music—he had Ray Estrada with him, Ian Carmichael—and I liked his use of two drummers." In live performance Steely Dan uses two drummers, playing in anthracite-hard unison, and there is something perhaps Zappaesque in the way Fagen leaps around: while "conducting" the group.

After Fagen graduated from Bard and Becker was asked to leave—something about lack of seriousness on his Work-Study Program—the two for a while tried to peddle their songs in New York. Not surprisingly, they didn't find much market for them, running as they did to lyrics like, "Do you throw out your gold teeth/Do you see how they roll?"

A random career of gigging followed, in the course of which they met both their guitarists, Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter. With Dias they actually tried to forma group in Dias's home town of Hicksville, L.I. "Neither of them drove," remembers Dias, a dropped-out Medical Computer Science student. "So I had to drive out to the Queens train station to pick them up for rehearsals." The commute helped kill the band.

So Becker and Fagen went back to New York and worked with Jay and the Americans in their backup band during 1970 and 1971. Jay Black remembers them, all right; he remembers them as "cocksuckers who I may kick in the ass next time I see them."

He qualifies this by saying that he understands people get "cocky" when they're "young and successful." As musicians, he professes the greatest admiration for them. "There are no finer songwriters in the country. They are kind of like the