Charles Shaar Murray, New Musical Express,
23 October 1982
Ahem, where were we? Steely Dan go out on the worst album of their entire career, Walter Becker gets involved in one of those stupidly seamy Hollywood drug scandals that are the infallible identifying mark of the terminal arsehole, and Donald Fagen bides his time and eventually comes up with The Nightfly, an album which doesn’t so much dilute the arctic smart-assery of the Dan as warm it up, loosen it up and present it in a new context: as the chosen style of a naïve, half-smart young man with fantasies of sophistication.
Fagen prefaces the album with a note to the effect 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 north-eastern city during the late ’50s and early ’60s, i.e. one of my general height, weight and build.’ In other words, Fagen can use his patented approach while mocking it and simultaneously revealing its true nature as a device.
You could almost say he has brought himself nearer to the listener in this flashback album by re-distancing himself from his distanced approach. I mean, you could say that, but I’d rather you didn’t.
The music is, of course, synthesised swing served up in a rather less-unconscious-than-usual mentholated LA style. Even the album’s oldie, Dion’s ‘Ruby Baby’, gets a disturbingly cool, splintery treatment: a ’50s vision of what the swinging nightclub music of the ’80s would sound like. People like Larry Carlton, Jeff Porcaro, the Brecker Brothers, Chuck Rainey, Valerie Simpson and the VERY GREAT Marcus Miller (whose bass playing on Miles Davis’ Fat Time has made him my hero for life) are along for the ride, and the end result is like something Stevie Wonder might have concocted if he were white, Jewish, sighted and in the throes of an acute attack of nostalgia for the Kennedy years.
Fagen spends a lot of The Nightfly playing the eagerness and optimism of his younger self for either poignancy or laughs and he kicks the album off by achieving both on ‘I. G. Y. (International Geophysical Year)’: ‘Standing tough under stars and stripes/We can tell/the dream’s in sight …’
His singing is light and carefree; he actually sounds younger than he did on the Dan’s albums. ‘New Frontier’ catches the atmosphere of the excited young suburbanite trying hard to fake some boho cool and places it squarely in time: ‘I hear you’re mad about Brubeck/I like your eyes, I like him too …’
However, the two best moments come in the middle of the second side, where – in the title track – Fagen becomes the sophisticated all-night DJ he used to listen to (‘an independent station/WJAZ/with jazz and conversation’) and then jets off to the Caribbean for a calypsonic account of political intrigue among the synthesised steel drums that would almost sound like Creole if the musicians didn’t seem to be wearing disgusting clothes and not sweating. ‘The Goodbye Look’ (named after a Ross McDonald novel which has absolutely nothing to do with Caribbean politics) is the most Dan-like performance on the album, and Fagen’s wit suddenly regrows its fangs. ‘Now the Americans are gone except for two/the embassy’s been hard to reach,’ sings Fagen through his teeth as the fake pans chime around him.
The Nightfly is – as I would say – a mandatory purchase for all old farts with a few Steely Dan albums stashed away at the back of the pile, and a fine introduction to Donald Fagen (single personality … STAR) for anyone unencumbered by any preconceptions about his past. Anybody who responds to genuine wit and craftsmanship and who is interested in a non-rocking look at the Kennedy era could do worse than investigate.
Substituting warmth for spite has not dulled Fagen’s acuity one iota and he’s still almost too cool. More you could ask for?