The Fez: The Groove That Somebody Else Started
How a keyboard riff from Paul Griffin became one of Steely Dan's rare co-writing credits, and how a song about insistence became the most relentless groove on The Royal Scam.
“The Fez” is the most groove-dependent track on The Royal Scam, and it carries a distinction that is almost unique in the Steely Dan catalog: a co-writing credit for someone other than Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Keyboardist Paul Griffin receives a composer credit—one of only three songs in the band’s entire discography to include an outside writer, alongside “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” from Pretzel Logic and the title track from Gaucho.
The story behind the credit is characteristically Steely Dan: pragmatic, slightly paranoid, and delivered with a wink.
The Griffin Question
Paul Griffin was a New York session legend whose credits stretched from Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited to Don McLean’s “American Pie.” He was the kind of musician who walked into a studio, listened to the song once, and contributed something that elevated it beyond what the writers had imagined.
On “The Fez,” Griffin began playing an instrumental melody during the session that Becker and Fagen decided to build into a more prominent role. As Becker later explained, they “had some suspicion that perhaps this melody wasn’t entirely Paul’s invention” and gave him the co-writing credit as a preemptive measure—“in case later some sort of scandal developed and he would take the brunt of the impact.”
Griffin’s own account was more generous: he said Fagen already had the keyboard riff, and he simply took it in a different direction. Fagen, for his part, later praised Griffin as one of those musicians who “can create something so different and unique they make the record,” distinguishing him from the “hacks” who populated lesser sessions.
The truth, as usual with Steely Dan, is probably somewhere in the margins of all three accounts. What matters is the result: a keyboard figure that locks the entire track into a groove so insistent it borders on hypnotic.
The Groove as Architecture
“The Fez” is built from the ground up on repetition. The keyboard riff cycles with metronomic consistency, and the rhythm section locks into a pattern that refuses to deviate. This is not the harmonically adventurous Steely Dan of “Kid Charlemagne” or the orchestral lushness of “The Caves of Altamira.” This is Steely Dan in groove mode, prioritizing feel over complexity.
The drums are tight and dry, emphasizing the backbeat with a crispness that keeps the track moving without ever accelerating. The bass sits low and steady, providing harmonic anchor while the keyboards do the melodic work above.
The effect is almost trance-like. The song establishes its pattern early and then rides it, allowing the vocal and the arrangement’s subtle variations to provide the only motion. It is a masterclass in the power of repetition—the idea that a groove, if it’s good enough, doesn’t need to change. It just needs to persist.
The Subject in the Room
Chris Willman of the Los Angeles Times described “The Fez” in 1993 as “a cheerful ode to the importance of always wearing a condom.” The interpretation has stuck, and while Becker and Fagen have never explicitly confirmed it, the lyric’s repeated insistence on never doing something “without the fez on” makes the reading difficult to dismiss.
What’s remarkable is how the song treats its subject—if indeed this is the subject—with total nonchalance. There’s no awkwardness, no euphemistic coyness. The narrator states his terms, the groove reinforces them, and the song proceeds with the confidence of someone who has made a boundary and sees no reason to justify it.
Fagen’s vocal delivery is characteristically dry. He doesn’t oversell the lyric’s humor or its implications. He states and restates the position with the patience of someone explaining a simple policy that shouldn’t require explanation. The repetition of the refrain mirrors the groove’s own repetition: both are about insistence, about a position held without apology.
Economy as Virtue
At just under four minutes, “The Fez” is one of the more compact tracks on The Royal Scam. It doesn’t develop in the conventional sense—there’s no dramatic key change, no extended solo section, no structural surprise. It arrives, establishes its groove, says what it has to say, and departs.
This economy is its strength. In the context of an album that includes the sprawling title track and the complex arrangements of “Kid Charlemagne” and “Haitian Divorce,” “The Fez” functions as a palate cleanser—a track that prioritizes physical response over intellectual engagement.
But even here, Steely Dan can’t help being clever. The arrangement’s apparent simplicity conceals sophisticated voicings, carefully placed accents, and dynamic shadings that reveal themselves only on repeated listening. The groove sounds effortless. Nothing about its construction was.