Steely Dan - My Old School (HQ Audio)

Somehow this song got into my 2023 playlist even though I hadn't posted it here before. Must be Google watching out over me. In any case, I'm listening to this song and I start wondering if there is some kind backstory here. Turns out there is. From Stuart Resnick on Quora we have this story:

Fagan's high school girlfriend, Dorothy White, gives Fagan (ahem, half of "69") or "35 sweet goodbyes" before she sends him off on a bus called the "Wolverine" to Annandale-on-the-Hudson, NY where Fagan would attend Bard College, sometimes referred to as "The William & Mary of the North". Bard's dean of students, (the girl who "could be so cruel") worked with the district attorney, G Gordon Liddy (Daddy G) and the local police to snitch and to drug-bust Fagan's dorm and arrest about 50 kids. The bust happens on a weekend that Dorothy is visiting and so Dorothy also gets arrested, as does Fagan who is "smoking with the boys upstairs" at 5AM.

Bard bails out the students, but not Dorothy since she's not a student, so her daddy has to bail her of jail (full of "working girls"). Fagan offers to take his increasingly bohemian girlfriend, Dorothy, to Guadalajara to avoid prosecution but she doesn't want to go.

Fagan was angry at Bard for its complicity in the bust and so he didn't attend graduation (when the whistle blows) and Fagan swears that he'd never going back to his old school. He also thinks that Bard doesn't deserve to be called "The William & Mary of the North". (So "William & Mary won't do".) Oleanders can't grow in New York's climate and apparently refer to cannabis (perhaps growing under UV lights).

Fagan did go back to Bard 16 years later, in 1985, to accept an honorary doctorate.

Ask Google about Bard Colled and G Gordon Liddy and we get this story from the Poughkeepsie Journal:

Poughkeepsie Journal Apr 6, 1968
Click to embiggenate

Gordon Liddy has appeared here before.