The Nightfly

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Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly," (download until 2/11/09), from "The Nightfly."

Obviously, this isn't a Steely Dan tune, but a Fagan record gets sort of lumped into Steely Dan, in a way that Walter Becker's record didn't, and not only for the singing. I have this impression, not that either Fagan or Becker comes clean in an interview, that they really do complete each other despite the fact that Fagan on his own can write a better tune than Becker alone. Becker really does have a way with words, and his words have as far as I'm concerned gotten much more interesting since their reunion than when he was strung out in their glory days. He's more clear in his meaning, which leads me to think that he actually has more to say.

Fagan did a solo record rather than more heroin after Gaucho, and on “The Nightfly” the reasons why he was the together one were clear. Fagan has the Dan attitude just as thoroughly as Becker, but he gives it verbal form less compellingly. Lester the Nightfly is a perfect character, the scene set clearly, no line sticking out at all. I have to think that most people who write tunes would kill—like, really kill—to have knocked out this lyric. What's interesting is that the tune has none of the individual lines that pop up regularly when Becker is involved that have that slight edge, satirical in a way and partially absurd, though not so much as to make it a joke. Becker walks a fine line well. I have no idea—to repeat myself as I have the habit of doing...[repeat instructions...check for understanding...re-teach...]—how the pair actually write tunes but I have to imagine a very lively conversation about the subject, the tone, lines—lines of verse—shared, with Becker tweaking them as they get to paper.

I remember the first time Steely Dan was presented to me as a worthwhile endeavor. I was in a jazz combo my senior year of high school, going to a gig. I was really serious, some thought snooty, about bop and post-bop. I basically shut down after “A Love Supreme.” Anyway, the guitarist, who really could play and was just as dismissive of bad taste as I was, was into Steely Dan. I was really put out until he played “Babylon Sisters.” Then I was hooked. I remember thinking that there wasn't for any practical purpose a melody worth talking about, nor a chord structure worth dealing with. It was more like the kind of crap fusion that had destroyed jazz as a commercial endeavor. Everything seemed attached to everything else in sequence without regard for, really, anything at all. We would joke when one of the players played some terrible chord that they were “abstracting” the harmony. Steely Dan seemed to do that all the time.

And it stuck with me. I still haven't figured out how Becker and Fagan—and obviously here we have to point to Fagan, who to my ears is the one who provides that bizarre melodic and chordal structure that is at once totally off-putting and brilliant. Nothing in any except a tiny few of Steely Dan's tunes have anything in them that I'd call good, at least musically. I'm not talking about execution. It's more that it reminds me of the kind of stuff people I went to school with did in order to feel sophisticated: toss in a chord that doesn't fit to pretend you're “advanced.” Why it works for Fagan is beyond me. I love this song dearly as I do all kinds of others he wrote or co-wrote with no sense of why I do.

Nothing tops “Bad Sneakers” or “Doctor Wu,” though.