Deacon Blues
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen wrote “Deacon Blues” about a man who chooses to fail beautifully rather than succeed at something he doesn’t want.
That’s the whole architecture of the song. Not failure as tragedy, not failure as self-destruction — failure as a considered aesthetic position. The Deacon Blues narrator looks at the winners, the guys who get the stadium and the trophy and the name on the building, and he decides he’d rather have the alto saxophone and the Scotch and the night. “They got a name for the winners in the world,” he sings. “I want a name when I lose.”
He wants to be called Deacon Blues.
The song came out of sessions at Village Recorder in Los Angeles in 1976 and early 1977, during the making of Aja — the record that would eventually win the Grammy for Album of the Year and sell millions of copies and get Steely Dan hated by the kind of people who think selling millions of copies is a moral failing. The irony being that Aja is partly a record about that exact position, about the losers and drifters and midnight people who live entirely outside the economy of success.
Becker and Fagen enlisted Pete Christlieb to play the saxophone on “Deacon Blues.” Christlieb was a session player and a member of Doc Severinsen’s Tonight Show band — not a rock star, not a household name, just a man who could play. What he did in the studio that day is seven and a half minutes of some of the best saxophone work ever committed to a pop record. It’s not pyrotechnics. It’s something sadder and stranger — a sound like a man who has made the same decision as the narrator and is still okay with it, still showing up, still playing the thing he loves in whatever room will have him.
Fagen has said the title came from a joke — the Crimson Tide is Alabama’s football team, and a deacon blues would be a losing team from some small church school somewhere, the team that exists to get beaten by Alabama. The losers who take the field anyway. He and Becker thought that was funny and then realized it was also true.
The narrator of the song lives in a version of Los Angeles that exists mostly at night. He drives to the sea. He drinks alone. He plays his saxophone until the morning comes, “till the night is all done.” He has a woman, briefly, or the memory of one — she “says she talks to angels,” and you believe him that she’s gone. What’s left is the music and the ritual of failing at a life other people would recognize as a life.
“I’ll learn to work the saxophone, I’ll play just what I feel, drink Scotch whisky all night long and die behind the wheel.”
That line gets quoted as romantic, and it is, but only if you’re listening carefully enough to hear what it actually says. He’s not going to master the saxophone. He’s going to learn to work it — which is different, which is the language of a man who came late to a thing and knows he’ll never be the best and has decided that’s fine. He’s not going to drink well. He’s going to drink Scotch and he’s going to drink it all night. And the destination is not a stage or a sunrise. It’s behind the wheel.
He knows where he’s going. He’s going there anyway.
This is what Steely Dan kept doing on Aja — surrounding emotional wreckage with arrangements so precise and beautiful that you could miss the wreckage entirely if you weren’t paying attention. Victor Feldman on piano. Lee Ritenour and Larry Carlton on guitar. The rhythm section locked in like they’re scoring a film, which in a way they are. The production is impeccable. The people inside the production are falling apart.
Fagen sings it in that flat, almost affect-free voice he has — not cold, but not warm either, the voice of someone reporting facts about his own life the way a detective might narrate a scene. There is no plea in it. He’s not asking anyone to save him or understand him or even particularly care. He’s just telling you what he’s doing, and what he’s going to keep doing.
That’s what makes the song hold up after nearly fifty years. Not the saxophone, though the saxophone is extraordinary. Not the chord changes, though they’re doing things that most musicians would need a map to follow. It’s that the narrator isn’t performing sadness. He’s made a decision and he’s living inside it, and the living looks, from the outside, like loss, but from the inside it looks like the only honest thing a person can do.
“This is the night of the expanding man,” he sings near the end. It’s a strange phrase, almost cosmic, and it lands softly. He’s not getting smaller in the failure. He’s getting wider. Making room for all the things that don’t fit anywhere else.
Pete Christlieb plays through the last two minutes and then the song just stops, the way a long night stops — not with ceremony, just suddenly over, the light coming in from somewhere, the tape running out.
He wanted a name when he loses. He’s had it ever since.
