Musical legends tour for summer vacation

August 9, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Just having a ball is what most folks do on vacation.

For musical legends Donald Fagen (Steely Dan), Michael McDonald (The Doobie Brothers) and Boz Scaggs, taking a holiday means touring as the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue, which comes through Cleveland on Tuesday at Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica.

While this year marks the second tour of the high-profile, baby-boomer trio in the past three years, the roots of the joint live venture — which takes audiences down a vast and deep memory lane with radio hits, as well as blues, R&B, soul and classic-rock covers — date back over two decades with The New York Rock and Soul Review.

That all-star project featured the aforementioned trio along with appearances by Phoebe Snow, Eddie Brigati (The Rascals), David Brigati (The Rascals), the late Charles Brown and Walter Becker. That led to the 1991 release “New York Rock and Soul Revue: Live at the Beacon.”

The current incarnation finds McDonald and Scaggs touring alongside Fagen and his Steely Dan backing band with a renewed sense of confidence and adventure.

“If we learned anything, it’s really only that maybe this time we can push the envelope a little bit more with some of the material,” McDonald said during a recent media conference call. “In the first round with this tour, we were wondering how obscure we could get with some of the material. We did everything from Grateful Dead to Beach Boys to The Band. Now, we do our originals, too, to bring that to the table. It’s kind of self-indulgent, but I think it’s self- indulgent for the audience, too, in a way, because it’s not too many shows where you’re going to see this much material that is kind of old and obscure.”

McDonald said the idea is for the audience to flip out at hearing an old tune, but the secret is it’s a song they remember. For example (spoiler alert), the outfit recently has been kicking out Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Heard it through the Grapevine,” Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” and Buck Owens’ “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” alongside the band members’ staple tracks such as McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’,” Scaggs’ “Lowdown” and Steely Dan’s “Peg.”

“We share a unique, or let’s say a common, thread of music,” said Scaggs, in the same conference call. “R&B is, I’d say, where we all land among our other interests. That’s our real common interest. So a lot of that material lends itself to different treatments.”

When it comes to the Dukes of September, the one elephant in the room is whether or not the act plans on recording. That includes at the very least capturing one of its live shows or perhaps even moving forward with writing new material.

“At the very heart of this thing, it’s a live show,” McDonald said. “That just kind of wants to be that and maybe nothing more.”

Added Scaggs: “Once you start recording, once the red light goes on, it complicates things. It’s not doing it for the original reason, at least for me. We don’t run tape. We don’t do this for the purpose of recording or taking it any further than doing what we’re doing right then and there that night. That could happen sometime, but right now this is like a freebie. This is the chance to just be. Go out and have a ball.”