In Eminent Hipsters, musician and songwriter Donald Fagen, best
known as the co-founder of the rock band Steely Dan, presents an
autobiographical portrait that touches on everything from the
cultural figures that mattered the most to him as a teenager, to
his years in the late 1960s at Bard College, to a hilarious account
of a recent tour he made with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald.
Fagen begins by introducing the 'eminent hipsters' that spoke to
him as he was growing up (and desperately yearning to be hip) in
suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The figures
who influenced him most were not the typical ones - Miles Davis,
say, or Jack Kerouac - but rather people like Jean Shepherd, whose
manic, acidic nightly radio broadcasts out of WOR-Radio had a tough
realism about life and 'enthralled a generation of alienated young
people'; Henry Mancini, whose chilled-out, nourish soundtracks,
especially to films by Blake Edwards utilised the unconventional,
spare instrumentation associated with the cool jazz school; and
Mort Fega, the laid back, knowledgeable all night jazz man at WEVD,
who was like 'the cool uncle you always wished you had'. He writes
of how, growing up as a Cold War baby, one of his primary doors of
escape became reading science fiction by such authors as Philip K.
Dick, and of his regular trips into New York City to hear jazz.
Other emblematic musical heroes Fagen writes about include Ray
Charles, Ike Turner, and the Boswell Sisters, a trio from the 1920s
and 30s whose subversive musical genius included trick phrasing and
way out harmony. 'Class of '69' recounts Fagen's colourful
tumultuous years at Bard College, the progressive university north
of New York City that attracted a strange mix of applicants,
including 'desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills
but appalling high school records' (like himself). It was at Bard
that Fagen first met Walter Becker, with whom he would later form
Steely Dan. The final section of the book, 'With the Dukes of
September', offers a day-by-day account of a tour Fagen undertook
last summer across America with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald,
performing a programme of old R&B and soul tunes as well as
some of each of their own hits. Told in a weary, cranky,
occasionally biting and always entertaining voice, Fagen brings to
life the ups and downs and various indignities and anxieties of
being on the road - The Dukes were an admittedly 'low-rent
operation' compared to a Steely Dan tour - as well as communicating
the challenges and joy of playing every night to a different crowd
in a different city.
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