Drink Pepto Bismol All Night Long

Donald Fagen’s new book Eminent Hipsters isn’t as much a memoir as a case for early death. Half of the book is a collection of essays on the people that inspired a once young and impressionable and only slightly jaded Fagen: Henry Mancini, the Boswell Sisters, his classmates at Bard in the late 1960s, pulp sci-fi authors like Philip K. Dick and A. E. van Vogt. Most of these are previously published, albeit eons ago in a magazine here, a magazine there. The other half is a diary kept by Fagen last summer during the “Dukes of September” tour, a “super-group” also featuring Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs backed by a virtuoso band. They concede to running through their hits but most of the set list is obscure covers that the “TV Babies” (anyone born after 1960, whose brains have been “irradiated”) Fagen reviles so much. He has reason: one guy in Toronto screams “Fuck you!” when they open with Ray Charles’ “Tell the Truth,” and at 64, he’s seen most every part of the rosy youth he describes disintegrate or disappear before his eyes. Too much “soul deadening porn and violence.” He says he can’t even read for pleasure anymore, because “too many people have died and too many sad things have happened.”