My brother and I don't agree about certain things in
life, but when it comes to Donald Fagen's 1982 classic we're both in accord.
Without doubt, it's the best solo album every recorded by a white Jewish member
of a recording duo with an passion for jazz and black music.
By 1982, Steely
Dan's time was up. And then there were two had become and then there
were none. Two years before, the duo of Fagen and Walter Becker had
released Gaucho, almost my favourite of the albums they'd released thus
far during the course of roughly a decade. it sold well enough, but reviews
were mixed and it seemed that Steely Dan were a spent force. Donald Fagen then
went on to demonstrate that he could do it just as well (if not better) as one
by writing similarly impenetrable catchy songs and hiring the best session
musicians to play them.
No. In fact, the
eight songs on the album are actually rather more penetrable than Steely Dan's
customary obtuse, enigmatic affairs. There's a remarkably transparent note from
the author on the inner sleeve that 'the songs on this album represent certain
fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the
remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early
sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build'. And it's
appropriate that Fagen chose to resurrect a gorgeous Lieber and Stoller song
for the Drifters about yearning for a probably unobtainable member of the opposite
sex. 'Ruby Ruby when will you be mine?'
He does the jaunty
original thorough justice and his own songs, 'Green Flower Street', 'Maxine',
'New Frontier' and 'Walk Between the Raindrops', speak of similar amorous
concerns, but with the hindsight of adult maturity. Fagen always had a great
way with an image and both songs are full of little gems like 'While the world
is sleeping/We meet at Lincoln Mall', 'There where neon bends in daylight sky/
In that sunny room she soothes me/Cools me with her fan' and ''That happy day
we'll find each other on that Florida shore/ You'll open your umbrella/And
we'll walk between the raindrops back to your door'.
'New Frontier'
opens the second side and it's a particular favourite for the intensity of the future
songwriter's cherche for la femme. I recognise the awkward ardour
of his come-on lines: 'Have you got a steady boyfriend/ Cause honey I've been
watching you/I hear you're mad about Brubeck/I like your eyes I like him too'.
And I revel in the couplet, 'Introduce me to that big blonde/She's got a touch
of Tuesday Weld...' I was too young at the time to be in love with teen
America's sweetheart, but have always loved the name (even if it wasn't her
real one). Reputedly, Stanley Kubrick wanted her for the lead in Lolita,
but Tuesday turned it down by suggesting, 'I didn't have to play it. I was
Lolita'.
I can't speak for Sunken
Condos, his fourth and possibly even final solo album, but perhaps one of
the reasons why The Nightfly works better than the otherwise worthy
successors, Kamakiriad and Morph The Cat, is this unity of theme and
concept. It's easy to grasp and nicely captured by a great cover: Fagen posing
as 'Lester the Nightfly' talking to his nocturnal listeners from 'an
independent station... with jazz and conversation/From the foot of Mt.
Belzoni'. There's a Sonny Rollins album cover sitting artfully with the ashtray
and the open pack of Chesterfields by the retro microphone and the
old-fashioned turntable. It was a time of Fagen's young life, apparently, when he
would take a bus to Manhattan from the New Jersey suburbs to see Rollins and
other jazz giants of the time. The lucky man got to see the holy trinity of
Miles, Mingus and Monk.
Two of the other
numbers on The Nightfly appear to set the time of Donald Fagen's youth
in a wider social and global context. 'The Goodbye Look' seems to be
about the change of regime in Cuba (where 'tonight they're arranging a small
reception just for me/Behind the big casino by the sea'). The horn section on the
opening 'I.G.Y.' exemplifies the kind of musical class on show throughout the
album: the Brecker Brothers plus George Benson and Eddie Palmieri's go-to
baritone saxophonist, Ronnie Cuber, and Carla Bley's trusty trombonist, Dave
Bargeron. Fagen helpfully explains that 'I.G.Y.' stands for International
Geophysical Year, and the song is all about a blithely absurd late '50s vision
of the future. A world where travel takes 'ninety minutes from New York to
Paris', with 'perfect weather for a streamlined world where 'we'll be eternally
free yes and eternally young'. Ah, yes... 'What a beautiful world this'll
be/What a glorious time to be free'. Indeed.
Recording The
Nightfly seems to have been a sunny affair and by all accounts much less
fraught and protracted than Gaucho. There's a lovely happy, lively
quality that makes the first Fagen such an unqualified and lasting success. I
doubt whether before or since, whether with or without Walter Becker, Donald
Fagen achieved what was in his complex mind with such apparent ease and joie de
vivre. I've kept my treasured copy in its cellophane wrapper.
