Reelin’ In the Years
REELIN’ IN THE YEARS
Donald Fagan and Walter Becker were the greatest song writing duo of 1970s. But Fagen’s memoir is such an enjoyable book that it deserves to be appreciated apart from the music.
The first half of Eminent Hipsters is a personal and artistic journey through the 50s and 60s. This appeals to me, for I have also been doing a lot of looking back. There is a pattern to this looking back. There seems to be a point somewhere in middle age where the memory reverses its poles. The distant past becomes clearer and the recent past and present lose focus.
This is the beginning of nostalgia. It is paired with a feeling of unease with the present, a feeling of alienation, like waking up in a strange new world after having been asleep for a very long time. Fagan is uninspired by the things of the present, so he looks back to the things of his youth.
As often as not, we fail to appreciate our formative years while we are living them. They seem pedestrian in contrast to some half-real half-mythic earlier time. That which is only ever experienced peripherally peaks curiosity and admiration, leading to an idealization. There is a mistiness, a fuzziness, a dreamlike quality that, by blotting out much that is mundane and incidental, cuts to the heart of the era, to its essence, and thereby comes closer to its spirit than facts alone ever could.
In Fagan’s more or less autobiographical essays, he idealizes the early 60s, not the square mid-50s, not the psychedelic late 60s. I get this. My own middle age nostalgia is also focused on my formative years. The difference is, he grew up on Miles and Monk. I grew up on Steely Dan. But the pattern is the same.
There are things, experiences, and ideas that are more fully appreciated in retrospect. Looking back, Fagan sees his formative years through both his youthful eyes and his mature eyes, getting a different perspective, a more holistic perspective.
The second half of the book is a journal Fagan kept when he was on tour with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs. There are a few memories of the 70s, but Fagan mostly writes about contemporary concerns. I believe they reveal as much of Fagan as would a narrative of the decades since Steely Dan.
The continuity of self seems not to need much middle. Such is the lesson of nostalgia.
The portrait of Fagan that emerges from the journal is but a grayer version of the boy he presents in the essays. Little seems to have changed over the decades. His values then are his values now.
The journal ends with the end of the tour. I wish I could have seen the Dukes at the Beacon, but I’m grateful to get to know Fagan through Eminent Hipsters. And I’m grateful to Fagan and Becker for the music.
You can’t go home again. But at least you can listen to the music.