| Steely Dan – My Old School Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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There was a long interview with Donald Fagen in Entertainment Weekly (EW) by Rob Brunner that I can no longer find on EW, but which is now posted on The Steely Dan Reader, which I've linked below. (You might want to skip to page 4.) https://steelydanreader.com/2006/03/17/back-annandale/ Here's a summary that I've put together from various sources including those here... Fagen's high school girlfriend, Dorothy White, gives Fagen (ahem, half of "69") or "35 sweet goodbyes" before she sends him off on a train called the "Wolverine" to Annandale-on-the-Hudson, NY where Fagen would attend Bard College, sometimes referred to as "The William & Mary of the North". Bard's dean of students, (the girl who "could be so cruel") worked with the district attorney, G Gordon Liddy (Daddy G) and the local police to snitch and to drug-bust Fagen's dorm and arrest about 50 kids. The bust happens on a weekend that Dorothy is visiting and so Dorothy also gets arrested, as does Fagen who is "smoking with the boys upstairs" at 5AM. Bard bails out the students, but not Dorothy since she's not a student, so her daddy has to bail her of jail (full of "working girls"). Fagen offers to take his increasingly bohemian girlfriend, Dorothy, to Guadalajara to avoid prosecution but she doesn't want to go. Fagen was angry at Bard for its complicity in the bust and so he didn't attend graduation (when the whistle blows) and Fagen swears that he'd never going back to his old school. He also thinks that Bard doesn't deserve to be called "The William & Mary of the North". (So "William & Mary won't do".) Oleanders can't grow in New York's climate and apparently refer to cannabis (perhaps growing under UV lights). Fagen did go back to Bard 16 years later, in 1985, to accept an honorary doctorate. |
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