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That something was technique. It wasn't just about playing well -- tons of rockers could do that -- but an obsession with, almost amounting to a fetishizing of, musical sophistication. This obsession took two different but related forms: drop-dead, lapidary perfectionism in the recording studio and an unprecedented use of the idioms (and players) of jazz, which they seamlessly transformed into kick-ass rock 'n' roll. The jazz influences in their songs range from the superficial, like the quotation from Horace Silver's "Song for My Father" in the bass line intro to "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," to the profound, like the tricky time signatures on "Your Gold Teeth II" or the harmonically audacious title cut on "Aja," with its thundering tenor solo by former Miles sideman Wayne Shorter.

Also Today "Hey Nineteen" Hearing Steely Dan's new single sent me back to adolescence and reminded me of the future I had forgotten. By Steve Burgess Steely Dan "Two Against Nature" Giant

Above all, it can be felt in their compositions, which unite clever, unusual modulations and chord voicings with bright, memorable melodies. Steely Dan's music represents an encounter of structure and invention that is almost unheard of in rock -- and shines more in that restricted setting than in jazz's wide-open spaces. Their jewel-like songs represent a more intriguing marriage of the two forms than most so-called fusion, which all too often is merely an excuse for some chopmeister to take a five-minute supersonic solo over two chords.

Steely Dan remain the hottest "cold" rock group ever; they proved that a nonperforming band made up of a bunch of session players could slam. (It helped considerably that they always put together fiendishly good rhythm sections.) This feat wouldn't surprise anybody in the jazz world, where legendary recording sessions are routinely made by a bunch of guys who just met over a chart, but it has always sat uneasily with those who worship the holy rock trinity of primitivism, passion and spontaneity.

Steely Dan always had plenty of passion, but the other two qualities are almost completely absent. In their place is a fiercely exacting musical intelligence, carefully planned and brilliantly executed. In that regard, there was always something oddly grown-up, in the best sense, about their music -- in an art form that gives carte blanche to stream-of-consciousness rants, it's edited. This approach could easily have led to bloodless, art-rock pretension à la Yes or the Moody Blues; what saved them was a certain street-smart earthiness that's rooted in both black American music and a post-Beatles pop sensibility, a soulfulness embodied in the very timbre of Fagen's sarcastic, heartfelt voice.

Still, it's a delicate line to walk, being artificial rockers (after their first two albums, the "band" was essentially Becker, Fagen and a Rolodex), and at times they fell into mannerism. There are moments on their last two albums, "Aja" (1977; which nonetheless remains one of their masterpieces) and "Gaucho" (1980), when the Dan's polished-to-the-bone style began to smack of decadence. This feeling of overripeness was heightened by some of their lyrics, in which one of their archetypal narrators, the existential hipster, began to show signs of becoming an overblown L.A. hepcat with an operatic sense of his own life ("I crawl like a viper through these suburban streets/Make love to these women, languid and bittersweet"). And their music, especially on the disco-inflected "Gaucho," became smooth to the point of surreal lounge-iness. It was a pretty interesting lounge, filled with David Lynchian characters and dangerous women, but compared with the jumpin' jungle rooms of "Katy Lied" and "The Royal Scam" it was a little ... plush.

But mostly, they made sophisticated, gorgeous, classic rock 'n' roll. The list of memorable songs from the Dan catalog is endless, from the stunningly propulsive "Green Earrings" to the haunting "Dr. Wu" to the maniacal barrelhouse blues of "Chain Lightning" to the melancholy sparkle of "Turn that Heartbeat Over Again." And always, there was amazing musicianship. The classic Steely Dan albums were virtual guitar textbooks -- think of Jay Graydon's mind-boggling run on "Peg," Denny Dias' sinuous voyage through "Your Gold Teeth 2," Skunk Baxter's inexorably building solo on "The Boston Rag" and on and on.

And then there were those enigmatic lyrics. Becker and Fagen remain among the most underrated writers in rock. The standard rap on them is that their lyrics were hip to the point of incomprehensibility, inside jokes so inside that they themselves didn't even know what the punch lines were. There's truth to this, but even when their lyrics were impossible to completely pin down, they were allusive enough to light a delayed fuse in the mind. And Becker and Fagen mined other veins than Poundian fragmentation. They specialized in sly narratives, telling tales as various as the disconcerting offspring of a Caribbean one-night stand ("semi-mojo -- who's this kinky so-and-so?"), the saga of Puerto Rican immigration into New York and the glory days of acid czar Owsley (whom they cunningly dubbed "Kid Charlemagne"). And their best writing, in songs like "Rose Darling" and "The Caves of Altamira," combines the two styles and possesses a terse, metaphoric passion that stands comparison with the finest rock songwriters.

Becker and Fagen hung it up after "Gaucho." Mostly, it seems, they were just burned out. Fagen released a stellar solo album, "The Nightfly," in 1982, after which neither man released a record for 11 years. Part of the reason for this long hiatus was a painful purgatory endured by Becker: He was struck by a car in New York and badly hurt, his girlfriend committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs and he himself fell into drug dependency. (Becker's extraordinary, little-noticed 1994 album, "11 Tracks of Whack," is an extended confession about his dark night of the soul; though uneven, several of its songs, in particular the stunning Icarus ballad "Surf and/or Die," possess a raw, tortured brilliance.) Becker moved to Hawaii and overcame his problems with what Fagen in a recent Rolling Stone story called "sheer Bavarian willpower." He returned to New York to produce Fagen's "Kamakiriad" (1993; a strong but somewhat less accomplished offering than "The Nightfly") and went on to tour with Fagen and an 11-piece band in 1993 and 1994.

For Steely Dan fans not among those 324 people to have seen them opening for Bread in 1972, the news that they were going to play in public was a bit like being told that Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger were going to be leading a sensitivity workshop in Times Square. Seeing the two old friends and artistic partners, who for years barely spoke, together again onstage was moving in a way that had nothing to do with music. But though the band executed the familiar repertoire competently, and there was a hint of a genuinely new rock sound in the horn arranging, it didn't break much new ground -- and there weren't many new songs. Fagen's marvelously expressive voice, never of operatic strength or range, was outgunned by the big unit. The whole thing was in a whole other league than the standard "lifetime humiliation in exchange for cash" tour engaged in by aging rockers, but that most unseemly of all whiffs, Eau de Brontosaur, hung ever so faintly over the stage.

All of which makes the release of "Two Against Nature," a mind-boggling 20 years after the last Steely Dan album, a rather momentous event -- if any of their increasingly decrepit fans still possess enough neurons to take note of it. In fact, the album is a test case not just for the artists themselves but for their fans: What do two decades do to one's musical tastes? Even if the boys can still get it up, will their listeners still care?

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