Steely Dan's Donald Fagen made news last November when he was heard in HBO's Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary hanging up on the film's director Garret Price who wanted to interview Fagen for the film. It went like this:
- Fagen: "And what genre is that?"
- Price: "Um, yacht rock."
- Fagen: "Oh, yacht rock. Well, I tell you what. Why don't you go [expletive] yourself?"
- Then Fagen hangs up.
Well, according to onetime Steely Dan member Michael McDonald, that was all staged.
“You have to know Donald’s sense of humor,” says McDonald in Classic Rock magazine. “When the guy called him, Donald said: ‘You can have the license, but do something for me. Hang up, pretend like we haven’t talked and let’s have another conversation.’ So that’s what happened. He called back and Donald told him: ‘Go [screw] yourself’ and hung up. That’s my understanding. It was a total set-up.”
McDonald participated in the film along with Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, and Toto’s Steve Lukather.