1973 · Behind the Songs
Forty-four arrests, a homemade guitar, and four solos in one session — the true story behind Steely Dan’s most autobiographical song.
Every great band has an origin story; Steely Dan’s is a drug bust. “My Old School,” released in October 1973 as the second single from the band’s second album Countdown to Ecstasy, tells the true story of a May 1969 narcotics raid at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York — the small liberal-arts school where Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had been students, and where both of them were arrested. The song is five minutes and forty-six seconds of rollicking, horn-driven rock and roll, powered by four guitar solos from Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and one of Fagen’s most exuberant vocals. It reached only number sixty-three on the Billboard Hot 100, a commercial disappointment after the top-twenty singles from the band’s debut — but it became an FM radio staple, and it remains the most autobiographical song Steely Dan ever recorded.
The raid went down in May 1969, and it was a spectacle: contemporary news reports counted forty-four arrests, roughly ten percent of Bard’s enrollment, in a sweep led by local law enforcement with G. Gordon Liddy — years before Watergate made him infamous — serving as an assistant district attorney. In the lyric, Liddy appears as “Daddy Gee,” and the song’s narrator recounts how a female acquaintance betrayed the circle to him. Fagen was among those arrested; a 2014 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article reported that his long hair was cut off at the Poughkeepsie jail. His landlord, Beau Coggins, had accused Fagen of trying to sell him marijuana — a charge Fagen still denies — and the dragnet also swept up Becker and Fagen’s girlfriend Dorothy White. A contemporary newspaper account listed “Donald Fagan” as arrested for “the sale of a dangerous drug,” with bail set at five thousand dollars. Bard arranged bail for its students, but the bitterness lingered: Fagen’s charges were eventually dismissed, and he never forgave the college for cooperating with the raid. In the song, Bard becomes “William and Mary” — a thin disguise — and there is even a nod to the Wolverine rail service that stopped in nearby Rhinecliff, the train the boys would have taken home.
The recording is as storied as the lyric. Unusually for a single, the studio track features four guitar solos — and though Steely Dan at the time employed two guitarists, Denny Dias and Baxter, all four solos were played by Baxter. The instrument he played them on was his own creation: Baxter built the Stratocaster himself, cutting the body from a piece of maple, fretting the neck, and winding the pickups by hand. He finished assembling it three hours before the recording session, in the parking lot of Valley Sound, and plugged it directly into the recording console — no amplifier, just wood, wire, and nerve. The band behind him was the classic early lineup: Fagen on piano and lead vocals, Becker on bass, Dias on rhythm guitar, Jim Hodder on drums and percussion, with Sherlie Matthews, Myrna Matthews, Patricia Hall, and Royce Jones on backing vocals. Jimmie Haskell arranged the horns — Ernie Watts, Johnny Rotella, Lanny Morgan, and Bill Perkins on saxophones — and producer Gary Katz captured it all in the key of G major, the sunniest key for the band’s darkest true story.
As a single, “My Old School” underperformed. Released in October 1973 with “Pearl of the Quarter” on the flip side, it climbed to number sixty-three on the Billboard Hot 100 — a letdown after “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years” had both broken the top twenty from Can’t Buy a Thrill. But the song refused to disappear. FM radio adopted it, and it became one of those album-rock staples that outlasts its chart peak by decades. Cash Box, reviewing the single, called it a departure from the group’s usual fare while predicting it would go somewhere; AllMusic’s retrospective praised the chorus and the extended instrumental passages, especially the second and third guitar solos. The song’s true chart was measured in longevity: fifty years on, it remains the track Steely Dan fans play to convert the curious.
The song’s coda wrote itself over the following decades. Bard College, the institution Fagen swore he would never go back to — “I’m never going back to my old school,” the lyric insists — eventually made its peace with its most famous musical alumni, honoring them with honorary degrees — an irony the song’s narrator would surely have savored. Baxter, meanwhile, kept the song close: he sang it himself when he recorded it for his 2022 solo album Speed of Heat, nearly fifty years after he played those four solos in a single session. “My Old School” endures because it is that rarest of things — a true story that swings. The details are all verifiable, the bitterness is all real, and the music is pure joy: the sound of two young men turning the worst week of their college lives into five minutes and forty-six seconds of triumph.
What to listen for: the four solos, first and always. They arrive like chapters — Baxter’s homemade Stratocaster biting through the mix, each solo with its own character, the second and third (the ones AllMusic singled out) building to a joyful frenzy. Then the horns, Jimmie Haskell’s saxophones punching the choruses into the stratosphere. Then Fagen’s vocal, all mischief and memory, delivering the most personal lyric he ever wrote with a grin you can hear. And underneath it all, the rhythm section’s relentless good humor — Jim Hodder’s drums driving the whole thing forward like a getaway car. It is the sound of a band laughing at the past on its way to the future, and it has not aged a day. Play it loud — this is a song that rewards volume, and a story that rewards remembering.