The Covid Kid
David Kamp
Author & Journalist
Steve Porcaro
Singer & Songwriter
Flight 59 northbound, JetBlue
Makin’ my way back home to you
Shotgunned Dos Equis for a week and a day
’Til the Daytona Hilton sent me away
“If I get it, I get it”
The TV reporter asked and I said it
You say I don’t get it
And now comes the very thing that you dreaded…
That fever, that shiver, that tremor, that ache?
A souvenir of your little boy’s spring break
And now I’m the pox of which you can’t be rid
They call me
The Covid Kid
Takin’ the test, well, that ain’t my job
But you pulled me a string, and you got me a swab
You set me up nice in the housekeeper’s wing
And as I streamed Rick & Morty, I started to sing
“Don’t sweat it, don’t sweat it
I’m young and unlikely to get it”
I read it, on Reddit
And to me our whole town is now indebted…
The cryin’, the sirens, the shortage of beds?
Chalk it up to me and my Caucasian friends
Still I don’t regret a single thing that I did
They call me
The Covid Kid
[Denny Dias-style guitar solo]
[bridge]
You see it’s all real simple
A boy must be allowed to play
You see it ain’t so sinful
You were all gonna die pretty soon anyway…
That fever, that shiver, that tremor, that ache?
A souvenir of your little boy’s spring break
Your wheezing, your heaving, your gasping for air?
This house will be mine soon, ’cause life isn’t fair
I barely got symtpoms, and I’m keepin’ ’em hid
They call me the Covid Kid
They call me the Covid Kid
They call me the Covid Kid
The Siren Song of… Covid?
David Kamp
Author & Journalist
If nothing else, the coronavirus has provided me with the occasion to create a skillfully forged addition to Steely Dan’s song catalog. That sounds totally like a non sequitur. So let me explain.
My family, which is my wife, me, and two grown kids, splits its time between Greenwich Village, in New York City, and a tiny little house in rural northwest Connecticut. Governor Cuomo didn’t officially put the state of New York “on pause” until March 22, but, ten days earlier, my wife and I saw all the projections predicting that NYC was going to become the epicenter of the pandemic, and we decided that it was wise to relocate to a less population-dense place.
The only hiccup: our 20-year-old son was still in Dublin, on a semester abroad. Amidst all the chaos, we managed to get him home (to the Connecticut home, anyway) and imposed upon him a 14-day quarantine, lest he become ill or turn out to be an asymptomatic carrier of the virus. Mordantly, given this situation, our son started referring to himself as “The Covid Kid.” To our relief, he remains healthy, all these weeks later. He never developed any symptoms. But I developed a song.
“They call me the Covid Kid”—can’t you just hear Donald Fagen singing that line in his wry tenor, while his co-conspirator Walter Becker and the cream of L.A.’s session musicians play behind him? I couldn’t get the idea out of my head: There should have been a vintage Steely Dan song called “The Covid Kid.” Fagen and Becker specialized in unsympathetic narrators: the middle-aged cokehead dating a teenager in “Hey Nineteen,” the potentially murderous cuckold in “Everything You Did.” So why not an arrogant rich kid who heedlessly goes about his hard-partying business, indifferent to the consequences of infecting his friends, family, and neighbors?
Newly emboldened as a lyricist, I decided to take a shot at writing this faux-Dan song. I say “newly emboldened” because last year, at the age of 52, I was fortunate to see the very first musical I had ever worked on as a lyricist, Kiss My Aztec!, have its world premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California. I have been a print journalist my whole adult life, but, since childhood, I have been noodling with songs, from proto-Weird Al parodies to sincere efforts at pop. Somewhere along the way, I mentioned to the actor, comic, and monologist John Leguizamo, who is a friend, that I wished that I had come up as a young adult in the 1930s, when “lyricist” was a plausible profession and Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and Oscar Hammerstein made careers of writing clever words for songs.
John filed away this comment and, to my surprise, raised it with me years later, in 2014, when he invited me to join him in his attempt to write his first-ever musical, a Spamalot-style period comedy set in the Aztec Empire at the time of Spanish conquest. John paired me with a young composer named Benjamin Velez. It was a shotgun marriage, but Benjamin and I got along well and enjoyed collaborating, and we accumulated a mountain of songs. After five years and what seemed like 30 developmental workshops, our show, directed by Tony Taccone, hit the stage in Berkeley, and it, along with our extraordinary cast, received raves from the Bay Area critics. Kiss My Aztec! is now, the abatement of the pandemic pending, bound for New York City. Eventually. When live theater is a thing again.
But back to the early days of lockdown. The words to my Steely Dan homage came remarkably quickly, way faster than the ones for the Kiss My Aztec! songs. (In my experience, it’s easier to write when you’re trying to inhabit another writer’s voice than it is when you’re trying to be yourself.) My first line, “Flight 59 northbound, JetBlue,” pretty much dictated itself to me, unconsciously echoing the cadence and number of syllables (eight) to the first line of “Babylon Sisters,” “Drive west on Sunset to the sea.”
From there, the story took shape—a privileged college kid flying home from his spring break in Daytona Beach, a vain monster with delusions of immortality and a house big enough to have an entire wing for the servants’ quarters. He doesn’t even care when his parents get sick:
That fever
That shiver
That tremor, that ache
A souvenir of your little boy’s spring break.
I shouldn’t paint too rosy a picture of the circumstances under which these lyrics were written. Our family, like all families, was in a state of early-lockdown despair, not yet adjusted to how work and life would proceed in the weeks to come, still crawling through the sluggish gray days of the Northeast’s endless winter. This sheet of lyrics was the first new “work” I had accomplished since the dawning of the age of social distancing. Suddenly, it became my mission to see this idea properly realized: I want this thing to be a de facto Steely Dan song. But how?
I remembered that my Los Angeles-based brother, Ted, is friends with Steve Porcaro, the keyboardist in the rock band Toto. Like Steely Dan, Toto is known for its studio polish and exacting standards; indeed, Steve’s late brother Jeff had played drums on several Steely Dan albums. I had met Steve once, 15 years ago, but I didn’t really know him. But in the spirit of “Hell, why not?,” exacerbated by the surreality of lockdown, I e-mailed him the lyric sheet and asked if he wanted to build a Steely Dan homage with me.
To my delight, Steve, stuck in a similar mode of housebound inertia, was game. We proceeded to have a profoundly nerdy discussion of precisely what kind of Steely Dan song “The Covid Kid” should be. I told Steve that I heard it as a bright-sounding piece, akin to “Deacon Blues” or “Tomorrow’s Girls,” a single from Donald Fagen’s second solo album, Kamakiriad. Steve countered that he heard the song as a Purdie Shuffle, so named for the signature sound of Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, a storied drummer of soul, jazz, R&B, and rock. The shuffle is a languid but complicated groove played in half-time, involving triplets, delicate hi-hat taps, and muted “ghost” notes. Purdie himself applied his shuffle to Steely Dan’s “Home at Last,” while Jeff Porcaro paid homage to Purdie with his drum part on Toto’s 1982 smash “Rosanna.”
Steve’s musical vision prevailed, both because I trusted his instincts more than mine and because he told me that my words would be better heard at a slower tempo. Before long, he sent me an instrumental demo that exceeded my expectations. He asked me to sing a guide vocal over it so that he could get a sense of how the lyrics should be phrased.
I was too self-conscious to do this in our house, where we are all living cheek-by-jowl 24/7. So early the next morning, while my kids were still asleep and my wife was working, I furtively crept into the garage with a bluetooth speaker and an iPad, doing my best Donald Fagen impression (which turned out sounding more like an unwell-Randy Newman impression) right next to the shelf where I keep the orbital sander and the jumper cables.
With that all settled, Steve and I discussed how to proceed in terms of making a proper recording of the song. I was envisioning our project as a piece of quick-’n’-dirty quarantine art, something that Steve could throw together in his home studio, playing all the parts, and then we would just dump it on the internet in two days.
But Steve, ever true to his session-pro roots—he has played with many bands besides his own, was on Michael Jackson’s Thriller sessions, and co-wrote Jackson’s song “Human Nature”—decreed that if we were making a Steely Dan homage, it was going be of Steely Dan quality. On my lyric sheet, I had written, as a joke, after the song’s second chorus, “Denny Dias-style guitar solo here.” Denny Dias was one of the two guitarists in Steely Dan’s original six-piece lineup. Steve, taking that cue literally, procured the services of… Denny Dias. They have been friends for decades. I should have known.
Soon, we had a formidable lineup of musicians participating in our whimsical little project: on drums, the Nashville-based Shannon Forrest, who actually played with Fagen on his “Dukes of September” tour with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald; on additional guitars, the virtuosic L.A. studio whiz Marc Bonilla; and on lead vocals, Billy Sherwood, who is a prog-rock guy (he is the vocalist and bassist in the current iteration of Yes) but comes from jazzer stock—his father, Bobby Sherwood, led a swing band in the 1940s.
Steve didn’t have to ask anyone twice. “Everyone is bored to fucking death and dying to do something,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Now that “The Covid Kid” was becoming a steelier Steely Dan homage than I had ever imagined, it occurred to me that, given that it humorously depicts how not to behave during a pandemic, the song might serve a good purpose as a fundraising vehicle. I got in touch with MusiCares, the charity wing of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the entity that gives out the Grammys. MusiCares had recently established a Covid-19 Relief Fund for musicians affected by the coronavirus, whether on account of illness or loss of work, given that all live-music venues have gone dark. (Many of the fantastic musicians with whom I worked on Kiss My Aztec! are currently getting by on unemployment.) MusiCares welcomed our offer, and, when we finally released “The Covid Kid” on YouTube on April 21, we positioned it on social media as an action item: “Don’t be like the Covid Kid. Stay home, stay safe, and donate to the MusiCares Covid-19 Relief Fund.”
We credited ourselves as the Fabriani Brothers—a nod to the pseudonym that Fagen and Becker used when, for their debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, they wrote their own florid, willfully silly liner notes. (“Tradition and experimentation reign side by side when Denny Dias accepts the burden of resurrecting the electric sitar on ‘Do It Again’ and makes it sound easy. On the same cut, an inexpensive, imported plastic organ [an instrument which long ago fell into disuse in most rock circles] is competently fingered by Donald Fagen.”)
About the video… the person I enlisted to make it was the guy who introduced me to Steve Porcaro in the first place: Ted Kamp, my brother, who works in TV production. He put together a smashing lyric video, abetted by the film editor Dan Wolfmeyer and my frequent collaborator on humor projects, the illustrator Ross MacDonald, who drew our grotesque title character, a spiked, spheroid “head” wearing a backwards baseball cap.
I can’t pretend that “The Covid Kid” has made a huge impact. But in the esoteric communities of Dan stans, Toto-heads, and Yacht Rock enthusiasts, it has caused a little ripple of joy. Steve and I have received many compliments on our faithful and convincing execution. And MusiCares has had a few thousand bucks come its way via our song.
Every day of lockdown remains a muddle of uncertainty and insecurity. But I’m proud of what Steve and I did with “The Covid Kid”—mainly the simple fact that, in this environment, we managed to do something.
My only regret: given how eager all these talented folks were to contribute, why didn’t we ask Donald Fagen?
David Kamp writes books, articles, lyrics, and humor. He is the author, most recently, of Sunny Days (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a history of the Sesame Street-Mister Rogers era of enlightened children’s television.