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From:
Michael Phalen
To: Roger Nichols
Dear Mr. Nichols:
 I'm
not at all sure that you would remember who I am after all these years,
so let me reintroduce myself - my name is Michael Phalen and I am the
journalist who interviewed Donald and Walter over a couple of days
during the Aja sessions and subsequently wrote the liner notes
for Aja. You gave me a ride in your Pantera to the Chateau
Marmont one night, my bloody shirt and tattered trousers
notwithstanding, after Donald and/or Walter had taken the distributor
cap off my rented car, as a prank - one of many tasteless gags that were
perpetrated against me on the final fateful evening. We talked about a
lot of things, you and I - your American flag jumpsuit, the future of
high fidelity, the correct equipment needed for an authentic Chinese
basket job, and much much more - but you may very well have forgotten
that long-ago night drive up Sunset Boulevard, inasmuch as you've been
working with the guys again and no doubt have had a lot on your mind
lately.
Let me be
perfectly frank - I've been busy too, and I have reached an impasse in
my endeavors which can only be surmounted with your able assistance.
Maybe I should begin my story at the beginning, okay? I am, or
was, after all, a journalist, and have some idea about how such things
should be done.
You may
recall that my interview sessions with the band (ha! some band! two
manic malcontents, a "Harry the Horse" wannabe, and you) were,
to say the very least, stormy. Most of the "fun and jokes"
were at my expense, and I don't think anyonecan as much blame me for
freaking out a little bit on that last evening at The Village Recorder
as I was waiting for the paramedics to arrive to staunch the arterial
bleeding. Feeling a bit put out, as I was at the time, and knowing that
the last mixes had been completed, I calculated that a strategic theft
of a precious master tape would likely go unnoticed for some
considerable time, and that only at some distant future moment would the
crime be discovered, to the utmost inconvenience of my tormentors, at
which moment my revenge would be complete - Ha! - It Was I - long
suffering Michael Phalen, who stole your priceless Aja multitrack
master so long ago! and on whose account you are now unable to make
nasty 5.1 surround sound remix blood money!
You may ask
yourself, why does this cur of an ex-journalist confide to me, by all
accounts an utterly loyal employee of Steely Dan, Inc., the details of
this villainous act? Excellent question, dude! You are, I suspect, every
bit as sharp as you ever were! To answer, I must digress a bit and give
you some personal biographical information, the confidentiality of which
I am sure you will respect. It is a sad fact that, in the aftermath of
the Steely Dan-Aja debacle (that's what it was for me, an
absolute career-killer), my professional and personal life began to fall
apart in short order. By the winter of 1978, I found myself to be
utterly cross-addicted to two over-the-counter remedies, the anti-diarrheal
medication Lomotil and the decongestant Sudafed. How
did this sorry thing happen to me?
Jeez, Rog, I guess the only answer is that it happened one day at a
time. All I know is, I woke up on Easter morning in 1979 and realized
that A) nothing had come out of either end of my body for a very long
time, and B) I was most definitely not, as I had briefly supposed,
"Jesus' Son", and C) my current living conditions, i.e.,
sleeping in an empty refrigerator carton underneath the Santa Monica
Freeway, were not consistent with good mental health nor were they
conducive to recovery. I knew that my life had become unmanageable and
that , if I was ever to sneeze or excrete again, I would have to
surrender myself to a higher power, get off the pity pot [a complete
waste of my time, under the circumstances (see A bove)], and get with
the program.
Okay,
this is running a bit long now, so - fast forward to 1997. Cured for the
most part of my addictions but still somewhat delusional and maybe a wee
bit obsessed with former interviewees Becker and Fagen, I find myself
sharing an apartment in the East 90s directly across from their
recording studio, where work is under way on the new Steely Dan album.
My roommate, a young woman whom I will identify only as "Couch
Girl," was, or believed herself to be, the frequent object of
Becker and Fagen's voyeuristic reveries as they gazed from the 3rd floor
landing of the River Sound headquarters building. I myself have seen
them there often enough in the twilight where they would languish of an
evening after having given up on the day's tedious overdubs. Couch Girl
- this is the name with which they christened my attractive 23-year-old
roommate, as I was later to learn from their studio employee, Per-Golem
Nyquistlimid, during one of our all-night rap sessions at the Ski Bar, a
neighborhood watering hole. Our friendship, Per's and mine, was
overdetermined by our mutual loathing for the alleged artists Becker and
Fagen, by our fascination with Couch Girl, or, more specifically,
certain parts of Couch Girl's body, and our abinding love of Pure Theory
and Mixed Drinks. No longer content to be simply the vile kidnapper of a
famous master tape or, in Per's case, a disgruntled and obscure cyborg,
we had decided one fateful evening to transmogrify, by any means
available, the existing Aja master (ferociously bland and
bourgeois capitalist tripe that it was) into a stunning
and completely original work of mercilessly demythifying contemporary
sound sculpture, with myself as
author. By selectively and/or randomly replacing the original musical
material ("tonespikes" or "slew plateaus") with new
waveforms from my own self-generated library of musical and non-musical,
or better to say, transmusical, sounds ("waveshapes,"
"package waves," or "containments," as the situation
dictated), a bright and shimmering new work of A*U*D*I*O*L*A*G*E would
gradually reveal itself on exactly the same piece of magnetic tape from
which the old dour work had been dissolved, due to its stunning failure
to reveal or even address the tonal incompatibilities or mimetic
discordancies of the - where the hell was I? Never mind - the point is,
I was erasing the old stuff and replacing it with stuff I liked better.
In
retrospect, I am cognizant of the fact that I may not have chosen wisely
in this undertaking. I should have realized at the time that a
monumental spitework of the type I had conceived, aside from being
grotesquely over the top and speaking poorly for the authenticity of my
"recovery," would never be accepted by the bourgeois artistic
community as equal or greater in value to the kitsch
"masterpiece" it had supplanted. Alas, a neogothic cathedral
of theory and doctrine anchored in the too-soft flesh of vituperative
vainglory ultimately will not stand. Thus my hope for redemption in the
eyes of my severest critics were, even at the outset, utterly forlorn.
To my dismay, I discovered that, as I thought things through and
realized the position I was now in, my radical resolve had congealed
into a hard dry bolus of middle class guilt and sentimental
recrimination of a sort that I had once believed to be truly unworthy
me. From this sorry condition there was to be no relief. Allthough it
has taken me several painfully long columns to explain all this to you,
my only possible savior, I myself came to realization in a flash one
morning in 1999 when I woke up from a deep drunken sleep thinking, "oh
boy - am I ever f**ked!!!"
By
the way, when I say "I am f**ked," I mean not just myself. but
Per and Couch Girl, too. Because both had been willing accomplices in
the comission of my "masterwork" from its very inception, with
which I think any court would agree, if it came to that - something
similar could easily happen to you, by the way, if you turn me in - but
also because, in Per's case, he was the guy who actually erased about 3
½ minutes of the multitrack by accident on one of the last nights over
at River Sound (Per had the keys, it was a nice place to work) - and in
Couch Girl's case, because she was the second engineer, so-called, and
because, unbeknownst to Per or myself, she was also servicing sttudio
manager Phylo Goetz in the afternoons, long after she promised us she
wouldn't do that sort of thing anymore.
Look - can you and your famous computer restore this rock classic or
not? If so, you must help me/us - if not for our sakes then for the sake
of posterity or or, say, the culture at large, or even for the $600
reward, which we could split if that's okay, no questions asked -
Couchie and I really need the bread right about now, the conky tonks
here cost six bucks a shot! Per is gone missing and thank God for that.
The dermatological condition of this hapless creature is, in and of
itself, sufficient to make his absence a boon to all concerned. I know
you can help us - there has got to be some flux
or nanowebers
or some fractal
electromagnetic effluvium of some
sort left on that reel of tape that somehow represents the original
sonic gestalt of the song "Aja" or at least a reasonable
approximation thereof. If so, I just know that you are the one and only
guy who can make this American Tragedy come out right for all concerned.
Help me, okay? Please - I'm begging you.
aloha,
Mike
p.s.
Just in case you can't or won't help
me out on this one, we are laying low for a while at an unspecified
resort locale, so don't look for us on 95th Street anymore.
p.p.s.
Rog, we are both aware that the
original purloined reel contained two songs, not one - so you are
probably wondering what happened to "Black Cow." A complete
explanation would exceed the permissible scope of this modest postscript
- but, if I were you, I would start the search with a thorough sweep of
Pete Fogel's apartment and be ready to reimburse him the $96 for the tab
at Le Bar Bat which he not so graciously picked up one night last
fall.
p.p.p.s.
I haven't actually spoken in
person to D or W for many years, but I did meet their personal retainer
Freddie Tuttle, Esq., in a cathouse in Denver last Thanksgiving. He
seemed like a nice guy, and the two Czechoslovakian girls he was with
seemed nice, too. |
