Steely Dan Trivia
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49 free Steely Dan trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Steely Dan trivia quiz covers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen from their meeting at Bard College through Can't Buy a Thrill, the decision to quit the road in 1974, the session-musician perfectionism of Aja and Gaucho, the twenty-year hiatus, and the surprise Album of the Year Grammy for Two Against Nature. The easy questions handle things most rock fans know: where the name came from, the biggest singles, the album that defined yacht rock and who left to join the Doobie Brothers. The hard and expert questions are for people who own the box set: the withdrawn debut single, the future comedy star who drummed in their college band, the Schlitz jingle, the erased Gaucho track, the Keith Jarrett lawsuit, the mu major chord and the pseudonyms the pair used on stage in 1993. In keeping with the band's own habits, nothing here quotes a lyric; the questions are about the people, records and stories. Every answer was checked against Steely Dan's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our 70s rock and classic albums quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Donald Fagen first approached Walter Becker in 1967 after overhearing him practise which instrument in a campus café?
Electric guitar
Electric guitar. Fagen thought the playing sounded professional and contemporary, walked in and asked, 'Do you want to be in a band?'
Q 02Steely Dan took its name from an object in which William S. Burroughs novel?
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch. In the novel 'Steely Dan' is the name of a dildo, so a band famous for its polish and sophistication has gone through life named after a sex toy.
Q 03Which future comedy star played drums in one of Becker and Fagen's college bands?
Chevy Chase
Chevy Chase. He kept time for a campus band of theirs called the Leather Canary and stuck with drumming for a while: a later group of his, Chamaeleon Church, cut one psychedelic album in 1968 and split.
Q 04What was the title of Steely Dan's 1972 debut album?
Can't Buy a Thrill
Can't Buy a Thrill. Its two hit singles, 'Do It Again' and 'Reelin' In the Years', were both sung by Fagen, a reluctant frontman who took the job because the band had found no singer it liked better.
Q 05The title of Steely Dan's best-selling album, Aja, is pronounced like the name of which continent?
Asia
Asia. Fagen said he took the title from a Korean woman called Aja, who had married the brother of one of his high-school friends.
Q 06Which 1974 single was Steely Dan's most successful, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100?
Rikki Don't Lose That Number
Rikki Don't Lose That Number. Its opening riff is nearly identical to the intro of jazz pianist Horace Silver's 'Song for My Father'.
Q 07Steely Dan's Two Against Nature won the Album of the Year Grammy over which two heavyweights?
Eminem and Radiohead
Eminem and Radiohead. Two men in their fifties, with their first studio album in twenty years, beat The Marshall Mathers LP and Kid A, and that album won four Grammys in all.
Q 08Two Steely Dan alumni, Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter and Michael McDonald, went on to join which band?
The Doobie Brothers
The Doobie Brothers. Baxter joined them first, and when their singer Tom Johnston fell ill mid-tour it was Baxter who proposed calling in his old Steely Dan colleague McDonald.
Q 09Steely Dan session players Jeff Porcaro and David Paich went on to form which band?
Toto
Toto. The two session men went on to write that band's biggest hit together: 'Africa' is credited to David Paich and Jeff Porcaro.
Q 10Which Steely Dan song did Kanye West sample on his 2007 track 'Champion'?
Kid Charlemagne
Kid Charlemagne. Becker and Fagen at first refused the request, then relented after West sent them a letter explaining what the song meant to him.
Q 11Who produced all of Steely Dan's 1970s albums, having hired Becker and Fagen at ABC?
Gary Katz
Gary Katz. He brought the pair to ABC as staff songwriters, and when their songs proved too tricky for the label's other acts, he suggested they form a band of their own.
Q 12Before Steely Dan, Becker and Fagen toured in the band of which 1960s vocal group?
Jay and the Americans
Jay and the Americans. The future studio perfectionists spent about a year and a half on the road as hired hands for what was, by then, an oldies act.
Q 13Which star recorded the Becker/Fagen song 'I Mean to Shine' on a 1971 album?
Barbra Streisand
Q 21Why was the planned tour supporting Aja cancelled?
Backing musicians began comparing pay
The rehearsals simply ended; Becker's leg was shattered years later, by a Manhattan taxi during the Gaucho sessions.
Q 22Steely Dan wrote the title song for which 1978 film, a flop that still yielded a hit single?
FM
FM. Becker and Fagen wrote it to sound big through cinema speakers and gave it an overdubbed string section, something they had done on a record only once before.
Q 23Which song from the Gaucho sessions was accidentally erased by an assistant engineer?
The Second Arrangement
Barbra Streisand. She cut the song for her album Barbra Joan Streisand, a rare win for two writers who were otherwise getting nowhere selling songs in New York.
Q 14Steely Dan's withdrawn 1972 debut single, later called 'stinko' by its writers, was titled what?
Dallas
Dallas. ABC pulled it soon after release, deciding its country feel was the wrong introduction to the band, and it was the one release left off their 1993 box set.
Q 15Which original Steely Dan lead vocalist was fired in April 1973?
David Palmer
David Palmer. He took it well, saying a band with a singer as good as Fagen did not need a second one, and soon co-wrote Carole King's hit 'Jazzman'.
Q 16'My Old School', from Countdown to Ecstasy, is a direct homage to events at which institution?
Bard
Bard. The song recalls a 1969 drug raid on the campus that swept up Becker and Fagen; the local prosecutor who directed it, G. Gordon Liddy, later became notorious in the Watergate scandal.
Q 17In 'Deacon Blues', the narrator measures himself against a winning college football team from which state?
Alabama
Alabama. Fagen's idea was that if a football powerhouse could carry a grand name like the Crimson Tide, the losers of the world deserved a grand name too.
Q 18Which 1975 Steely Dan album's sound was compromised by a faulty DBX noise-reduction system?
Katy Lied
Katy Lied. The then-new dbx system malfunctioned, and although the record still went gold, Becker and Fagen said they were never satisfied with how it sounds.
Q 19Which guitarist's prominent playing makes 1976's The Royal Scam the band's most guitar-driven album?
Larry Carlton
Larry Carlton. He did far more than solo: he played on most of the tracks, wrote out the charts and acted as Becker and Fagen's go-between with the other session players.
Q 20Which Aja single, with Michael McDonald on backing vocals, was released first and hit No. 11?
Peg
Peg. Michael McDonald sang every part of its stacked chorus harmony himself, and the guitar solo was attempted by at least seven top session players before one take was kept.
The Second Arrangement. Most of the nearly finished recording was wiped in 1979; the band tried to cut it again and gave up, and a rough mix surfaced decades later on a cassette kept by their engineer.
Q 24Which jazz composer sued Steely Dan over Gaucho's title track and was added as co-writer?
Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett. Becker and Fagen admitted to an interviewer that his piece 'Long As You Know You're Living Yours' had been a heavy influence, and he ended up with a co-writing credit.
Q 25Which guitar star played the solo on 'Time Out of Mind' from Steely Dan's Gaucho?
Mark Knopfler
Mark Knopfler. He was hired on the strength of his playing on Dire Straits' 'Sultans of Swing', and later described the session as long and gruelling.
Q 26After Steely Dan disbanded in 1981, Becker moved to Maui and described himself as what?
An avocado rancher
An avocado rancher. He added that he was also a 'self-styled critic of the contemporary scene', and he used the quiet years in Hawaii to give up drugs.
Q 27Fagen's 1982 solo debut, which yielded the hit 'I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)', was titled what?
The Nightfly
The Nightfly. Unlike his cryptic band songs it is openly autobiographical, a look back at his suburban boyhood of late-night jazz disc jockeys and fallout shelters.
Q 28In 'Hey Nineteen', the ageing narrator is dismayed that his young date doesn't recognise which soul legend?
Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin. The two have so little in common that he ends the song counting on Cuervo Gold tequila, not conversation, to make the night a good one.
Q 29Denny Dias's solo on Steely Dan's first hit, 'Do It Again', is played on which unusual instrument?
An electric sitar
An electric sitar. Dias, one of the band's founding guitarists, took the first break on it, and Fagen followed with a solo on a 'plastic' Yamaha organ.
Q 30Becker's 1994 solo debut, co-produced by Fagen, was titled what?
11 Tracks of Whack
11 Tracks of Whack. It returned a favour: a year earlier Becker had produced Fagen's solo album Kamakiriad, and that summer the two went back on the road together as Steely Dan.