Geddy Lee on Steely Dan’s Commercial Complexity

In April 1974, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker gave Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth their verdict on progressive rock. Becker found Yes, Jethro Tull and Emerson Lake & Palmer “interesting,” but had yet to hear one of them grow past “quick changes and super niceties.” Fagen was less generous: Yes were polished, but their music “doesn’t seem to hold together.” Rush’s debut had been in the world for a month.

Geddy Lee does not need the two bands reconciled. In a newly released interview from Rolling Stone’s cover-story sessions, the bassist and singer says he is “a huge fan of Steely Dan,” and specific about it: he nearly named his daughter Aja after the album. “I love that record so much,” he says. “I wore it out.” Alex Lifeson points elsewhere, to Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, asking whether anyone has been more versatile. New touring drummer Anika Niles, meanwhile, is a fan of the late Jeff Porcaro, who played on three Steely Dan records including Katy Lied.

The admiration is not reciprocal on record. Fagen and Becker never commented publicly on Rush, and Becker’s 1974 remarks place them firmly on the other side of the era’s argument. What Lee describes is that argument resolved: Steely Dan, he says, thought like jazz artists and still made music that was easily consumed. That feat, not the chord stacks or the time signatures, is the thing worth naming.