Nathanael West, Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov: all were discovered by Becker and Fagen to be common interests when they first met as Bard College undergraduates in the late 1960s. The site also includes an entry on Steely Dan itself, originally “a type of (fictional) Japanese dildo, mentioned in William Burroughs’ infamous 1959 book Naked Lunch.” Becker and Fagen “would often regret having chosen that moniker,” writes Brian Sweet in his 1994 biography, Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years, “because critics and journalists were forever trying to find parallels between Burroughs’ book and Steely Dan.” Yet Burroughs did play a role in the band’s formation, as did a host of other imaginative and blackly humorous literary minds of the 20th century. John, kirschwasser, the Studebaker Lark, the College of William & Mary. The online Steely Dan Dictionary, the fruit of another Danfan’s obsession, offers entries on gaslighting and much else besides: the Andria Doria, black cows, Cathy Berberian, the Haitian divorce, Jill St. The word came, Fagen said, “from the classic film Gaslight, and to gaslight is what Charles Boyer did to, who was it? Ingrid Bergman or someone…” In any case, Boyer’s character “tried to convince her that she was insane by moving things around in the house” and (adds Becker) “constantly turning the lights lower and lower.” Steely Dan’s references, on which Becker and Fagen seldom deigned to elaborate so straightforwardly, constitute a rich cultural nexus. It was on Fever Dreams, 20 years ago, that I found an excerpt of an interview in which Steely Dan’s leader-masterminds, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, explain the nature of gaslighting. On that level, his book fulfills the same function as exegetic fan sites like Fever Dreams, once the go-to source for help with the band’s never-straightforward lyrics. This is a common condition among Danfans, as is his tendency to venture occasionally into the wilds of interpretation. No fewer than five times does he deem a song a “winner” another he introduces as a composition “regarded by many as their worst, although I like it a great deal.” Indeed, he seems never to have heard a Steely Dan–related recording he didn’t like. Though at least by avocation a critic, Rowden approaches this endeavor in a spirit of near-pure enthusiasm.
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Jez Rowden includes that fact in Steely Dan: Every Album, Every Song, a volume of Sonicbond’s “On Track” series from 2019, whose charge is to provide brief descriptions and assessments of every album and song recorded by the act in question. “Gaslighting Abbie” alone required 26 straight eight-hour days in the studio to get right. But I was, at least, in the right place: a university-district high-end stereo shop, the kind of audiophile’s sacred space that has provided countless “Danfans” their first proper experience of the band - that is, of the band’s records, played back on a sound system of high enough fidelity to do justice to the enormously costly, complex, and time-consuming labors of recording and production that went into them. It was then that I first heard the word myself, in the context of a Steely Dan song from 2000, “Gaslighting Abbie.” Not only did I have no idea what it meant, I had only the vaguest sense of who Steely Dan were. THE TERM “GASLIGHTING” has returned to the popular lexicon over the past decade, when as recently as the turn of the millennium it had fallen into near-complete disuse.
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