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In the decorative images on ancient Greek pottery, in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, John Donne’s Elegies, Ben Johnson’s “The Alchemist,” the Renaissance-era satirical writings of Pietro Aretino, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, there are dildos. In the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe’s “The Choise of Valentines Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo,” whose dildo reference is supposedly the first in written English, the narrator’s unsatisfied lover reaches for her “little dildoe,” who “bendeth not, or foldeth any deal / But stands as stiff as he were made of steel.”

In Restoration England, everyone’s favorite literary dildo is the one in “Signior Dildo (You Ladies All of Merry England),” a satirical poem by John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester. Riffing on the Duke of York’s recent and scandalous marriage to an Italian Catholic princess, Wilmot personifies the dildo as a fictional Italian nobleman who becomes the toast of England: 

You would take him at first for no person of note, 

Because he appears in a plain leather coat,

But when you his virtuous abilities know,

You’ll fall down and worship Signior Dildo.

Signior Dildo really gets around, for nineteen more double-entendre-filled verses. He’ll stand tall as the highest-achieving fictional dildo whose initials are “S.D.” from the 1670s until the 1970s, when Walter and Donald find themselves in need of a band name and find one in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

In Naked Lunch, the dildo’s full name is “Steely Dan III from Yokohama.” It appears in a movie within the book—a stag film screened at a party in the lawless Interzone. A girl named Mary straps on Steely Dan III while explaining what happened to his predecessors Steely Dan I (“torn in two by a bull dyke”) and II (“Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboons-asshole.”) Once she goes to work on Johnny, she’s joined by a turtle necked guy named Mark; the wildly hallucinatory bisexual three-way scene that follows includes cannibalism, fire, multiple deaths by hanging, identity-swapping, linear time itself jumping “like a broken typewriter,” and a reference to “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” the Duke Ellington favorite later covered by Steely Dan (the band) on Pretzel Logic.

Later, once the dildo becomes rock trivia, people will describe the dildo in Burroughs’s book as “hydraulic” or “steam-powered.” But this isn’t what Burroughs says about it. He calls it a “rubber penis.” It seems like your standard over-the-counter dildo. It does feature a mechanism that lets it spurt milk, but no one ever describes Steely Dan the band as being named for a “milk-spurting” dildo. Nor does anybody ever point out that the very next page of Naked Lunch includes the sentence “She puts on a record, metallic cocaine bebop,” a description that sounds like Burroughs imagining the sound of Steely Dan over a decade before they existed.

If you know only one piece of trivia about Steely Dan, chances are it’s the dildo thing. (A Google search for “Steely Dan + dildo” returns almost 600,000 citations.) Every popular band has at least one thing they’re sick of being asked about in interviews. For Donald and Walter, it was Burroughs. In 1974 Walter tells Rolling Stone, “There always used to be a Beatnik Corner in the bookstore—Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder and so on,” and says that’s how he found Naked Lunch. He implies that it’s also an allusion to Skunk Baxter’s pedal steel guitar. Don’t focus on the dildo, is what he seems to be saying. The story’s headline reads “Steely Dan Comes Up Swinging: Number Five With a Dildo.”

Becker also says their choice of a Burroughs-referencing band name “shouldn’t be read too literally.” But they weren’t not influenced by Burroughs. In the liner notes to Countdown to Ecstasy, the description of “The Boston Rag” reads as follows: “Enervated after an attack of unrelieved nostalgia, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter sheds his outer skin and stands revealed as a Wild Boy”—likely a reference to the feral, jockstrapped countercultural terrorists featured in Burroughs’s 1971 novel The Wild Boys, also a favorite of David Bowie’s and a key influence on the lyrical content and overall dystopian-sci-fi vibe of Bowie’s album Diamond Dogs, released in 1974. The Razor Boy, from the Countdown song of the same name, might be a Wild Boy, too; Burroughs, the original Razor Boy, used razor blades to produce his “cut-ups,” narratives formed through the juxtaposition of words and sentences sliced from unrelated texts.

Donald and Walter were more linear in their approach, but Burroughs has to have shaped their tendency to pack a lyric with colorfully named walk-on characters whose cameos evoke a larger fictional world outside the song. If Burroughs had never dreamed up Green Tony, Hamburger Mary, Sammy the Butcher, Clem Snide, Doctor Benway, the Subliminal Kid, Colonel Arachnid, or Jimmy the Shrew, we might never have been introduced to Clean Willie, Snake Mary, Hoops McCann, Jive Miguel, or Doctor Wu.

The street kids of Tangier, some of whom Burroughs allegedly paid for sex, knew the writer as “El Hombre Invisible.” At a party in Mexico City in 1951, he attempted to shoot a gin glass off the head of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, who was twenty-seven. The bullet struck her in the forehead and she died. He was never prosecuted and went on to be a famous author and a famous junkie, two things he would be for the rest of his life. In 1985 he wrote, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never become a writer but for Joan’s death . . . the death brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.” This is both profound and awfully convenient. Burroughs spoke in a tight Midwestern monotone, the voice of a private detective or an exterminator, two jobs he had in fact worked, and if you discovered him during his ’90s resurgence you probably knew him first as a voice. His struggle with the Ugly Spirit led him to patter over Bill Laswell beats on the college-radio staple “Words of Advice for Young People,” making videos with Ministry and noise records with Kurt Cobain and preaching about technology in a TV ad for Nike’s Air Max2. Everything he got involved with as a pop-culture figure was cooler for his involvement and, at the same time, all of it made Burroughs himself seem less cool.

“The junkie on the street in Burroughs’ cosmology is the mythical center,” Marianne Faithfull wrote. “Burroughs, of course, never spent a day on the street and never took off his suit and tie except to fuck.” Conventional wisdom continues to file him in the Beatnik Corner, alongside more traditionally bohemian writers known for chasing kicks and wonder in spontaneous prose. But no other Beat wrote like Burroughs did—his work was nihilistic, violent, anti-authoritarian, steeped in paranoia, populated by fugitive junkies and secret agents. He stood both inside and outside the Beat movement, just as Steely Dan were simultaneously an emblematically studio-slick ’70s California rock band and merciless satirists pissing on the era of peaceful, easy feelings from inside the tent. A few years later, when the New York Times writer Arthur Lubow tracked down Burroughs and played him Katy Lied, the author filed a thumbs-down review not dissimilar to the prevailing critical line among Dan-skeptical rock journalists.

“These people are too fancy,” Burroughs said. “They’re too sophisticated, they’re doing too many things at once in a song. To write a bestseller, you can’t have too much going on. You take ‘The Godfather,’ the horse’s head. That’s great. But you can’t have a horse’s head on every page. These people tend to have too many horses’ heads.”

The dildo reference is the first horse’s head in the book of Steely Dan. It’s a provocation for the squares and a shibboleth for fellow hipsters and the first in a series of ostensibly audience-alienating gestures that become part of the band’s contrary mythos and actually make people like them even more. It’s two guys adopting as their nom de guerre a phallic reference they probably can’t legally explain on the radio. But more to the point, it’s two guys, two men, naming their band after a symbol of the phallus’s replaceability. The dildo threatens masculine primacy and the supposed natural order by offering nonreproductive sexual gratification on demand.

Thomas Nashe knew it. When the “little dildoe” enters the picture in “The Choise of Valentines,” Nashe’s poor upstaged narrator spends the next twenty-plus lines talking all manner of shit about his inanimate rival: “Curse Eunuke dilldo, senceless, counterfet, / Who sooth maie fill, but neuer can Begett.” By naming themselves after a prop from a violent Burroughs sex scene, Donald and Walter are framing their band in a tradition of transgressive art about sex and death. But—whether this was intentional or not—the name also invoked falsehood, ersatzness, and masculinity in eclipse, all of which would become central Steely Dan themes.

It wasn’t a bad name, in other words, for a band who’d sing song after song about male protagonists desperately clinging to an imperiled sense of world-mastery, with a “band” that was itself a falsehood, a device, a band of stand-ins, a band that, minus Walter and Donald, technically had—I apologize in advance for this—no actual members.

It’s probably a total coincidence that a band named after a strap-on later had a big hit with a song called “Peg.” But it can’t mean nothing that, unlike Jelly Roll Morton, Tower of Power, Throbbing Gristle, The Sex Pistols, the Meat Puppets, Whitesnake, Helmet, Tool, Mushroomhead, Swollen Members, Velvet Revolver, and Third Eye Blind, when they picked a phallic band name, they picked one that referred explicitly to an anti-phallus, a counterfeit penis worn in fiction by a sexually dominant woman, as if to call out their swaggering ’70s peers as insecure phonies packing foil-wrapped zucchinis. And in their music, they’d eschew the traditional hard-driving forward motion of guitar-driven rock-’n’-roll in favor of something slipperier and more oblique. They might be the cock-rock tradition’s greatest traitors. But lend them your ears and they’ll sling you a dong.

Used with permission from the University of Texas Press, © 2023

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