If you think rock music is all about unkempt types banging it out in derelict garages, their hulking amps cranked to 11, and a squad car already en route with the uncool neighbors to blame, you’re not incorporating Steely Dan into your rock schema.

Steely Dan is not your garage band. When Donald Fagen and Walter Becker get to playing, the neighbors start tapping their feet and recollecting their gloriously misspent Me Decade. (That’s a reference to the 1970s for readers too Millennial to recall.)

By any measure, it was a musically happening decade, chockablock with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, neither of which could quite drown out those John Denver and James Taylor acoustic murmurings. Funk was in full force. Starland Vocal Band (discovered by Denver!) put out “Skyrockets in Flight” and Toni Tenille sang of “Muskrat Love.” Good luck ignoring the polyester pulse of disco and the pugilistic 1-2-3-4 count of The Ramones.

But if the decade had to be distilled into one lite-rock soundtrack, one could argue in favor of the flavorful tunes of Steely Dan, a band that coolly incorporated jazz, soul and R&B into a cerebral, radio-friendly sound that some music critics could and did gush all over. Heck, before he joined the Doobie Brothers as a lead singer, Michael McDonald sang backup in this band.Even if you don’t know or care about rock history, you probably know Steely Dan’s biggest hits, such as “Do it Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years” and “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number,” to name but some.

The band’s lineup has shape-shifted over the years, but Fagen (keys) and Becker (bass) are the beating hearts — and imposingly serious faces — of Steely Dan. The two met at Bard College in 1967, according to www.steelydan.com, and began writing and playing together under a variety of names, including one incarnation, The Leather Canary, in which the inimitable Chevy Chase sat in on drums.

In 1971, with the help of producer Gary Katz, Fagen and Becker secured a songwriting gig in Los Angeles for ABC Records, then assembled their own band “after realizing that the songs they were writing were too sophisticated for the other artists,” or so sayeth the Dan’s website. The two fans of Beat-lit settled on the name Steely Dan, a name shared by, um, a sexual apparatus in William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.”

Their first album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” dropped in 1972, spawning the hit “Do it Again,” the first of many Steely Dan singles to ride high on the Top 40 charts.

The rest is history. While you still can’t necessarily buy a thrill, you can sure pony up the cash to see these living rock legends during a rare stop in your hometown.

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com