Dukes of September Rhythm Revue heads to Atlanta

“It's in a way the most fun kind of show to do, because it gives the audience a lot of variety, so it never gets boring,” Fagen said in a teleconference call before the start of the tour. “It's fun for the other musicians to do something they don't usually do. And I think there's a great tradition in it. Like I know in New York here, everyone always talks about these great shows at the Paramount … like the Motown revues and soul revues, [where] you'd get to see Otis Redding and Sam Cook and all these great acts, all on one stage with one band. I think that's sort of where these kinds of things derived.”

Fagen is no stranger to this sort of tour. From 1989 through 1993 he assembled several series of concerts called the New York Rock & Soul Revue. The shows brought together a variety of established solo artists to perform not only a few of their own songs, but plenty of classic soul and R&B material. The 1993 edition of that tour also included McDonald and Scaggs.

At that time, Fagen and McDonald were already longtime friends. McDonald played in Steely Dan in the 1970s before he went on to join the Doobie Brothers and become the voice behind some of that band’s biggest hits (“What a Fool Believes” and “Minute By Minute,” to name two).

Fagen and McDonald got to know Scaggs (who rose to fame with his 1976 album “Silk Degrees”) on the 1993 tour, and in a recent teleconference interview, the three demonstrated they are all clearly fans of one another's work and say one of the highlights of the tour will be hearing – and playing on – one another's songs during the shows.

The fact that Fagen, McDonald and Scaggs didn’t call this tour the “Rock & Soul Revue” is perhaps a hint that the repertoire will stretch beyond Motown and R&B. Among the covers concertgoers might hear is Grateful Dead’s “Shakedown Street.”

“It wasn't the typical Grateful Dead song because it had a kind of dance beat to it,” Fagen said. “I think they were kind of cashing in on the disco craze or something like that. But it's a fantastic song with a beautiful lyric and it gets a great response every time that we do it. And so I think I'm going to try to put that in the show.”

McDonald said he’s eyeing a Ray Charles song, “I Got News” as one of the highlights for his set. Another possibility is raiding the song catalog of The Band.

“Each of us is going pick a song, so we've been sort of going through a lot of The Band's material,” Scaggs said. “Each of us has sort of listened and dug them a lot over the years … so that's a particularly exciting little bit of real estate that we're looking at for the show.”

They won’t, however, try to replicate the original versions of the cover songs they perform.

“Stylistically we're going to have to just own that song,” Scaggs said. “We're going to have to find our own way to possess that song. And it's really driven by trying to find the spirit of that song and adapting our instruments and our voices to make it work. That's going to be a challenge.”

Concert preview

The Dukes Of September Rhythm Revue with the MGs. 8 p.m. Aug. 26. $25-$89. Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park, 2200 Encore Parkway, Alpharetta. 404-733-5010, www.vzwamp.com

-- By Alan Sculley, for the AJC. Provided by Last Word Features