(Credit: Far Out / Alamy)

To be in Bob Dylan’s band you have to be a particular type of musician—whatever that is, evidently, Donald Fagen wasn’t it. Then again, neither were The Rolling Stones, so Steely Dan’s acerbic Fagen can’t feel too hard done by. Not even Dharma Montgomery got in when she auditioned.

On the fabled occasion that Dylan did play with The Stones, he wound up storming off the stage having sung about half a line and he flipped his middle finger to Keith Richards as he left. This was in Montpellier in 1995, Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes recalled the amazing moment that two of music’s most seismic forces collided. Alas, Robinson explains: “The Stones don’t jam; they don’t deviate […] they go around the chorus, and then they come up to Bob’s turn.” At this point, Dylan doesn’t sing on cue and for the driving ways of The Stones, that is his bus stop missed.

Robinson concludes: “[Bob] walks off before the end of the song, and they are like ‘Bob Dylan!’ and he turns around and he looks at them saying ‘Fuck you!’ and his give them the finger and I’m like ‘The best fucking concert I’ve ever seen in my life, it’s incredible’. I can see Keith, he goes ‘Don’t be like that, Bob!’”

You see, Dylan’s flowing ways are very particular, which is why in 1981, he was looking for someone who had swing more so than polished professionalism. Thus, rather than digging through session musicians, ahead of his tour, Dylan placed a barely noticeable ad in a Los Angeles newspaper looking for qualified but unknown musicians to join him.

Donald Fagen replied. Dylan’s bass player, Rob Stoner, recognised his name amid the trickle of tentative responses. He excitedly contacted Fagen and said that he would put his esteemed CV before Dylan and get back to the Steely Dan founder in a matter of days. Fagen waited patiently… and then he waited patiently some more. He never heard anything back. Which is strange because of all the particulars in Dylan’s live act, being jazzy is something that shines through so you imagine that Fagen would have flourished. Alas, he was blanked. And now he is somewhat bitter about that.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Fagen told Brian Sweet in the book Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years, “Dylan passed up a good thing. Sorry, Bob, I’m not available anymore. I’m too busy,” he said despite having just finished touring Gaucho and finding himself in a lull. “I inquired about joining Dylan’s band, but when I did, I was quite secure in my own endeavours. I’m in Steely Dan and it was basically a whim.”

Since then, Fagen has turned towards scathing critiques of the original vagabond. “He has about a dozen minor-key-drone tunes with three chords. I find it very tedious. He actually has songs that are more boring than some early Appalachian songs. It’s amazing,” he said of Dylan in a 2013 Rolling Stones interview. “He has songs with 512 verses and almost no melody. I think a psychiatrist would be more useful than a throat doctor at this point.”

Nevertheless, in the past, The Dan had, indeed, pored over some of those verses. In fact, Dylan had such a great impact on Fagen and the late Walter Becker’s band that the opening line from his 1965 track ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, “Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby / Can’t buy a thrill”, was lifted to give them the title of their acclaimed debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill, as pointed out by Andy Gill in 1998’s Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.

Which is why ambivalence rather than bitterness might be a better way to think of Fagen’s thoughts about Dylan. As he told Roger Friedman in 2016, he seemingly wants to bury the hatchet. “I’m so glad Bob Dylan hasn’t acknowledged the Nobel Prize. They don’t get it. He’s an artist,” Fagen said. “He’s mad at me. He even mentioned us in a speech.” But Fagen believes he was merely misconstrued despite his rather obvious words to the contrary. When Friedman asked what he’d like him to write about Steely Dan’s present appraisal of Dylan, he humbly replied: “Just say, we love him, he’s Bob Dylan, we talk about him all the time.”

As it happens, he has even quoted Jack Nicholson on the matter, stating: “[Nicholson] said that as long as Bob Dylan is alive, he will be the greatest living songwriter.” And his voice being “shot” can never detract from that timeless truth.