Steely Dan's Fagen digs deep in memoir

Eminent Hipsters

nolead begins By Donald Fagen

Viking. 176 pp. $16.17

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Alissa Quart

The conventions of the rock-and-roll memoir once were frightfully clear. Defiant adolescence leads directly to creating a band of noncompliant youths, a first album, first hit song, first drugs, loads of faceless sex, and, of course, first rehab. Then comes the nostalgic, AA-laced coda describing a happy afterlife in Santa Monica. All of this was usually rendered in workaday prose, often concocted in part by a ghostwriter.

But now, the rock memoir has changed. Stars write the books themselves. These books are often steeped in literature, with stabs at ethnography - and sometimes even luminous prose. They may even win the National Book Award. They tell the stories of entire cultural scenes, often in New York City, and act as historical records, music criticism, plangent self-portraits, and sketches of fellow luminaries.

Into this camp comes Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, his lip curled in disdain (thankfully) at any signs of bad taste around him. His Eminent Hipsters has joined the inspired Just Kids by Patti Smith and Bob Dylan's meandering lyric Chronicles. There's also Black Postcards, by Dean Wareham of the band Luna, which features this wonderful line: "If nothing else, we had our arrogance." And See a Little Light, the memoir from Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü. Plus, let's never forget Richard Hell's memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp - unless, that is, you are Tom Verlaine, his bandmate in Television.

With Fagen, we know we are in elliptical literary territory, because Eminent Hipsters is primarily about influences. Fagen's years of megastardom barely appear. Instead, he is sketching out the varied elements that created his slick, tastefully jazz-infused pop music - a dab of Birdland, a blue-eyed soul tendency, and a generous handful of Brill Building songcraft.

Fagen spends two paragraphs comparing Ike Turner to Goethe's Faust. We learn that his mother was a fine swing singer in the "Jewish Alps" - the Catskills - who was obsessed with phrasing or the way notes are syncopated. He writes of his youth:

"I was an introverted jazz snob who was afraid to ride in other kids' cars for fear that 'Johnny Get Angry' by Joanie Sommers might come on the radio . . . ."

At Bard College, his "old school," he meets Walter Becker, his collaborator for 40 years. The two had many interests in common: jazz, blues, all sorts of popular music, Nabokov, and writers of what was then called the "black humor" school.

This isn't Rick Springfield's biography.

What comes through in this collection is Fagen's love of popular music he deems worthy, from jazz onward, and also his acute self-consciousness. The two things go together. He is so ardently self-aware that he knows to preemptively flag the new high-brow rock-memoir genre he is a part of with his book's first sentence, swearing he's not just another "rock-and-roll geezer making a last desperate bid for mainstream integrity but putting out a book of belles lettres."

He's not alone, of course. All the highbrow rock memoirists share Fagen's intense self-awareness. Indeed, what marks them as ultimately worthy and distinct from the oldtime rock-and-roll memoir is that these people understand what they represent. They may even know that they are remnants, traces of the end of rock star qua rock star.

Today, the phrase rock star lives on most hardily as a metaphor. The sobriquet is applied to everyone from hairdressers and fashion designers to technologists, lingering mostly to add luster to other media as the phrase is drained of value unto iself.

Eminent Hipsters understands the casual glamour it brings to publishing. As such, it is tart and allusive, albeit a little thrown-together. My favorite part is what in the traditional rock memoir would be the sanctimonious coda. In Fagen's book, it's a sour account of the indignities of late middle age (or early old age), while still being a rock star on tour:

"At night, to get to sleep, I watch pay-per-view movies on the hotel system. The movies are so bad now that I usually pass out just after catching the first glimpse of flesh-eating death mist. Once an insatiable reader, I don't read so much anymore. I'm now at the age - sixty-four - where so many sad things have happened that I'm too broken and anxious to read."

Of course, Fagen may never have liked touring, given that Steely Dan was such a studio band.

The cloistered, depressively honest end of the book befits a volume that has strayed from the rock memoir clichés but also lacks some of the passionate immediacy of literary rock authors like Patti Smith.

Eminent Hipsters is, after all, an autobiography of taste.

Daniel Fagen: "Eminent Hipsters"

Author appearance: 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Central Library, 1901 Vine St. Free.

Information: 215-567-4341 or www.freelibrary.orgEndText