We're sitting drinking Campari in the Angry Squire on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, a dull sweltry Sunday night, watching the sippers and swallowers drift through a brew or two and buzz out somewhere else.

A dark New York street cowboy saunters in, locking his Honda to the hitching post outside. He orders a Whitbread Ale (on tap), takes a poke, then moves to the juke.

Anybody on the street

Has murder in his eyes

You feel no pain and you're younger

Than you realize.

Thoughts like that sometimes must be hidden on B sides; and Steely Dan, the most profound cha-cha band in rock history, keeps it behind their first Tasmanian Go-Rilla, "Do It Again." I nodded to the guy in the cowboy hat, he didn't see mp, and that was cool. But when another obscure Steely Dan B side came on under his quarter, I decided to walk over and ask him what his motives were.

But after "Fire in the Hole" was finished, and "Reelin" in the Years" went through it's remarkable guitar trade-off, the subway cowboy was out the door. To me, it kind of indicates where the Steely Dan cult is at: found

often, in unlikely places, following no discernible pattern except walking slow, drinking alone, and moving swiftly through the night. It's strange that a band with an unfashionably enigmatic lyric sense, rich in a bittersweet vision of people and places both familiar and remote, would turn out to be a top forty and FM hit band, rather than a "critic's band..." Especially considering that they took their name from a dildo in William Burroughs" Naked Lunch.

"We always felt we would be a hit with the critics, if not the public," muses Walter Becker, who with Donald Fagen makes up the songwriting nucleus of the Dan. "But rock "n" roll reviewers adapt to the times, and if the times happen to be unsophisticated, that's wjiat happens."

Whether or not you agree with Becker, it's true that the Dan are Indeed sophisticated for these times. Musically, they combine deceptively simple latincaribbean rock "n" roll riffs with melodies that can buy a thrill. But Steely Dan go much deeper than that, especially if you're one of the 600 or so people on the planet who each year attended funky and fragmented Bard College in the late sixties, where Fagen, Becker, and myself got certain parts of their schoolin".

The kids who went to Bard were generally of the same breed that went to any of the schools with which it's been associated; hotbeds of social permissiveness and intellectual stimulation like Goddard, Antioch, Franconia, and Reed.

I saw Becker and Fagen around campus, most likely in the coffee shop, but never spoke to them. The main thing I learned was that most Bard kids could consume more hard and soft drugs than an equal number of degs at a Black Sabbath concert, and then stay up the rest of the night wondering what it would be like to bugger. Jean Genet, to ball Anais Nin, play guitar like Mike Bloomfield, or write peoms like Robert Kelly.

Fagen and Becker began playing together at Bard. "Whenever there was a social function that demanded a cheap rhythm section, we were there," says Becker, Who looks the bespectacled silent type with or without his bass, but is really verbal and articulate. "Actually, there were two branches — the New York branch, and the Boston branch."

Out of the Boston branch came Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, erstwhile guitar and steel player, who was once a member Of Ultimate Spinach.

"I joined the band (Spinach) after their first guitar player got too psychedelic," says Skunk.

"You mean 13th Floor Elevator psychedelic, or dangerous psychedelic?"

"No, this was different. This was real drugs. Lots of drugs."

Skunk doesn't want to talk anymore about Ultimate Spinach. He's far too modest about their place ; in the rock pantheon. He's also a childhood friend of Janis Cercone.

During the interview, which took place at a rehearsal studio on Yucca Street, a few blocks off Sunset and Vine, we kept coming back to Bard. References to the school run through much of Steely Dan's two albums. "Reelin" In the Years" is probably the best song ever written about the pseudopoetic, preppie-hippie assholism that dominated Bard and other joints of its kind in the late sixties:

You've been telling me you're a genius

Since you were seventeen

And ail the time I've known you

I still don't know what you mean.

On the second album, Countdown to ^ Ecstasy, there's even a tune called "My Old.School," which chronicles one* of the annual Bard busts, in which the Duchess County Police, under Sheriff Quinlan and an assistant D.A. named G. Gordon Liddy, would deputize every townie bowling at the 9-G Lanes and carry off ten to twenty per cent of the student body.

There were plenty of fitting human subjects for song at Bard, people who left themselves permanently imprinted in the Bard collective unconscious. Dudes like Marcus Aurelius Greenberg, an R&B oldies fanatic, greaser and part-time (most of the time) junkie, who was once roused out of a serious smack "n" seconal OD at 3:30 a.m. to write a 20-page paper on Nabokov that was due the next morning. (He got an A minus.) Or Bill "the Night 0\yl" Gottlieb, who raised cunnilingus from foreplay to an art form (he once even challenged Great Ray from Screw Magazine). Gottlieb was known to get madly drunk down the road at Adolph's, and then go to a dorm like TURN TO PAGE 74.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 40.

Tewksbury, where he'd drop bis drawers and molest freshman girls who were tripping on mescaline.

Of course Steely Dan aren't the first ones to write specifically about Bard in their music. When we were there, old Bardians swore that the busted pump near Adolph's^bar (legendary Bard hangout) didn't work "cause the vandals took the handles," and that Dylan wrote that song ("Subterranean Homesick Blues") on the walls of the graffiti famed Potter dorm shitstalls.

After Bard, Steelies Fagen and Becker made their way back to New York. They did an album on Spark Records under the name "The Original Soundtrack." The album itself was a soundtrack, for the famed Zalman King movie "You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It (Or You'll Lose That Beat)," It featured a really killer Fagen and Becker song called "Dog Eat Dog," which went in part,

So rip off your mask

Or the best you can ask

Is a mattress in the city pound.

After the soundtrack (the movie lasted in release for about fifteen minutes), Fagen, Becker and Denny Dias formed a rehearsal band that played in Denny's basement in Hicksville, Long Island. The drummer happened to be Jay and the Americans" road drummer, and all of them soon found themselves on the road with... Jay and the Americans.

"Mostly it was playing sleazy little night clubs in Queens and The Bronx," recalls Walter Becker. "It was a very compact operation.,. it also paid the rent."

After a year or so the circuit began to get tedious. Fagen and Becker, and Denny and Skunk were sort of hanging -around when an old friend, Gary Katz, became a staff producer at ABC-Dunhill in Los Angeles. Katz got Fagen and Becker jobs as staff writers at Dunhill, and that's where the modern Steely Dan saga takes off.

"They gave us somebody else's office with a terrible piano in it," said Walter, "and we started banging out the hits. It didn't take us too long to find out that wasn't going to work, because the "hits" we were-coming up with were really too weird or too cheesy for 'anyone to record. We wrote some songs so cheesy the Grass Roots wouldn't do them."

"A staff writer is supposed to be a researcher of radio as well as a creative person," adds Donald. "It's essentially imitating whatever you hear on the radio and putting it out eight or ten months later."

The first Steely Dan album was recorded in June, 1972, after six fruitless months on the song squad. Both the Dan's hit singles ("Do It Again" and "Reelin" in the Years") are here, as well as a few songs that could've been hits if the band was greedy. L.A. songs like "Midnite Cruiser" and "Turn That .Heartbeat Over Again." New York nostalgia moves like "Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)," and the brilliant popish "Dirty Work," which Birtha is trying to break out with.

A few personnel changes have ensued. Vocalist David Palmer, who sang oh neither of the band's hits, is gone. To add spice to the Vocals and the visual situation (the band doesn't exactly look like they just jumped out of Modern Romance magazine), two foxy lady vocalists have been added. Their names are either Porky and Bucky, or Chip and Dale, or Gloria Granola and Jenny Soule.

The second album, Countdown to Ecstasy, was my most played album throughout the past summer and remains a steady favorite. The sound is deep and

well-strung, with patterns constantly shifting under the melodies and rhythm.

, The lyrics are as usual brilliant, since they're the kind of words you can make mean anything you .want most of the time.

In "Razor Boy" and "The Boston Rag," there arises a misogyny that makes Rod Stewart's seem like that of an 8-year-old fighting with his older sister." There are women in cages in "Razor Boy," which always reminds me of David Bowie's haircut; the Boston Rag was "Lady Bayside, back in 1965." If you came from New York, you know that was a drag.

"Show Biz Kids" is the band at their weirdest, and possibly most accessible. It's a strange follow-up to two gold singles, considering it's a hypnotic,enigmatic musical piece based around the world's oldest Henny Youngman joke:; the girls sing, "Go io lost wages, lost wages" throughout the song. The girls k voices are mixed way up front, with another new vocalist, Royce Jones also hanging in there somewhere. It allows them to pull off lines like: "They got the Steely Dan t-shirts and for the coup de grace... they're outrageous (go to lost wages.)" Great .song, and yet another Bard reference: "El supremo in the room at the top of the stairs" was a mural in one of the Stone Row dorms portraying a Banana Republic firing squad.

A more likely single might turn out to be "Pearl of the Quarter," with it's lazy Louisiana steel guitar, soft as a "cajun smile" and cynical as "she loves the million dollar words I say." Fine drumming, as always, from Jim Hodder, who appears in this article for the first -time.

The real Steely Dan heartbeat is "King of the World." It moves from nostalgia for childhood . magalomania tongues (ham radio, for instance), to Saturday afternoon movies. The lyric is superb: "Any man left on the Rio' Grande is the King of the world, far as I know."

Says Walter Becker: "Typical devastation. Like, what do you do at the end of the world. The sense of doom is overwhelming. We wrote it after watching Ray Milland in Panic in the Year Zero, "

Cha-cha-cha!