As new condition black boards with silver spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color photographic dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Introduction and Acknowledgments. A 1/16th inch nick at the upper edge of the inner front and rear jacket flaps. ""Many chapters in this book are about the people and things that intersected with my life when I was a kid .how the stuff I read and heard when I was growing up affected (stretched, skewed, mangled) my little brain. The main subjects are the talented musicians, writers and performers from a universe beyond suburban New Jersey who showed me how to interpret my own world."" - from Eminent Hipsters, and the rear outer dust jacket. ""In his entertaining debut as an author, Donald Fagen - musician, songwriter and co-founder of Steely Dan - reveals the cultural figures and currents that shaped his artistic sensibility, as well as offering a look at his college days and a hilarious account of life on the road. Fagen presents the ""eminent hipsters"" who spoke to him as he was growing up in a bland New Jersey suburb in the early 1960s, among them Jean Shepherd, whose manic nightly broadcasts out of WOR Radio Network ""entrhralleed a generation of alienated young people:; Henry Mancinin, whose swank, noirish soundtracks introduced Fagen to the sound of modern jazz; and Mort Fega, the laid-back, knowledgeable, all-night jazz man at WEVD, who was like ""the cool uncle you always wished you had."" Coming of age during the paraniia of the Cold War era, Fagen found doors of escape in reading science fiction and in his exhilarating trips to Manhattan jazz clubs to hear the iconic masters of the art. ""Class of '69"" recounts Fagen's colorful, mindexpanding years at Bard College, the progressive school up the Hudson River from New York City, where he first met his musical partner Walter Becker. ""With the Dukes of September"" offers a cranky narrative of the agonies and ecstasies of a recent cross-country tour Fagen made with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs, presenting a program of old R&B and soul tunes as well as some of their own hits. Acclaimed for the literate lyrics and complex arrangements that distinguish both his work with Steely Dan and his solo compositions, Fagen proves himself a sophisticated writer with his own distinctive voice in this engaging book."" - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.