One of pop music's sneakiest masterpieces has turned 25.
Often, an album rises from regular best-seller to classic status because
it captures the temper of its times. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band," for instance, simply sounds like 1967, trippy
and disarrayed. But "The Nightfly," the
1982 album from songwriter Donald Fagen, gives that
standard a twist. Instead of evoking the early '80s, Mr. Fagen
captures a different time -- the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, when
If the album doesn't ring a bell, don't worry. "The Nightfly" has sold more than a million copies and
shown enough staying power to get a soup-to-nuts anniversary edition in
November from Reprise Records. Yet it never quite made itself inescapable. If
you've heard one of the songs, it was probably either "I.G.Y.," a
catalog of World's Fair forecasts about the future, or "New
Frontier," a frantic, jazzy number about a "summer smoker
underground" in a fallout shelter.
You might also know Mr. Fagen, who has a long
history of misdirection. As the front man for the band Steely Dan, he co-wrote
a decade's worth of hits that hid snarky lyrics under
silky harmonies and slick musicianship. "The Nightfly,"
which arrived a couple of years after the band broke up, was something else
altogether. For once, Mr. Fagen stopped being cryptic
and opened up to his audience.
As he wrote in the liner notes, the songs "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." The cover adds
another layer of autobiography. On the front, we see Mr. Fagen
as a crew-cut deejay on the graveyard shift. On the back is his audience, a
single lighted window in a row of tract homes -- or maybe the artist as a young
man, drinking in inspiration.
If so, he didn't forget a thing. Throughout the record, Mr. Fagen draws on obscure corners of American pop for his
musical settings -- stuff that got pushed to one side by the British Invasion
and then trampled underfoot by the harder sounds of the late '60s. But he's not
simply aiming at pastiche. The music always reinforces his themes of innocence
and experience.
In "New Frontier," for instance, he uses cocktail-party jazz to
set the story of a would-be ladies' man on the make. The music sounds as
frenetic as the teenage hero's hormones, and its deliberately cheesy tone
matches the kid's skin-deep sophistication. Likewise, "The Goodbye
Look" uses a campy tropical backdrop -- the kind a teenager would hear on
his parents' cha-cha records -- for a tale of romance and revolution on an
island paradise. Mr. Fagen throws in some vocal homages, as well.
"Maxine," a story of hand-wringing college romance, gets decked out
with soaring harmonies worthy of the Four Freshmen.
The lyrics are just as poignant and precise. Take the opening number,
"I.G.Y.," which pokes fun at space-age daydreams. "By '76, we'll
be A-OK," the narrator promises, enjoying undersea trains, wheels in space
and "Spandex jackets, one for everyone." But Mr. Fagen's
vocals never make it seem like he's sneering. He seems to be joking about his
own dashed hopes as much as everyone else's, and he
clearly has a lot of affection for those forgotten tomorrows.
"New Frontier," meanwhile, turns JFK's
famous phrase into a metaphor for the mysteries of sex and adulthood. The song
follows a wannabe hipster through a party in his parents' bomb shelter, as he
chases a girl "with a touch of Tuesday Weld" and imagines a future
that would get big laughs in "The Graduate." "I can't wait till
I move to the city," he confides, "till I finally make up my mind to
learn design and study overseas." Obviously, Mr. Fagen
is having some fun at his hero's expense. But he also seems to have fond
memories of just how sexy a vacuum-packed world could be.
The album's most revealing line comes in the title song, narrated by the
disc jockey on the cover. "You'd never believe it," he tells his
listeners in a weak moment, "but once there was a time when love was in my
life."
I sometimes wonder what happened to that flame
The answer's still the same
It was you, it was you
Tonight you're still on my mind
A girl, surely -- but maybe also the
Reprise's reissue moves the story along by bundling in Mr. Fagen's two other solo records -- as well as a bunch of
extras -- to make a "three ages of man" trilogy. "Kamakiriad," from 1993, is a witty meditation on
middle age and its regrets, told as a sci-fi travelogue through a future