As we hit the causeway by the big hotels.
So last week I was in Florida, and each time I’m down there I think about all the ways the state has shown up in Dan songs and solo Fagen music. “Biscayne Bay, where the Cuban gentlemen sleep all day” is top of mind here. “Doctor Wu” is the centerpiece of Katy Lied — my favorite Dan album, a peculiar grab-bag of shaggy-dog noir, dirty jokes, and a streak of uncertainty that dapples the bright, expansive Omartian/Paich piano leads. It’s the contrast of tropical effulgence against gloomy midday clouds that makes Miami so supremely photogenic, after all; sky-darkening Photoshop AI is popular because unencumbered sunshine washes everything out. The place energizes and lulls, pulls and pushes. And the brief intermezzo of Florida on Katy Lied is a comma amid the ever-alternating clauses of California slick and the bad sneakers grinding New York dirt.
These sunshowers and occasional cold snaps penetrate “Florida Room” from Fagen’s Kamakiriad, a song I mostly love for how he gets his echt-sophisto background singers to pronounce “dahlias” with a short “A” like an old Bronx-Irish boxer would. “Florida Room” is similar in its humidly languid dérive to Bob Dylan’s “Key West”: travelogues of the sensorium, of the past. I listened to both songs on my trip.
And “Walk Between Raindrops” from The Nightfly is about, yes, walking between literal raindrops, but it’s set in Miami (Rat Pack showbiz, gangsters, the Jewish people) so the title comes with allusions to a rabbinical fable and the evasion of looming violence.
There’s a passing reference on Steely Dan’s first album that could very possibly drop a pin on Miami Beach, but in true Becker-Fagen vagueness, we don’t know. The “tower room at Eden Roc” from “Brooklyn” could mean the 1955 resort hotel on Collins in Mid-Beach. It could be, as a Genius annotator speculates, “Eden Rock … an apartment building on 1869 83rd Street, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Not really a skyscraper and probably not a luxury address in 1970s, un-gentrified Brooklyn.” And it should be likeliest that it’s the infamous Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, the longstanding celebrity hidey-hole that regular patron F. Scott Fitzgerald used as the basis for Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers in Tender Is the Night. But it warms my heart to imagine a pre-Dan Fagen cruising Collins Avenue in a rental car one snowbird January on a break from banging out dry runs in a cramped midtown rehearsal room — and going “Eden Roc, yeah! Write that down!” and then splitting for Boca to break matzoh balls with a retired uncle. Who moved there from, you know, Brooklyn.
