It was never a secret that Steely Dan was David Crosby‘s favorite band. For decades, the late Crosby, Stills, & Nash co-founder treasured the band and even shared his admiration for them on social media three years before his death.
“Steely Dan is my favourite band in the world, period,” Crosby stated in a 2020 tweet.
In early 2019, Crosby joined Steely Dan in Santa Barbara for a performance of their 1977 song “Home at Last.” Later that year, in October, Crosby also joined Steely Dan on stage for two nights at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, where they performed the Steely Dan classic “Reelin’ in the Years” along with CSN’s “Wooden Ships.”
“I get there, and they’ve learned it really well, and they’ve written horn parts,” recalled Crosby of performing with the band. “It’s just smoking. I walk out, and the whole audience goes absolutely bats–t crazy. We practically did structural damage to the building. It was really good.” After the shows, Crosby says he “cultivated” a relationship with Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. “He doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, but he’s a brilliant guy,” said Crosby. “I admire him beyond belief.”
Both also collaborated two years later when Fagen co-wrote “Rodriguez for a Night” on Crosby’s eighth and final album, For Free, in 2021. “We Steely Dan’d them right into the fucking ground,” joked Crosby. “It’s a story song, and it’s really fun. “I’m so honoured he [Fagen] gave us a set of words. I’ve been asking him for a couple of years. He started to trust us, I think. It took a long time, but he gave us a set of words that are really wonderful, and we just wrote the shit out of them.”
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‘Aja’
Decades before Crosby started to perform and collaborate with the band, they helped him navigate his struggles with addiction during the late 1970s. It was Steely Dan‘s sixth album, Aja, that helped Crosby get through a particularly difficult time when he was fighting for his life.
In the midst of his addiction, Crosby was also drawn to the Aja opener, “Deacon Blues.” Written by Fagen and Steely Dan guitarist Walter Becker, the lyrics follow an obsession with sci-fi and are loosely based on Alfred Bester’s 1952 novel, The Demolished Man, and tell the story of a man imagining his evolution, spiritually and otherwise.
The song was also partly based on the duo’s dreams of becoming jazz musicians. Imagining the narrator of the song as a Norman Mailer-type, the song title was inspired by the late football player Deacon Jones.
This is the day of the expanding man
That shape is my shade
There where I used to stand
It seems like only yesterday
I gazed through the glass
At ramblers, wild gamblers
That’s all in the past
You call me a fool
You say it’s a crazy scheme
This one’s for real
I already bought the dream
So useless to ask me why
Throw a kiss and say goodbye
I’ll make it this time
I’m ready to cross that fine line
That whole record helped me stay alive at that point.
David Crosby
Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues
My back to the wall
A victim of a laughing chance
This is for me
The essence of true romance
Sharing the things we know and love with those of my kind
Libations, sensations
That staggers the mind
“In the depths of my addiction, I let drugs become the most important thing in my life—more so than making music, more so than almost anything,” shared Crosby on his connection to Aja and the track.
“But somehow the music hung in there for me, and it’s what kept me alive,” he added. “I was listening to this song an awful lot at that time because it’s spectacularly strong: ‘They call Alabama the Crimson Tide / Call on me Deacon Blue.’ That whole record [‘Aja’] helped me stay alive at that point.”
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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