his photos, which has led to his being called "a rock & roll Victor Mature," in person turns out to be dominated by an alarmingly long nose, wide mouth and high forehead, giving him the aspect, perhaps, of a mad scientist. He no longer is introduced to audiences as Tristan Fabriani, but with his own band he still doesn't run it straight when it comes to introducing himself. Naming the members of "our little orchestra" from his seat at the piano, he winds up, "and yours truly ... Mary Tyler Moore." His irony is less in the razor blade and more nearly in the lanky, swallowing-his-words, country-western mode.

The Becker and Fagen team formed seven years ago at Bard College, a tiny, hyper-intense institution across the river from Woodstockuntaught, for some time when the two met. "I learned music from a book on piano theory," he says. "I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the Harvard Dictionary of Music, I learned everything I wanted to know."

Fagen had studied jazz piano in high school. "Before I went to college," he says, "I had a prejudice against rock & roll. But people there introduced me to the Beatles and the Stones, who were incorporating jazz idiom into rock—without, I suspect, realizing it.

"Dylan, of course, Dylan has influenced everybody, it's too obvious to mention. I also liked Zappa. I first went to one of his shows under the impression that the Mothers were a jazz group. I went home very impressed. I liked the