Steely Dan closes out tour in Santa Rosa

During their creative heyday in the 1970s, jazz-pop band Steely Dan hardly toured. The band’s founders, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, were sonic perfectionists; they just couldn’t get the sound they wanted outside the studio. And at that time, touring was typically a loss leader; the $10 tickets didn’t cover the costs of performing.

How times have changed.

The sound quality at live venues can be superb, and ticket prices make touring profitable. So Steely Dan has become a touring band.

After comeback shows in 1993-94, Steely Dan hit the road with a vengeance to support their 2000 album, “Two Against Nature,” the first collection of new songs Steely Dan had produced in 20 years. They’ve embarked on several tours since then but have never come to Sonoma County.

That’s remedied this month as the multiplatinum masters who helped invent jazz-rock fusion conclude their 2008 Think Fast tour Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts.

“It’ll be like playing a nightclub,” said bandleader Donald Fagen in a phone interview this week.

“What’s really special is the size of our venue and the intimate nature of the shows. Our theater holds 1,600 people with no seat further than 75 feet from the stage,” said Kristi Buffo, spokeswoman for the WFC. “It is the smallest venue on Steely Dan’s tour.”

Steely Dan swung through the Bay Area last month, electrifying almost 10,000 people at the near-sold-out Greek Theatre in Berkeley.

The tight, crackling backup band came onstage first, performing instrumental versions of mid-’70s classics “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” and “The Fez.” As the sun set behind the distant Golden Gate Bridge, Becker and Fagen strode onto the stage to thunderous applause and launched into the monumental “The Royal Scam.” At first Fagen’s distinctive, slightly nasal voice sounded thin and reedy, but he warmed up after a couple of songs and sounded like the beguiling, enigmatic Fagen of yore.

It’s hard to imagine now that when the band made its first album, Fagen hired another singer to perform some of the songs.

“Over the years I’ve come to enjoy (singing) quite a bit,” Fagen said. “In the ’70s it was kind of a chore for me, but I’ve taken some lessons over the years so it’s easier and it’s quite a lot of fun.”

Steely Dan clearly belongs to Fagen (electric piano) and Becker (guitar). The duo has consistently managed to assemble astonishingly strong backing bands.

This ensemble is no exception, with the propulsive Keith Carlock on drums, an all-star four-piece horn section and a pair of female vocalists who appeared in Berkeley in luxuriant Angela Davis afro wigs and who sang the lead together on “Parker’s Band,” a tribute to jazz great Charlie Parker.

What makes Steely Dan unique isn’t simply their deft blend of jazz and pop styles — Becker has joked they perfected elevator music — but the band’s lyrics.

They write “cryptic poetry that Dylan might have conjured had he pored over (author William S.) Burroughs instead of (Woody) Guthrie,” says Slate’s Fred Kaplan.

Beneath the smooth riffs lie an underworld of characters who cringe at the sight of daylight: the prostitute in “Pearl of the Quarter,” genius LSD-fabricator Owsley (“Kid Charlemagne”) who “crossed the diamond with the pearl,” and the desperate lecher in “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies.”

Cast against the soul-soothing musical riffs are stories of alienation: the outcast in “Any World That I’m Welcome To,” (sadly absent from the Berkeley set), and the college grad in “Hey 19” who finds himself adrift in suburbia, (“Moved down to Scarsdale, Where the hell am I …”).

Fagen and Becker are highly literate, a key to their endurance.

“We’re not a singer-songwriter type act – it’s not confessional music,” Fagen said. “I’m usually playing a character of some kind. I don’t think I’m much of an actor but when I’m singing the songs it’s part me and partly I’m playing a role.”

Casual Steely Dan listeners may not get all the allusions in the songs. But that doesn’t bother Becker: “I want some people to get it, but I don’t care if everybody gets it.”

At the Berkeley show just about everyone got it, singing along with the band and recognizing songs from the first couple of notes.

Steely Dan is really two bands, the pop-influenced outfit of the early albums and the smooth-jazz crew of the later discs (starting with 1977’s “Aja”). True, “Aja” came out more than 30 years ago, but that disc still defines the launch of Steely Dan 2.0.

This tour’s set tilts toward the jazz category, with several songs from “Aja” and “Gaucho,” and “New Frontier” from Fagen’s 1982 solo album, “The Nightfly,” complemented by a couple of tunes from the band’s two albums from this decade.

Steely Dan is five years removed from its most recent album, 2003’s “Everything Must Go,” so there’s no current album to flog. The band gives the audience what it wants: the great songs of the 1970s with a dash of more recent material.

The two-hour set in Berkeley, however, managed to touch on just about every era, with a jazzed-up “Show Biz Kids” and a rousing “Kid Charlemagne” to close the set. The final encore was 1972’s “Do It Again,” the band’s first hit.

Fagen is 60, Becker’s 58, but they appear to be reveling in their heavy touring schedule. And these trailblazing boomers take pride in their endurance.

“We were the enemy of punk bands everywhere,” Fagen sneered in an NPR interview. “And where are they now?”