When the Beatles broke up in 1970, a number of artists scrambled to obtain their mantle as the World's Greatest Musical Group, especially in England, where the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Roxy Music, and David Bowie all fought over the crown--which of course was ultimately unobtainable. In the US, during the early 1970s, popular music was dominated by the more gentle, and ultimately far more ephemeral threads of the singer-songwriter movement, which took the complexity of the best work by Simon and Garfunkle, and the Beatles in the 1960s, and reduced them to three finger-picked chords and a whine.

The notable exception was Steely Dan, who emerged from the same love of popular American music of the 1950s that influenced all of the above acts, but also a love for more rarefied stuff: big bands of the 1930s and 1940s, and bebop and cool jazz of the 1950s.

As The New Musical Express wrote in 1974:

Woolworth's seems hardly the place to get turned on to rock music-that's where Walter Becker's ears started to twitch at the sounds of The Beatles' "No Reply" (side one, track - on"Beatles For Sale"). And that convinced him there was more to rock than three chords.

For Becker's songwriting partner, Donald Fagen-the two are the writing force behind Steely Dan-it was "Ticket To Ride," heard on the radio one summer that nibbled a hole in his prejudice against rock music.

Becker, however, is still prejudiced against rock and doesn't like it if there aren't enough chord changes, unless it's played extremely well...Although each musician in the group counts, it's Becker and Fagen's songwriting that really makes Steely Dan something special. Both of them have similar backgrounds and attitude, getting into jazz a long time before appreciating rock.

Fagen, he says he's done this bio speel about two million times now: he learned to play piano and a little alto-sax as a child, taking his licks from jazz records, and tried to play like Red Garland who is Miles Davis's old piano player. "I picked up that style. Later I found that I could pick up almost any style from records."

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