reproducing Tricky Sam Nanton's trombone part on pedal steel. Their be-bop tribute, "Parker's Band," includes a brief Charlie Parker quote from "Bongo Bop."

Like their songs, this isn't the kind of thing most rock bands get into. Walter Becker, though, isn't surprised that they're getting away with it. "People laughed at these songs for years. But in my heart I always knew we'd written good songs, and some day people would like them."

Some day came in 1972. Gary Katz, one of Richard Perry's original partners in Cloud Nine Productions, had left Avco Records and spent nearly two years "lying in bed looking at my big toe." A tall, sincere stringbean of a man—a self-confessed basketball dropout, in fact—he got to be friends with Becker and Fagen during that time.a classic Grass Roots title like "Tell Me a Lie." But meanwhile Steely Dan was being assembled in the basement of ABC. Katz sent for drummer Jimmy Hodder, who had been with the Bead Game, a Boston group Katz had once produced. Hodder, a figure from the Boston studio-session scene, naturally knew another sessionman: Jeff Baxter, Mexico City–born son of a J. Walter Thompson executive vice president.

The original incarnation of the band had creditable antecedents among hip bands that never made it. In addition to Hodder from the Bead Game was Baxter from a late incarnation of the unfortunate Ultimate Spinach, and for a brief while the group had a lead singer named David Palmer who had been with a group called Middle Class, managed while it existed