Dead Head or Dan Fan: Who’s the Bigger Asshole?
On the spectrum of Grateful Dead to Steely Dan, wherein does your rock music pretentiousness lie?
Do you believe your music has blessed you with spiritual enlightenment, bestowed upon you the responsibility of subverting capitalism and sticking it to the man? Or has your music granted you the distinction of intellectual superiority, as one cannot even begin to appreciate your music without understanding the genius of its melodic idiosyncrasies, rhythmic underpinnings, and harmonic patterns? Do you and the other members of your cult share a collective memory — maybe a psychedelic fever dream — of the band’s every live performance, every transcendental jam session, with every inspired improvisation and every moment of euphoric climax? Or do you revel in smug self-satisfaction, knowing only you can decode the sardonically-encrypted lyrics, only you can appreciate the technical perfectionism and complex arrangements?
Who are The Dead and The Dan?
For those too young to remember or not hip enough to know, the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan are rock bands that peaked in the 1970s but have deservingly developed standings as some of the greatest bands in rock history.
The Dead
The Grateful Dead was formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California, at the height of the counterculture movement. While rooted in bluegrass and rhythm and blues, their music shifted towards lengthy instrumental jams heavy in modal and tonal improvisation, a fitting soundtrack for the psychedelic experience. Their epic tours made them pioneers and innovators of concert sound, with the diversity, unpredictability, and duration (three hours and more) of their performances the ideal backdrop for acidheads, hippies, and other lost souls in search of one long, strange trip.
The Dan
Steely Dan was founded in 1971 in New York by core members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, becoming a studio-only band in 1974 when Becker and Fagen withdrew from live performances. Influenced by rock, jazz, Latin music, R&B, and blues, Becker and Fagen composed complex structures and harmonies and employed the greatest rock and pop studio musicians to make their visionary ideas come to life. The duo’s penchant for perfectionism became a defining trait of their music, characterized by impeccably executed instrumentals, sophisticated studio production, and what some would dub a “sterile” quality. Their intellectualism further manifested in dark, enigmatic lyrics with biting sarcasm. The band’s self-imposed inaccessibility to a mainstream audience made it the ideal choice for self-conscious, middle-class hipsters looking to inhabit a niche in the rock fandom.
Who are Dead Heads and Dan Fans?
Because of their well-earned legendary statuses, both bands have their own cult of die-hard followers. For the Grateful Dead, it’s Dead Heads, and for Steely Dan, it’s Dan Fans.
Dead Heads
To be a Dead Head is to understand the band’s 30-year tumultuous touring career as a means of educating the masses, illuminating a new style of music to the youth of their generation and generations to come. They must frame it intellectually if they want a chance at justifying the shortcomings in even the Dead’s best shows — intonation problems, weak singing, calamitous rhythm. Dead Heads thus faithfully and blindly devote themselves to the prophet Jerry Garcia and his apostles (Bob Weir, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann), upholding their faith by spreading their gospel — a responsibility largely fulfilled through the mitzvah of sharing tapes.
The band always encouraged recording their live shows, even establishing a designated section for fans to set up taping equipment, and tapers took their duties seriously. For a band whose performances were defined by improvisation, the ability to capture those elusive moments when the band’s ethereal muse took shape imbued tapes with allure akin to supernatural sightings.
A canon of Dead shows soon began to develop amongst fans, and what began as a covert operation in the early 70s has since been sanctified as a unifying religious practice among the community — the ability to contribute to a living, breathing scripture. Really, the Dead Head subculture has all the elements to be declared a legitimate religion by the government: recognized creed and form of worship, formal code of doctrine and discipline, distinct religious history, and most importantly, a kick-ass name — Church of the Dead.
Dan Fans
Danfans are, by and large, insufferable pricks. But it shouldn’t be surprising that Steely Dan have the world’s most arrogant, elitist assholes for a fan base. New York beatniks who moved to Los Angeles, the Dan hated hippies and loved cocaine, dark sarcasm and subtle wordplay.
For Dan Fans, status in the Dandom is achieved via intellectualism more than communal sacrifice; the self-proclaimed audiophiles and music theory aficionados either really know what they’re talking about or know enough musical jargon to BS it. One of their favorite buzzwords is the “mu chord,” the defining stylistic device of the distinctive Steely Dan sound. From my experience, three modes of fans emerge distinguished by musical expertise:
- Amateurs haphazardly throw around the term in their insufferable rambles on the Dan’s ingenious composition.
- Semi-professionals make sure you know they know what a mu chord really is, going into painstaking detail on how it’s formed by adding a 2nd to a major triad, thus consisting of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th degrees of the major scale and engineering the sonic quality of whole-tone dissonance.
- Pros Mad Libs the previous sentence, choosing a random combination of four numbers and some perfumy phrase about the “sonic quality” akin to a sommelier’s “A sensory cocktail of burnt sugar, clam broth, lemon, and tinged iron deliver seductive sweetness and metallic acidity that render the finish as invigorating and refreshing as it is vibrant and dynamically complex.”
(Apparently, there is a similar hierarchy with Dead Heads, with your level of piety related to how well-versed you are in the history and culture of the Dead, the band’s different “eras,” etc. After all, you can’t draw a blank when someone asks, “Give me the TL;DR of our messiah’s origin story.”)
Dan Fans will further revel in their unique ability to appreciate Becker and Fagen’s mastery of wit and language, their unique insights on the artists’ opaque lyrics filled with cryptic references, dark humor, and bitter cynicism. If prompted, they’ll delve into Steely Dan Antiheroes 101, a character study of the songs’ featured deadbeats and desperadoes — the drug dealer hero of “Glamour Profession” catering to the Hollywood’s greatest stars of sports and screen, the dead-ender in “Don’t Take Me Alive” barricaded in with his case of dynamite, the traumatized war veteran in “Third World Man” with a case of youthful idealism gone psychotic, the self-pitying suburbanite in “Deacon Blues” who dreams of life as a jazz saxophonist.
Of course, Steely Dan’s music is too sophisticated to explore tired tropes like love. The closest thing you’ll get is perverted obsession, a much more fitting subject for psychoanalytical evaluation. Take, for example, “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” in which a middle-aged man invites the neighborhood children to his den to watch porn. Or consider “Hey Nineteen,” the laments of an aging hipster realizing he has nothing in common with the teenagers he’s trying to get with. If it’s not tragic, pitiful, or disturbing, it’s not Steely Dan.
Agree to disagree?
When it comes down to it, Dead Heads and Dan Fans just fundamentally disagree about the purpose of music and what gives it value. Is it the experience, the connection between musician and listener, the supercharge of the senses, perhaps all from a (drug-induced) elevated state of perception? Is it the chaotic synergy of all these, maybe the fleeting beauty of the moment, irreproducible under any conditions? (In other words, You had to be there, man!) Or is the value of music in consumable innovation, the production of high-quality sounds that will stand the test of time? Is it the complex interaction of meticulous production, technical precision, and ingenious arrangement to achieve a miracle of creation? Or is this question too meta for us to even have a serious conversation about it?
But if there’s one thing Dead Heads and Dan Fans should be able to agree on, it’s that innovation often results from the clash of opposing forces; the necessity of a sound defense to survive the impact of criticism or effective offense to outperform our opponents requires us to refine, expand upon, or entirely rethink our ideas. Was it not rivalry among the great Renaissance artists Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, their vying for commissions, recognition, and prestige, that produced some of the greatest works in art history? Was it not Socrates who established debate not only as an art form but as a societal necessity, and was it not debate among the wise philosophers that granted them new insights on natural phenomena, human behavior, and other mysteries of the world? Was it not America’s desire to one-up Russia’s Sputnik stunt that spurred the space race and, along with it, innumerable technological advancements? While the parties in consideration held each other in great esteem, their competition is what stimulated their creativity. To compete, they borrowed from one another, drawing on the techniques and innovations that they most admired.
Competition can sometimes yield petulance and destructive energy. However, when the competition has the context of respect, we can harness some of that energy for good — for example, use it to examine music with a critical lens and appreciate the quirks that distinguish different styles. For what would be the merit of painstaking technical execution without a relative lazy indifference to which to claim superiority? What would be the allure of a musical mindfuck, a vibrant orgy of sound, sight, and body odor, without the underwhelming and somewhat pathetic alternative — a circle jerk of middle-aged men, gratifying their self-proclaimed audiophilia as they gather in one of their DIY “listening rooms” and spin vinyl on thousand-dollar turntables to get that “sexy analog sound?” In some cases, these contrasting features can serve as a basis for collaboration, their complement taking on a beauty not present in its unique sources.
If the elitist assholes that are Dan Fans and the holier-than-thou junkies that are Dead Heads can find it within themselves to appreciate the value in one another’s musical tastes, they’ll become one step closer in spirituality to the artists they so worship. For to be a musician is to be constantly listening, acquiring new sounds for your musical palette, learning from the techniques and stylistic choices of other musicians. Donald Fagen grew up listening to Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk, and his work is inspired by their sound as well as the jazz arrangers of the fifties and sixties. The Grateful Dead greatly admired the Beatles, and a desire to emulate their sound and performances was why they “turned from a jug band into a rock ’n’ roll band”.
In the end, innovators are never really at odds with one another; they learn from one another, contribute to and draw from the same musical lifeforce. Maybe us listeners should take a page out of their songbook and embrace that open-minded spirit. Go ahead and try it, step out of your musical echo chamber, listen to Spotify’s curated Discover Weekly playlist instead of retreating to your Liked Songs, jam out with that person whose music taste is the polar opposite of yours. You may be surprised by what you find.
