still carries that late-seventies studio polish mixed with something wilder underneath, the kind of thing that makes a biker lean back on the bars and just listen. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker built it like a suite, stitching together pieces of other ideas they had lying around until it became this eight-minute journey that never quite settles in one place. Fagen has called it a trip through time and space, the sound of a guy running from the noise up on the hill toward something quieter and more mysterious.

The name itself comes from a real person, or at least the memory of one. In interviews Fagen has said it was inspired by the Korean wife of a high-school friend’s brother who had served in the army. He was never sure of the spelling, but the sound of the word struck him as romantic, the sort of image that suggested calm and a beautiful woman waiting somewhere far from the city grind. He has described the whole piece as being about the tranquility that can come from a quiet relationship with someone like that. The lyrics move through dime dancing, Chinese music under banyan trees, a dude ranch above the sea, and that double helix in the sky, all of it circling back to the simple line that when the running is done he runs to her. It is not a love song in the usual sense; it feels more like a private mythology the two of them invented in the studio and then invited the best players they could find to inhabit.

That is where the real stories live. Producer Gary Katz has talked about how none of the regular session drummers could give them the kind of controlled chaos they wanted on the improvisational stretches. They finally called Steve Gadd, a man they had never used before, and the track clicked almost at once. Gadd later said they wanted the sections to get raucous, something most pop-session players of the time were not used to doing. He made notations on the chart while the others ran it down, then laid down those famous fills that still make people stop and listen decades later. Some accounts say the basic rhythm track was done in less than a day, a rare moment of relative speed for a duo famous for endless takes. Wayne Shorter stepped in for the tenor solo that lifts the middle of the piece into something almost weightless. Fagen has said the tunes on the album came out more like they envisioned them than usual, and sometimes went beyond what they had imagined.

The perfectionism was still there, of course. Becker and Fagen were known for hiring half a dozen guitarists or more for a single solo on other tracks from the same sessions, erasing takes until something felt definitive. On Aja itself the ensemble locked in faster. Chuck Rainey on bass, Joe Sample on electric piano, Larry Carlton and Denny Dias on guitars, Timothy B. Schmit on background vocals, Victor Feldman on percussion, and Michael Omartian on piano all found their places without the usual multi-week odyssey. When Gadd heard the finished track later he did not even remember playing it; someone had to tell him it was his kit. That is the kind of session story that still circulates among the people who were in the room, the kind the Zoo Crew likes to pass around while the record spins.

To understand how two guys reached the point where they could call Wayne Shorter and Steve Gadd into a studio and get this result, you have to go back to how they started. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met in 1967 at Bard College in upstate New York. Fagen was walking past a campus café when he heard someone playing electric guitar with a clean, authentic blues feel and a vibrato that sounded, as he later put it, like a black player. He introduced himself and asked if Becker wanted to be in a band. They discovered they shared tastes in jazz, blues, popular music, and the darker strain of contemporary literature. Soon they were writing songs together on the piano in the common room of Becker’s dormitory. One of their early pickup groups, the Leather Canary, even had future comedian Chevy Chase on drums.

After Fagen graduated they moved to Brooklyn and tried to sell songs in the Brill Building, knocking on doors until Kenny Vance of Jay and the Americans took an interest. They spent time as backup musicians on the road with that group, using pseudonyms, and even got one of their tunes placed on a Barbra Streisand album. In 1971 producer Gary Katz, now working for ABC/Dunhill in Los Angeles, hired them as staff songwriters. Officially they were supposed to write pop material for the label’s teen-oriented acts. Secretly they began assembling their own group so they could record the more complicated, ironic songs no one else seemed able to handle. They rehearsed after hours in an unfinished wing of the ABC building with Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter on guitars and Jim Hodder on drums. The name Steely Dan came from a prosthetic device mentioned in William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch. By late 1972 they had released Can’t Buy a Thrill and were on their way.

They kept refining the approach, eventually stepping away from live performance to concentrate on the studio. By the time they reached Aja they had the budget, the players, and the confidence to let a track stretch out and breathe. The album became their biggest commercial success, the one that proved the strange hybrid of jazz precision and rock attitude could reach a wide audience without losing its edge. You can dig into the full official history and discography on their site at steelydan.com. The verified Facebook page is Steely Dan and the official Instagram account is steelydan_official. For deeper reading, the long-running fan archive at The Steely Dan Reader collects decades of interviews and reviews. Active Facebook groups such as Steely Dan keep the conversation going among people who still argue about the best solo or the correct spelling of the title.

That is the kind of music the Zoo Crew keeps spinning for the Zoo Freaks who know the difference between a polished record and a living one. Drop by THE ZOO anytime you want to hear the long cuts, the deep stories, and the open-road spirit that still rides with this one.