yeah, damn it, the right should be most afraid of steely dan!
Hot Licks and Rhetoric: Inserting the Burroughsian Dildo into the New Frontier by Davis Schneiderman
Steely Dan -- defenders of irony, studio masterminds, authors of seven consecutive "hit" albums, introspective gurus of a decidedly anti-hippie strain of counterculture, and ironic white-boy rock 'n roll kommandos -- were armed during their music-making tenure with a secret be-bop arsenal and a knowledge of literary illuminati. They installed their insidiously crafted guerrilla hooks into the collective cultural noggin' like a time-delay bomb that explodes on paranoiac-inertia for at least 50 years after the drop. The studio band of those long years known as the 1970s, Steely Dan somehow survived the jungles of Studio 54's coke-lined disco, the sexual revolution, pet rocks, and used-to-be-in-charge-here Tricky Dick -- only to falter after one "final" painstaking stab (1981's Gaucho album) at prefiguring the millennium.
After Gaucho, with its larger-than-myth examination of feisty doppelgängers and not yet exorcised cold-war demons, the Dan's dynamic nucleus -- string-man Walter Becker and vocalist/keyboardist Donald Fagen announced their initial split for parts unknown. But oh, what a ride it was!
The Formative Years
Evolving of age in the simulacra of the 1950's , with replicated TV dinners and Sputnik firmly ensconced in the background, the boys' late-for-the-era-but-early-for-the -mainstream discovery of Charlie Parker and other jazz greats was like chancing upon the surreality of backyard bomb shelters. Like untold masses of other like-minded malcontents, Fagen and Becker nurtured their growing suspicions of the American-dream with a liberal-slanted and mind expansive trip to the halls of higher education. They attended Bard college in the salad days, with New York's knickerbocker Hudson to thank for the jazz-pop clash of their aesthetic sensibilities. Cribbing an inspired moniker from William S. Burroughs' cryptically-named dildo in Naked Lunch, Steely Dan's origins upsurged as a threat to the safely-scripted pop-world, from the same deviant sources as Burroughs' post-A-bomb word-hoard experiments.
Like the language-as-virus apolitics of the Burroughsian vision, Steely Dan stomped out a startling range of musical errata, correcting the ersatz pop-rock of the formulaic radio song -- 3+ minutes, verse/chorus predictability, 15 word vocabulary -- fermenting a vintage of intellectual jazz-pop that matched in musical experimentation what it boasted in lyrical innovation.
Fagen's themes are multifarious, many-headed, magical, and pleasantly redundant throughout their song catalog, and nascent in the early ventures. 1972's album Can't Buy a Thrill is largely a paean to earl-70's excesses, as much tongue-in-ear schlock as rock: "Midnite Cruiser's" sad-sack nostalgia ("I am another gentleman loser/Drive me to Harlem or somewhere the same"), "Kings" edgy post-modern Nixon jab ("We've seen the last of good King Richard..."), the hook-laced-irony of "Reeling in the Years" ("The weekend at the college didn't turn out like you planned/The things that pass for knowledge I can't understand"). 1973's Countdown to Ecstasy album cut its chops on the Can't Buy a Thrill tour, and rolls out the Go East Young Man! spirit of Herman Hesse in "Bodhisattva" ("...The smile in your Japan/The sparkle of your China..."), and the everyday oracles of an increasingly cynical capitalism in "Your Gold Teeth" ("...You throw out your gold teeth/Do you see how they roll?").
In the balance of Steely Dan's recorded career these essential strands of lyrical data separate, float about, and recombine with other thematical bases in the production of various musical genealogies. But with each passing generation the songs become less about the average misanthrope's identity, and more about the identity of all humanity living under the ubiquitous threat of nuclear devastation. Fagen never strays far from the satiric, sardonic irony of baby boomer cum atomic boom(er), and the dark fin de siécle spirit embodied in "...the mechanized hum of another world," pulses through their song catalog in various, increasingly ominous adaptations.
Ecstasy's final sortie is Fagen's first venture in the realm of the overtly apocalyptic. "King of the World" alights in pre-electronica synthesizer and drum loop, conjoined quickly with an automatic bass riff, which is more along the lunatic fringe of pre-techno than anything previously attempted by the Dan. The guitars jangle in the background, announcing a violation of the pop saccharine code: Hello one and all/Was it you I used to know?/Can you here me call/On this old ham radio...? go the lyrics, crack boom, a sonic welcome somehow slipped in as a "Day in the Life"-like afterthought on an otherwise fairly innocuous record.
The ham radio technology that the song's first-person narrator chooses as his medium contains the threat that this romanticized, personalized signal of a simpler time is no longer operational, and no connections are made: (Is it a problem of the narrator, the machinery, or the receiver?) Then, the thrice-repeated chorus for the first time: "No marigold's in the promised land/There's a hole in the ground where they used to grow/Any man left on the Rio Grande/Is the king of the world as far as I know..."
The Southwestern American setting brings to mind the expansive connotations of the various Native American cultures that inhabit the area, but also the last-man-standing king-of-the-hill figure as a default-hero in an exploded promised land. If the machinery of communication (embodied in the ham radio) is broken, the song's narrator becomes (possibly) the only individual left alive. Yet, the validity of this supposition is questioned by the narrator, with the "as far as I know" disclaimer lending an additional layer of uncertainty to the "non-responsive" ham radio signal.
The next verse ends with an apparent no-man's land between the windy border of the Rio Grande and the general locale of broadcast -- "...through the ruins of Sante Fe," positions the action firmly in New Mexico, complete with its Los Alamos legacy of white sands and Manhattan projects.
The bridge intensifies the beleaguered landscape with a shift of the synthesizer to a repeated, cartoonish warble like an exaggerated irregular heartbeat, driving home the self-evident absurdity of any culture capable of producing such devices of impotence as the ham radio and/or the Hydrogen Bomb: "I'm reading last years papers/Although I don't know why/Assassins, cons, and rapers/Might as well diiiiiiiieeeeee..." The final lyrics from Fagen drone endlessly for several beats until morphing with the instrumentation to become a robotic sound collage equivalent to a radiation suit, popping with newly invigorated fervor into the final cadences: "...Watch the sun go down, smoking cobalt cigarettes." We are now in a universe much different than Ecstasy's initial return to the enlightened city of the playful opener, "Bodhisattva."
All industrial-complexes are destroyed, and the Buddha is nothing but a butt-smoking approximation of self. The narrative ends (and the album, thus the moment of Ecstasy, le petit morte) with the ultimate irony of any ineffective shelter -- "If I stay inside/I might live to Saturday." It doesn't matter how well-stocked with provisions the middle-American fantasy of safety is, even potential danger equals deep shit for the individual and the collective. Ecstasy's liner notes pronounce with sufficient anti-levity, "I think my face is on fire."
Pretzel Logic
1974's album, Pretzel Logic, signals the beginning of a more ambitious direction for the group, moving further away from the guitar rock trappings that inhabit such a relatively minor place on their previous outings (but a space nonetheless). The musicianship is tighter, as a variety of outside-the-"band" session men were introduced as supplements, in cases even replacements, for the touring entourage that worked on the first two albums. Steely Dan was at least an approximation of a band musician-wise in the early days, but in 1974 they ceased touring, dissolved the ever-changing roster of more-than-competent "bandmembers" and coalesced into the studio-primed Fagen/Becker nucleus (Doobie Brother Jeff "Skunk" Baxter was among the canned).
If "King of the World's" impending prognostication was a musical reading of Nostrodamus' Centuries, Pretzel Logic managed to suppress the prophetic impulse beneath a final nod to the thematically "safe" nostalgia record. Perhaps most culturally-noticeable on FM radio-hit "Rikki Don't lose that Number," but even more blatant on "Barrytown," "Parker's Band" (yes, its Bird himself), and the groups' only official cover, a technically admirable but emotionasexual "stain" removal lly vague rendition of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodeloo," the key re-visitation of the recent American past by the Dan's narrative archetype emerges (autobiographical, 50's post-war kid duped into believing Technicolor is a great advance for mankind, mixing irony with humanism in penetration of the veil) and is strung out equally, or soon to be, on both the false rank-and-file promises and the day-glo puff dreams of a hippie-centered counterculture. It's only in the minstrel-show poses and advertising-jingle ubiquity of the brilliant track "Pretzel Logic" that "King of the World's" desperate prophecies begin to be fulfilled.
"Pretzel Logic's" harmonized chorus: "These days are gone forever/Over a long time ago," establishes the next phase of Steely Dan's descent into a world more Burroughs than balanced, where theatre, entropy, and unexpected juxtaposition become the postmodern tools of their songcraft which not only supersede but retroactively eliminate all unspoken contracts of the previous 1950's -style generation. The collective deception of the Eisenhower years, tranquillity punctuated by only occasional periods of rough sailing, finds exposure as a deception. For Steely Dan, this is the epitome of Pretzel Logic, the everything-is-just-fine sentence-word that through its own patent absurdity allows Fagen to croon with ironic sincerity --"No, I've never met Napoleon, but I plan to find the time" -- and get away with it.
Katy Lied
Thus, 1975's album Katy Lied, with its cryptic, accusatory title and the introductory swirl of "Black Friday," to the calculated risk of "Your Gold Teeth II" (a sequel), increases the level of intellectual complexity in the lyrics and musicianship. Intimations of jazz sensibilities work both ends, while conversely and irrevocably ejecting the less palatable characteristics of the Steely Dan narrative archetype. The naiveté of the youthful search-epic so common in the earlier songs fades in the light of an older, informed brand of meta-cognitive questioning.
In the enigmatically scripted "Doctor Wu" which is more "jazz-pop" than "rock" will ever be, language disguises itself as a forlorn love ditty: "...You walked in/and my life began again. . . .all night long we would sing that stupid son/And every word we sang I knew was true." Initially, we are given the typical, hackneyed convention of the love song, but the lyric surprisingly alters at the chorus: "Are you with me Dr. Wu?/Are you really just a shadow of the man that I once knew?/Are you crazy?/Are you high?/Or just some ordinary guy...?" Dr. Wu is a personified non-sequitur of the stock Asian mischief character, escaped from the enigma of a Zen riddle. He boggles the song's narrator with seemingly unexplainable presence and purpose; his form is undefined, and causes the narrator to question the reality of his appearance. The simple love story dissolves completely by the first saxophone solo, and we roll through a second scenario of musical convention, the drug-wasteland: "I've been waiting for the taste you said you bring to me..."
We feel grounded, if not disturbed, by the apparent explanation of Dr. Wu as a junkie's hallucination, but it is only in the song's final moments that this position is questioned: "Can you hear me Dr. Wu?/Are you with me Dr. Wu?" repeats and disintegrates into bits of chopped phraseology, dropping the "Dr. Wu" tag, only to pick it up again several beats later, separated from context and, like the language used to both pacify the quiescent lovers or appease the strung-out loner, disconnected from its original intent.
Fagen and Becker exploit the semiotic possibilities of the pop song with "Dr. Wu's" establishment of two narrative frames and the subsequent dissolution of these same schemas. This is a relative anomaly when held up to the entire Steely Dan catalog, but only in the easily identifiable decomposition of expected signs. Where "Dr. Wu" makes explicit, with its atrophied ending, the precariousness of a listener's faith in the "truthfulness" of lyric, this effect comes to predominate the latter phases of the Steely Dan output in a more subtle manner.
"Kid Charlemagne"
Fully-integrated, this outpouring of impending chaos reveals itself with 1976's album The Royal Scam. A loose, conceptual tirade against all that is seemingly innocuous, Scam continues the ironic development of Fagen's blustery lyricism, with an ironically guitar-driven, at times downright funk-ti-fied crop of songs that temporally disrupt the jazz-horizon impetus that the Dan seemed on a collision course with.
Somewhat furthering the lines of neo-millennialism investigated askance with Countdown to Ecstasy's "Kings," "Kid Charlemagne" finds the romanticized emperor (minus his twelve famous peers), reconstituted for the future complete with "Kid" moniker and street-thug credibility. Intimations of Burroughs' character the Lemon Kid hang like ermines in the new world, and the road-race tempo of the "San Francisco nights" finds the hybrid hustler, feeling "like Jesus..." in the cyborg future and moving as a missionary to the southlands of California: "Everyone stopped to stare at your Technicolor motor home/Every A-frame had you number on the wall/You must have had it all/ You go to LA on a dare and you go it alone..." The "Kid," an underworld savior with aspirations of immortality ("Will you live forever?"), makes his way through the same simulacra that marred Fagen's and Becker's white-washed 1950's. The A-Frame is replicated living, the Model-T of houses, a plastic existence of interminable, unharnessed energy. "Get along/Get along/Get along/Kid Charlemagne" may as well be the battle cry of Charles I, fathering both a physical Carolignian dynasty of French kings and a more ethereal, and more significant legacy of myth. Updating Charlemagne through the centuries builds upon the multiple connotations of Charlemagne the Arthurian-style hero (the epic Song of Roland, etc...) and crashes over 1000 years of myth with a sinister futuristic bent.
The second verse informs the listener of his or her obsolete nature in rebellion among "...all the white men on the street" multiplying uncontrollably. But it isn't until the third climatic verse that the narrative moves from a manifesto of the listener's situation to the imperatives that signal a possible escape: "Clean this mess up or we'll all end up in jail/Those test tubes and the scale/Just get it all out of here..." The objects that spell potential disaster for the "Kid" are ripe for consolidation. The test tubes and scale in question operate as dual sites of resistance: manufacturing equipment for hallucinogenic-induced mental states (precisely the apparatus able to leap the centuries), or the raw material of genetic manipulation (the "resurrection" dreams of the narrator). The verse finishes with the final instructions of escape, concurrently warning against the eyes of the "law" that guard the bastions of middle-America: "...Yes there's gas in the car/I think the people down the hall know who you are/Cause the man is wise/You are still an outlaw in their eyes."
"Sign in Stranger"
The contrast of rock-driven concept songs like "Kidinstrumental memory Charlemagne" with the piano-lounge-cool of otherworldly vignettes like "Sign in Stranger" increasingly becomes Steely Dan's emotional trademark in the development of their cosmic opera. The piano trickles that open "Stranger" place the ultra-suave, cigarette-chomping narrator at the hilt of a seedy bar in a sordid interplanetary free-zone, populated by characters who specialize in identity elimination, temporal distortion, and sexual "stain" removal ("Do you have a dark spot on you past?/leave it to my man he'll fix it fast").
The chorus of "You Zombie/Be born again my friend/Won't you sign in stranger?) places the "you" of "Kid Charlemagne" in the aftermath of a successful getaway run, where the price of both fame and infamy is the same liquidation into an eternal life that is mass-produced. Participants are fed escargot and other Epicurean delights in the pursuit of numb, Riviera-esque pleasures. The lyrical bridge offers the inquiry, "And who are you?/Just another scurvy brother..." while the "sign in stranger..." imperative equals the removal of any remaining chips of individuality, along with the double-intent language of "stranger" as both adverb to "sign" and direct address of an imperative command.
The resurrected dead are fully-coordinated for the final judgment in zombie-personas, and the album returns to earth for the title cut that closes The Royal Scam. But little hope remains that the coming apocalypse will leave anything of the old distinctions ("Every patron saint hung on the wall and shared the room with twenty sinners...")
Aja
1977's platinum success, Aja, marks a re-routing toward the jazz-flavored compositional direction that Katy Lied eloquently began. It's musical density seems to require that The Royal Scam should be a jazzier missing-link between the Katy Lied and Aja albums in order to account for the rapid development of the Dan's hybrid-style. That it was not testifies to the versatility that Fagen and Becker, the consummate studio-mavens, display when left to their own devices. Jazz giants Joe Sample, Wayne Shorter and Tom Scott hop on board to help render the genetic-Buddhism of "Aja's" capitalized Western World ("Double helix in the sky tonight, throw out the hardware, let's do it right...), the dancing-in-the-streets thug-life of "Josie," and the Odysseus-update "Home at Last" ("Still I remain tied to the mast..."). The juggernaut record is a commercial high-point, and while the group has certainly not deviated from their hard-wrought ironic world-view, the intimations of impending doom are once again localized (almost exclusively) in the introspective events of personal destruction over global fate.
The "Deacon Blues," that "...drinks scotch whiskey all night long/and di(es) behind the wheel..." searches for a name no different that the "Kid," but the stakes for humanity are lowered to a seeming narrative still-point. The "Deacon" is a character on a quest for personal redemption, and while grotesque, does not share the blatant universality of The Royal Scam's grotesques.
Aja's return of Steely Dan to the promotional realms of the music business, encapsulated in "Peg's" ode to memory and stardom, seemed the perfect time for Fagen and Becker to arise from touring "retirement" and once again strike up the "traveling minstrel show." Yet the tour is quickly aborted before the first rehearsal is even completed, as the less idealistic back-up band members find comparisons of pay scale and general griping more important than anything going on with the music.
Gaucho
As if fulfilling some theatrically-prescribed script of 70's musical convention, a providence of music industry and personal forces too disparate to be divine, Aja's almost-too-successful wake would spray and foam uncontrollably for the next several years, as the How-do-you-follow-up-a-dinosaur? Album,1980's long-delayed Gaucho, tromped slowly to awareness. Following largely in its predecessor's musical direction, not tacking or switching so gracefully as The Royal Scam did after Katy Lied, Gaucho seems a victim of Fagen's own occasionally debilitating-irony.
Gaucho is technically proficient to a fault (check out the production value on "Time out of Mind" or "Hey Nineteen"), but the hallmark of Steely Dan's meta-balancing act -- the juggling of jazz, rock, and muzak sensibility floating above the iconoclastic forms -- found a disquieting redundancy on the always competent but ultimately disappointing album. What Kenny G did to a rich tapestry of jazz experimentation a scant decade later, Steely Dan, in some small measure, did to themselves.
If Gaucho is doomed to wallow in Aja's instrumental memory, the album's lyrical proficiency shows a surprising level of biorhythm. The still-submerged strains of 1980's fin de siécle spirit finds an initial gush in a lyrical-vortex that attempt to sum up a century known for its incomprehensible rush to modernize and its equally callous abandonment of the by-products of modernization (re: nuclear waste). The postmodern backlash of postmodernism's own inscrutability, a fall-back cheapshot for skeptics, shines through brilliantly in "Babylon Sisters." It's long highway drive through the eternally-refashioned Tigris-Euphrates hedonism: "Turn that jungle music down/Just till we're out of town..."
Traditionally, the end-of-century creates a sort of prophetic panic, symptomatic of the need to project through the gates of the upcoming numerical marker (in this case 2000) and begin forecasting life in a unfamiliar mode. The doppelgänger, the double of the self, is the classic manifestation of this prognostication, answering the what-will-life-be-like? question with the production of a hypothetical self. This second-self is a product of prediction based upon the possibilities and imaginations of the day, and more often than not, presents a threat to the originating consciousness, as the future constantly erases and re-envisions the past. Fagen's micronized struggle with the second-self in "My Rival" bears more comparative urgency at the 20th century yardstick than Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde did in the 19th. The split personality abandons its one-or-the other existence in a more complicated stalking of simultaneous time. Sensory details establish setting from the outset: "The wind was driving in my face/The smell of prickly pears/My rival/Show me my rival/The milk truck eased into my space/Somebody screamed somewhere..." The earthbound narrator sees his physical body, one that feels passage of air on skin and inhales the blends of exotic fruit, challenged by the arrival of an alien form into his "space."
The milk-truck is Fagen's white-delivery system, the same transport of identical street-men who populate "Kid Charlemagne's" California cities. A very real threat to the self is extant, hidden in even the ultra-innocuous vehicles of modern-life, and while the female-voiced imperative of "My rival/Show me my rival" lets the listener in on the irony, verse 2 sees the narrator on the trail of the doppelgänger. It's the exact brand of wild-goose chase that provides the personal simulacrum with its validity: "I've got detectives on his case/...He's got a scar across his face/he wears a hearing aid/...I'll match him whim for whim..." The self-referencing jumps back to Scam's interplanetary cast of individuality assassins. "Sign in Stranger" introduces Pepé with his "...scar from ear to ear/He will make your mug shot disappear" capability. And "My Rival's" narrative double becomes the product of an earlier fantasy, the projection of the self into a futuristic worst-case-scenario otherworld of indenticality, made not only into thought by Fagen's earlier treatment, but rendered into flesh on Gaucho. The "I'll match him whim for whim" strategy threatens to root the double out into the open, and the "hearing aid" signals an apparent infirmity or augmentation that allows the double to supplant the narrator via sensory differences. Things are not what they seem; the new package is not necessarily an improvement - "Sure he's a jolly roger/Until he answers for his crime/I'll match him whim for whim..."
The self-referencing jumps back to Scam's interplanetary cast of individuality assassins. "Sign in Stranger" introduces Pepé with his "...scar from ear to ear/He will make your mug shot disappear" capability. And "My Rival's" narrative double becomes the product of an earlier fantasy, the projection of the self into a futuristic worst-case-scenario otherworld of similiarity, made not only into thought by Fagen's earlier treatment, but rendered into flesh on Gaucho. The "I'll match him whim for whim" strategy threatens to root the double out into the open, but the "healing hand" may just be the saving-grace. Yet, this too, comes with a price: "Sure he's a jolly roger/Until he answers for his crime/I'll match him whim for whim..."
Let the doppelgänger run amok and accountability is increased (in the form of responsibility) to the original self. The song ends with an imperative to cease all internal subterfuge ("But now it's stopping time..."), but the "My rival/Show me my rival" chorus is appeased only in the meantime, as the song wilts away. Impending troubles remain latent, and loom largely in darkness after only partial revelation.
Gaucho's title tracks offers the most lyrically intricate subject matter of the album, an epic South American romp the through the diminishing sunset of the bolo-wearing cowboy, again finding the doppelgänger hanging about, lingering with glee at the close of aging New World legends: "Would you care to explain?/Who is the gaucho, amigo?/Why is he standing in your spangled leather poncho, and your elevator shoes?/Bodacious cowboys, such as your friend/Will never be welcome here/High in the Custerdome..." The implication is of the traitor exposed, the insurgent realized by not only the possessed narrator of "My Rival," but also the few remaining members of a mythology threatened by the new-millennium's "Custerdome." The group draws power and relevancy, like the crafty "Kid Charlemagne," from the ability to incorporate the past, even the rejected past, when projecting into the future.
And by now the ugly spirit, the fin de siécle doppelgänger, the piece of the self that is beyond speculation, prediction, or control, is caught blatantly in the cloth of the past, ensnared in the Gaucho's magical ponchos and shoes. The song's narrator responds desperately to various unspoken suggestions of the double-spirit for acceptance: "No he can't sleep on the floor/What do you think I'm yelling for?" The future, with all its morphs and apocalyptic promises, nonetheless arrives.
Most fittingly, and perhaps most eerily of all possible manners, is Gaucho's final song (the last cut on the last, as of now, Steely Dan studio album.) "Third World Man" is the inevitable rise of W.B. Yeat's famous rough beast of the second-coming: "Johnny's playroom is a bunker filled with sand/He's become a third world man/Smoky Sunday/He's been mobilized since dawn/Now he's crouching on the lawn/He's a third world man..." Johnny, the nuclear-child, lives in a bomb-shelter finally put to use, calling into exustence the post-apocalyptic dawn by virtue of its own construction and proliferation; he morphs into the new "third world man"; the Cold War-era, we-will-bury-you threat made flesh. The disbelief that marks the nuclear-holocaust is the same shell-shocked, trivialized resistance to the powers operating in "My Rival" and "Gaucho," and the moment of arrival is rendered with Fagen's typical childhood inspired ironies: "I saw the fireworks?/I believed that I was dreaming/Till the neighbors came out screaming/He's a third world man."
Surprisingly, the mutated grotesques of "Sign in Stranger" or "Kid Charlemagne" are nowhere to be found in this super-realistic prophecy of the coming troubles. "Soon, you'll throw down your disguise/We'll see behind those bright eyes/By and by/Where the sidewalks are safe, for the little guy" goes the chorus, implicating the visitor that permeates Gaucho like a muzak-soaked disease to be ultimately revealed only when the current cycle is up. Some hope does remain for Fagen's "little guy," as if behind the costume of bright eyes, in the disc of the doppelgänger, the acceptance of the double self will lead to an new adaptation. This is firmly linked, in the final verse, to the reification of a global community: "When he's crying out/I just sing that Ghana rondo/ /He's a third world man "
On and On and On
To avoid overemphasizing one song-among many (despite its "convenient" location), "Third World Man" assumes a position in the Steely Dan continuum that brings, if not closure, some amount of progression to the more absurdly-fantastic visions of the earlier songs. On Fagen's critically-acclaimed solo album, The Nightfly (1982), the manners for dealing with the enclosing darkness (always held just at bay with Steely Dan's irony) migrate from the surreal Burroughsian location of "Dr. Wu's" ubiquitous dictums or "King of the World's" cobalt-nightmares, to a more personal site of re-investigation: the retroactively fusion-soaked 1950's that contained the seeds of Steely Dan.
A loose concept album, The Nightfly finds Fagen in the late-night radio persona of Lester the disc-jockey, perhaps someone inspired by the magic of old ham radios, dangling a non-cobalt cigarette from the twist of his fingers, looking pensive and rebellious over the jacket of Sonny Rollin's The Contemporary Leaders LP. From the liner notes: "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."
The first stanza of the song "New Frontier" begins (and jumps back from "Third World Man" in perpetual re-assessment): "Yes we're gonna have a wingding/A summer smoker on the ground/It's just a dugout that my day built/In case the Reds decide to push the button down..."
The timetable of the Steely Dan apocalypse is fluid. At one moment the firework bombs are exploding as we listen, at the next, we travel back before the bang - trapped in a continuum of language and event, as easily jumped as the laser reading a compact disc, perhaps not so easily avoided.