Breaking Down Steely Dan’s “Peg”

Steely Dan’s a mystery. They succeeded in the rock genre, but the music often sounds foreign to the rock-accustomed ear. Some critics have called it “yacht rock,” a frivolous designation that lumps their aesthetic in with Toto, Kenny Loggins, and Christopher Cross. Steely Dan never could’ve dropped to the depths of “Highway To The Danger Zone,” or “Sailing.” “Jazz rock” is what the music world’s settled on, and it works for a band whose founders’ musical heroes were all jazz greats, as opposed to early-rock heroes like Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry.

Walter Becker and Donald Fagan were definitely up to something fancy. Their music is the opposite of punk rock. Their early fans dug their original, cerebral new sound, a sound that also turned off purists inflamed that the band was taking rock too far from its roots, into the effete environs of jazz. How a musical genre dominated by black musicians came to be labeled “effete” is a mystery.

While Becker and Fagan founded Steely Dan as a conventional band, they eventually stopped performing live to become a studio band of two that brought in session musicians to record with. Their methods were perfectionist, their arrangements complex, and their songwriting was sophisticated, with cynical, literary lyrics sung over extended chords rarely employed in rock music. Steely Dan developed a sound so pristine that their Aja (1977) album is often used as a test recording for audio equipment.

An examination of one the band's biggest hits, “Peg,” from Aja, is an effective shortcut to exploring the core of their songwriting process. This one-time radio staple is a well-disguised 12-bar blues song written in the standard I-IV-V blues chord progression, with the Roman numerals referring to chords based on the first note of a scale (the root note), the fourth note, and the fifth note. So in the key of G major, in which “Peg” was written, the chords are G, C, and D. In the blues, these are generally four-note 7th chords. These 7th chords are also a staple of jazz, but jazz musicians often add extra notes to them, in addition to adding chords outside of the standard jazz progression.

Even without knowing about the I-IV-V progression, any listener has heard it hundreds and hundreds of times outside of the blues genre in such songs as the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout,” Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around The Clock,” and many more. It's been the basic building block of pop music since well before the Beatles.

The Beatles and other innovative rock musicians added extra chords—often minor chords—to this core chord structure to produce a new sound, but Steely Dan took this to another level. One result is a song like “Peg.” The first element of disguise is that the song’s in a major key and sounds like it's in a major key, whereas the blues, even though based on major chords, has a “minor chord” feel to it. The “blues scale,” even though its second note’s from the minor scale, can be played with any major-key blues song.

A blues song intro might start with the I chord, which for “Peg” would be a G chord, and then alternate that chord with the V chord—I-V-I-V-I-V. But the intro to “Peg” starts with a five-note G major 9 (Gmaj9) chord—generally a jazz chord, although it can occasionally be found in rock, as in The Doors’ “Riders On The Storm.” And instead of alternating with the V chord—D7—Donald Fagan “walks down” the keyboard from the opening Gmaj9 to the five-note D7#9 chord. The chords in between are exotic—F#7#9 (the “Jimmy Hendrix chord”), F6(9), E7#9, Eb maj9—producing a unique sound that lingers in the memory. To visualize this “walkdown,” find the G note on a keyboard and imagine building a chord on that note and every other note moving to the left (both black and white keys) through D. Try to find a chord run that complex in any other rock song.

Moving on to the verse, it's structured as a 12-bar blues, but doesn't sound like one, as the bones of the song are hidden under elaborate chords. Still, if one were to sing the melody to “Peg” over a standard blues progression instead of the song’s enhanced chords, it would work. Instead of the standard blues resolution from the V chord to the I chord, which would bore Becker and Fagan, “Peg” relies on the IV to I resolution, known as a “plagal cadence,” which is also called the “amen cadence” because it often follows the final “amen” in Christian hymns. Plagal cadences can be found, for example, in several Beatles songs—including “Lovely Rita” and “You Never Give Me Your Money”—and in Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Fortunate Son.” Listen to the coda to “Hey, Jude” to get the feel for what a plagal cadence sounds like.

As for Peg’s lyrics, they're cryptic. The main theme is a narrator missing (or obsessing over, in some interpretations) a girlfriend who’s left him to get into the movies. A number of amateur song analysts claim that it was porn movies, which seems like the product of overactive imaginations given the slight evidence they produce—e.g. the bass line in the song sounds like the bass lines used in porn at the time, or the single mention of the color blue is supposed to be coded language for a “blue movie.” That’s what Steely Dan’s obscure lyrics do to people.

But Steely Dan’s unique, picaresque lyrics have, for the most part, stood the rest of time, as has its music. In their heyday, Becker and Fagan were never content to follow musical templates that preceded them. They pushed themselves with experimentation and brought in the best studio musicians to help them execute their vision. Steely Dan’s dedicated, obsessive approach to the entire recording process that begins with songwriting has produced music that won't be forgotten.