Among all the chronicles of rock & roll memoirs, there’s none quite as funny as Donald Fagen’s Eminent Hipsters. Much of the humor is, perhaps, unintentional, yet Fagen’s voice as narrator, and his perspective on the travails of his life as a touring rock star, is as sardonically funny as the narratives of so many of his famous songs.

But it’s written with much brilliance, and surprising candor. As in his songwriting solo and with Walter Becker, Fagen simply sees the world unlike most. His estimation of most people – especially those alive now – is less than favorable.

Fagen is, of course, one of the founding members of Steely Dan with his late great partner Walter Becker, who died on September 3, 2017. Anyone familiar with the songs the two cooked up for the Dan’s songs knows how rich they are with generous amalgam of humor and darkness intertwined. That same fusion exists in Fagen’s soul, which we get to experience intimately in these pages.

Donald’s a musical genius, one who has spent a lot of time in the “college of musical knowledge” as he put it, devising with Becker their own signature merger of rock songwriting with the expansive harmonies of jazz. They also created their own standard of record-making, which succeeded in being soulful, precise, funky and elegant all at once. And never imitative. Regardless of one’s enthusiasm for their music, it would be hard to minimize the degree of their innovation in creating a form only they could truly fulfill, in the songwriting, musicianship and production. They set their own Steely standard, and not once did they make an album which failed to reach it.

Fagen, unlike Becker, is also a famous curmudgeon. Though this has been known about him, and expressed sometimes in interviews, nowhere have his intensely negative sentiments about the human race ever surfaced as overtly as they do here.

In fact, much of the book is Fagen griping. And griping, really, in the middle of a true rock and roll dream: unlike 98% of the world’s musicians, the man has  made a fortune playing music, so really is in pretty good shape. He has earned it – sure – the guy’s a genius, and with the Dan and solo has created countless masterpieces. So what exactly does he have to complain about?

Good question, and one that is thoroughly answered here. As it turns out, he’s got quite a lot to complain about. It has to do with humans in modern times, neither of which he likes much.

Like Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles, this one doesn’t tell or even attempt to relate his entire history, or that of his band. Yet Fagen has never played by the rules, and this omission of all the normal stuff distinguishes the man from most. Yet it is utterly engrossing reading. His voice comes through with all its steely mockery, derision, desolation and disgust well preserved and presented. With with precious little here about Steely Dan, there is his diary of sorts from his tour with the Dukes of September, the soul band concocted with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald.

There are also some interesting Fagen-scribed essays here, including a long and inspired take on the Boswell Sisters and an interview he did with Ennio Morricone.  But it’s here in this tour log, more than anywhere, that the true Fagen spirit is exposed.

His despair, which starts small and gradually inflates, stems from the fact that on tour with the Dukes he gets treated quite differently than when with Steely Dan. One reviewer referred to this as Donald’s “dry white whine.” Everything that affects him – the hotels, the traveling, the transport, venue, reception and food – are considerably less grand in every way than that to which he grew accustomed. And he’s hardly a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. He’s actually the exact inverse of that.

But it’s not as if Donald was roughing it, really, or even sharing his space. Each artist on the tour got his own bus, and both Scaggs and McDonald would often sleep on theirs. Not Donald, who insisted always on hotel lodging, as living on a bus is, to him, tantamount to the “life of an insect.”

But hotels – like concert venues – are invariably populated by other humans, which to Fagen is almost always trouble. They either want something from him he can’t deliver, or ignore him when he wants to be noticed.

More annoying to him than the generation of “TV Babies” (those born with few books but constant TV) is the new generation forever tuned into the phones in their palms, rarely looking up at the world. What irked him the most was the expanding multitude of audience members who are looking at their cellphones all through the show. “Don’t they know they it lights up their face in the dark?”

Then there is the challenge of staying in shape, physically and psychologically, when on the road, which to Fagen is a supreme challenge, as he writes:

“Swimming? Pools are grungy or freezing or crowded or there’s just not enough time. Treadmill in the hotel gym? Go yourself – I am too wasted to exercise…. Bicycling? You mean, call the concierge, inquire about rentals, roll around unfamiliar streets while cars and trucks are trying to kill me? I can’t even get the hell out of bed.”

If it weren’t Fagen writing this, it would get tiresome. But because this is a genius songwriter here, a man who has written countless miracle songs and made so many classic albums, it’s different. Because it answers a question we’ve wondered about for decades. The answer being: So this is the mind that created all those great songs with Walter Becker!

He’s a songwriter and artist famous for creating something new and previously unattained with the fullness of the Dan. Yet much of modern times, including the technology created to improve our lives and standard of living, he finds to have the opposite effect. Instead of streamlining our lives and imbuing each individual with ever-expanding knowledge, he’s hyper-aware of how much of modern times is worse than the past. This following passage is pure Donald, evoking his love for the simplicity of previous times, and the irony of realizing that this long-awaited futuristic world which we awaited so long is not at all the one we imagined:

DONALD FAGEN: In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on.

All the telephones worked, and they sounded good, too. Rarely did anyone ever lose a call, and that was usually on an overseas line.

Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. By then, just about everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the signal was strong: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, all day and most of the night.

No soul-deadening porn or violence. Decent news programs and casual entertainment featuring intelligent, charming celebrities like Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Rod Serling, and Ernie Kovacs.

Yeah, call me old Uncle Fuckwad, I don’t care. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindfuck.

The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People. For example, those people in the audience who can’t experience the performance unless they’re sending instant videos to their friends: Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I’m filming this shit!

You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say. Wake up, ya dope!”