Covering Their Bases Reely Dan

Cover bands. Say what you will about them, but unlike their more successful and famous counterparts, they’ll always play the hits and won’t be snobby assholes about it. In Covering Their Bases, The A.V. Club asks a cover band to weigh in on a contentious issue regarding the reason for their existence. In this edition, Steve Kikoen of Steely Dan tribute act Reely Dan talks about Chevy Chase, Yes, and the band members’ personal connection with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker before Reely Dan’s show April 8 at FitzGerald’s.

The A.V. Club: Why Steely Dan?

Steve Kikoen: They’re sort of like The Beatles of the ’70s. It’s the perfect marriage of rock, blues, jazz, funk, and soul. I’ve never really encountered a band that has all those influences so perfectly mixed together. Add to that the way that they write lyrics. The stories they tell are at one time acerbic and, at another, joyous.

AVC: When did you get into “The Dan”?

SK: I got really into them in college. I was very deep into the progressive rock movement like Genesis; Emerson, Lake, And Palmer; and Yes. Actually, I’m a choir director in Niles Township, and I work with this high school choir that combines about five or six different high schools. Anyway, I’d written an arrangement of a Yes song that came to the attention of two people in the band, and they asked if we’d perform it onstage at the Chicago Theatre and the Allstate Arena when they came to town. My early devotion came to a climax that day. But I digress …

So, I was in college, firmly embedded into progressive rock. I thought nothing could be better, but my roommate at the time really adored Jethro Tull, and he was like, “You should listen to this band, Steely Dan, because I know you love jazz and funk,” and I thought it was really interesting. So I further turned him on to prog rock while he turned me on to the amazing musical prowess of Fagen and Becker. 

AVC: How did Reely Dan come together?

SK: I was contacted by this gentleman named Bob Blom. We both live in Arlington Heights, and we’re both studio musicians in Chicago from time to time, so we knew each other’s names.

I had this band called Bebop Daddys, which was this jazz-rock collective of eight musicians. We were playing original music that’s not unlike Steely Dan—Donald Fagen even wore a Bebop Daddys T-shirt I gave him onstage a few years back, and any week I get three or four e-mails from people looking to buy the shirt after they saw it on him on YouTube.

Anyway, long story short, I decided that I wasn’t going to pursue Bebop Daddys as a live project, but rather as a recording project. Then I started thinking about Tributosaurus, which is an amazing concept. I know some of those guys. I don’t have much respect for tribute bands, persay, because they don’t have the highest-quality musicians. I thought it would be fun to start a tribute band to Steely Dan, though, because they use studio musicians themselves. They’re composers, and they put together these different bands to make their records.

So, we got together with the top players in Chicago. We have three of the top brass players. Koko Taylor’s niece sings with us as part of the Taylor Sisters. There’s another trio that sings with us, too, The Chi-Town Sisters. It’s very authentic, because that’s how Steely Dan goes on tour. They have a 13-piece band, and we made it an 11-piece, though.

AVC: Do you have goals for the band?

SK: We’re just 100 percent into it for the music. There’s such a huge following of Steely Dan fans that we figured that a lot of people would want to come see the band. They did have a 19-year hiatus, which is probably when we should have formed, but we put this together shortly after they reunited.

Steely Dan only plays in town maybe once a year or every other year. Reely Dan plays a lot more than that, though.

This is honestly the first band I’ve been in where I’m its No. 1 fan, plus I get to be in it. There’s a level of musicianship you don’t usually find. Some guys who play with us are in Broadway pit orchestras. The bassist and drummer were in Wicked and Billy Elliot. It adds a certain legitimacy to what we’re doing.

AVC: Have you ever met Steely Dan?

SK: Several times, yes.

The first time, I met them through a consortium that I started as part of my educational work. I started this thing called the Millennium Music Project, and over 30 schools were involved. The kids were all 13 to 18, and the project was an effort to get kids to listen to music they wouldn’t normally listen to. It started back in about 1995, and the whole idea was that, as we approached the millennium, let’s reflect back on the genres and composers of our century. Let’s see who had a deep impact, culturally, on society.

At one point, I had these, sort of, awards where kids at different schools were trying to make a hierarchy over all these bands that they were studying. Donald [Fagen] and Walter [Becker] literally won “composers of the century” from these kids. We presented the award to them at one of their concerts. This was way before Reely Dan was in existence. Lennon and McCartney won, too. So did Paul Simon.

More recently, well, some of our studio cats know theirs—so we’d be backstage at Steely Dan concerts, and we’d see them through the drummer or guitarist or different people we know.

At one point when we were backstage at one of the many concerts, we were talking to them with other members of the band, and they said how much they liked our band’s name. They thought Reely Dan was a hip name. There’s also a band out in L.A. that they liked—The Steely Damned. Ours doesn’t have that negative connotation, though.

AVC: What’s your favorite Steely Dan song to play?

SK: I love so many of them. The first one that pops into my head, though, is the title track of Aja. We just started playing that one, and to me, that’s the most unique song they’ve ever done. It’s the most progressive rock song. It’s such a joy to play that. It was a monumental work in 1977, when it came out.

AVC: Do you get mostly older people at your shows, or do new fans come out too?

SK: It’s a big mix. I think partially because when they reunited and released that first album in 2000, they won that Grammy for best record. That’s already 11 years ago, but they had this hit on the radio. So it seemed like they garnered a huge amount of new fans then.

It seems to be a big mix of age. There are certainly people in our age bracket there, but there are a ton of people who listen because their parents did, or maybe they were the lucky beneficiaries of the Millennium Music Project.

One of the nicest things that’s happened to us is that, about a year ago, we were invited to perform on WGN’s morning news. As a result of that, we’ve successfully broken into the theater circuit. I love FitzGerald’s and other nightclubs around, but Steely Dan—or Reely Dan—is really at its best in a concert format. You want to be able to do it in a performing arts center. We’ve sold out the Metropolis theater in Arlington Heights, and we’ve got Pheasant Run in St. Charles coming up. People keep saying they’d come see us at Park West and House Of Blues. 

AVC: Do you get stage fright like Steely Dan so famously did?

SK: Not really. All of us are professional musicians or educators, so it’s ensconced in what we do. Bob [Blom] is also a well-known jingle writer in the Chicago area.

AVC: Did you know Chevy Chase was the drummer in one of the original versions of Steely Dan?

SK: When we performed at Metropolis, our keyboardist had a little book of trivia he thought he’d share with the audience, and one of the first things was, “Who was the first drummer?” Someone knew it.

Another thing that I think adds legitimacy to our band, actually, is that our keyboardist is the main singer. People who know me know that I’ve been the lead guitarist and lead singer of every band I’ve been in, but I really relished the idea that Bob [Blom] was pulling off such a wonderful Donald Fagen-esque vocal. In every other case of tribute bands that we’re aware of in the nation—well, really look at the ones with the real highest-quality musicians, and there’s only a handful of those—maybe seven or eight. In the other cases, it’s either the guitarist, bassist, or a separate lead singer doing the words. In our case, it’s fun to have it be the keyboardist, because it adds a little more legitimacy to our tribute band. Sometimes, with those other bands, no matter how good they sound, it’s still odd to look at someone who’s not the keyboard player.