Turn Off Shuffle:
Concept Albums Explained
by Timothy Ryan and Paul-Newell Reaves
The Nightfly
Donald Fagen
1982
For all you hep cats out there, staying up late with your radio on, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan has just the ideology for you.
I’m your host, Paul-Newell Reaves, joined by guest analyst Timothy Ryan — who has a special request for us this week, “the Nightfly”, broadcasting in full on Concept Albums Explained, Defenestrationism.net.
The experience begins with the packaging. The front cover features Donald Fagen in a 1950’s-style wide tie and white collared shirt, he’s speaking into a radio microphone next to a turntable, with nothing more than an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, and a clock behind him reading 4:09. He is Lester the Nightfly, a radio broadcaster for WJAZ, New Orleans — as track six of the album makes clear.
The back cover introduces another character into the program. It depicts a suburban household at nighttime, on the second floor a single window is lit. This is the listener, staying up late with the radio, soaking up the airwaves of ideology.
As the Nightfly takes requests, Tim and I will be analyzing these songs one lyric at a time.
Take it, Tim.
And what is this lonely heart listening for? If you’re up late tuned to that smooth-talking Lester calling out “Hello, Baton Rouge!” you’ll hear about far off lands, lost romance, dangerous politics and the excitement of our future in space! That’s right, the Nightfly’s running the wire about the new International Geophysical Year 1957-58.
Requesting listeners to “respect the seven second delay we have,” Lester puts on his next song, “I.G.Y.”
You’re immediately welcomed to this brave new world by the unchanging rhythm of smooth jazz rails throughout as the song’s seductive opening horns slide you straight into your journey: “What a beautiful world this will be/What a glorious time to be free.”
You’re “standing tough under stars and stripes” where the future looks bright indeed “On that train all graphite and glitter/Undersea by rail/Ninety minutes from New York to Paris” and in just twenty years “by ‘76 we’ll be A.O.K.”
“Get your ticket to that wheel in space. . .The fix is in/You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky,” or you can stay home and play in a solar-powered city with perfect streamlined weather and “there’ll be spandex jackets, one for everyone.” Come on along, y’all, the America IGY is selling is a future that promises effortless adventure and comfortable conformity simultaneously.
But get this daddio: beneath it all even with “more leisure for artists everywhere” during their New York-Paris trip, we’ll also wind up with a “a just machine to make big decisions—”
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
Man, given this was put down over forty years ago, even before Macs hit desks, it seemed both predictive and archaic at the same time. Now it has a particularly poignant feel in the last few months, more than when it was written. DOGE and the latest ruling that corporations can use copyrighted material to build their AI machines doesn’t feel free, eternal or young. During the Reagan years when I.G.Y. was first released, it felt satiric, that unbridled capitalist development will be a beautiful world and a “glorious time to be free”, the sanguine assurances ringing hollow. Now it feels eerily and depressingly prescient, you dig?
But hey, Lester’s got to let a lot of stuff roll through his ears and off his back. After a long night at the turntable he picks up the phone from a cat up too early or too late, maybe a song dedication to a lost main squeeze. The caller has no idea that it takes Lester himself back down to his own lost romance at “Green Flower Street”.
As the DJ spins the disc, he remembers those days “steppin’ out at six a.m.,” the streets filled with folk either heading home from grave shift or off for early days at the factory or the house or the hotel, a sense of danger and romance that drew him on down to “a special place for lovers”. In a Chinatown fraught with illicit thrills, our lover thinks he can glide through a separate world, with “murder out in the street” and “trouble most every night” — but not directed at him. The insouciant, upbeat music helps create the illusion. Instead, the descent into the world of violence and sexual excitement is set up in the two verses before our protagonist finds his “mandarin plum” that exquisite love, in that quiet sacred room, almost drug-like in its dream-like beauty –
One we understand
There were neon bends in daylight sky
In that sunny room she soothes me
Cools me with her fan
We’re drifting
A thousand years roll by
It can’t last, natch. “Where we once danced our sweet routine/It reeks of wine and kerosene,” an explosive combination. Those somnambulant paradisiacal hours of our protagonist’s slumming reverie are interrupted by his squeeze’s brother Lou Chang, “burning with rage.” And what’s he burning about? “Hey buddy you’re not my kind”. Suddenly the comfortable racial assumption melts away, and the song comes full circle, because trouble has come home, and it’s not so romantic anymore. But, man, the chorus keeps insisting on Lester’s lost dream,
Where the nights are bright
And joy is complete
Keep my squeeze on Green Flower Street
Hey check this, Paul-Newell, going down Green Flower way circles Lester back to his title track and by verse three, the Nightfly seems to be introspecting— it is four in the morning, after all— “There was once a time when love was in my life.” If the mic is still live, if Lester’s thoughts are still broadcasting, the occupant of the lonely suburban window will be absorbing the tragic tales of the Nightfly’s lost capacity to love.
As Lester spins the track “Maxine”, the lyrics become deeply personal, exposing a vulnerable side of our Nightfly. It is a song of teenage hope and love lost— “Some say that we’re reckless, they say we’re much too young… try to hang on, Maxine.”
The youthful couple spends nights together, deep in conversation, “while the world is sleeping, we meet at Lincoln Mall. Talk about life, the meaning of it all, try to make sense of the suburban sprawl”. As the song ends, the pair dreams together of the places they’ll live around the world, of how they’ll dress “in jeans and pearls”, and how they’ll “fill the place with friends”.
They can’t perpetually hold onto their dreams, to speak nothing of the unattainable chimera of the I.G.Y. Our Nightfly seems to burn out on romance at a young age, resulting in a life where,
I’ve got plenty of java and Chesterfield Kings
But I feel like crying
I wish I had a heart of ice
A heart like ice
And all the Nightfly has left to do is sell commercial product. All his aspirations have come to is this pre-dawn on-air ad flakking just more spandex jackets of the first track.
If you want your honey to look super swell
You must spring for that little blue jar
These are the lost dreams of Lester’s youth, pie in the sky, Mexico City, Manhattan — until he wakes up. And when he does, that life with Maxine was just a fiction and Lester finds himself here spinning soundtracks for other peoples’ desperate, youthful dreams.
And plenty of ideology is left to sell, too, the next track on Nightfly’s playlist, “Ruby Baby”, is a top 10 hit from 1956 by the soul group the Drifters— as covered by Donald Fagen.
Despite the smooth R&B groove, the lyrics do not create a love song, but a song of objectification. Just like the products he’s reduced to hawking at crazy late night callers, Ruby is property. With seemingly romantic lines such as, “like a ghost, I’m gonna haunt you… I’m gonna steal you away from all those guys… made a bet that I would get you, Ruby, Ruby, when will you be mine”, the heartbroken Nightfly’s broadcast perpetuates patterns of male dominance over romantic partners. It’s property as a creepy stalking, male possessiveness. And it’s exacerbated by the plaintive refrain that starts on a hopeful upbeat major note, “When will you be mine, all mine” but slides into a minor key when the unspoken answer is “never.” What may have been unthinkable, and certainly not romantic in the 1950s is, by the album’s release in 1982 and in our own anomic times, that unsaid “never” leaves a potential violent denouement a perpetual threat.
The ideology is hard at work. Ruby is just as much a sought-after product, a possession, as what the commercial is demanding the listener to buy.
But it sounds like someone out there’s having a shindig, Paul-Newell, and the next request is for “New Frontier”, a favorite Jack Kennedy phrase. For overt ideology but with a twist, listen up all you Beats and peaceniks and cinephiles out there, and catch the only music video for the album “New Frontier”–
Whoa, whoa, Tim— hold your horses there, mister. Can we consider a music video as part of the microcosm of the album? The Nightfly is a radio jockey, they hadn’t even conceived of videos for popular music, even in the futuristic International Geophysical Year, not until Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in 1965.
Don’t be so uptight, Paul-Newell, this music video is part of the packaging by ‘82 so I think we must include it as part of the album. This is one of those cool examples where the video, visually ground-breaking at the dawn of MTV, illuminates the song, and vice versa.
That young couple (“She’s got a touch of Tuesday Weld!”) drives on through a future housing development in that big Ford Fairlane, past the lonely upstairs radio light in the window, to have a party in a fallout shelter!
She’s wearing Amber and French twist
She’s got us wild and she can tell
She loves to limbo, that much is clear
She’s got the right dynamic for the New Frontier
Kick off your shoes and loosen up, honey, since this is the most upbeat song Lester will spin for us! “We’re gonna have a wingding/a summer smoker underground!” It’s just a dugout that his dad built, “in case the Reds decide to push the button down.” The happiest love song at the end of the world.
Because hey, man, the future looks bright – or does it? “We’ve got provisions/And lots of beer/The key word is survival on the New Frontier.” What happened to the shining, happy people of IGY? No matter, the young lovers have to dream: “Well, I can’t wait ‘til I move to the city/and finally make up my mind/to learn design and study overseas.”
But somehow, the dream can turn into a nightmare, you dig? It starts out romantic – “Let’s pretend that it’s the real thing/And stay together all night long” but that underpinning “real thing” is where the video comes in – as we’ve been watching these young Tuesday Weld/Buddy Holly lovers cavorting, their world’s been punctuated by over a dozen different styles of animation: bringing to life actual paintings by Joan Miro, “The Three Musicians” by Pablo Picasso, Socialist Realism, Hanna-Barbara sketchy jazz figures, 1950’s bra and perfume ads, Picasso’s “The Bather” morphing into the cover of the classic “Time Out” by The Dave Brubeck Quartet – “I hear you’re mad about Brubeck/I like your eyes I like him too”!
But the lovers fall asleep during the instrumental denouement, perhaps after their hinted not-so-chaste night “And when I really know you/We’ll open up the doors and step into the dawn.” Our musical themes slow down, some instrumentation bows out as she dreams of that fabulous housing development, a thoroughly modern kitchen, all done up in kinetic 1960s ad copy style — she’s dreaming of the great city of the future, promised by the I.G.Y. She wakes and slips out.
He dreams on about a different future – maniacal Hanna-Barbara generals shooting off a nuclear war, a barely rendered family piling into a fallout shelter shadowed by the mushroom cloud, the music slowing now, to just bare percussion and a lightly ironic keyboard, pulling us out of his nightmare.
Now here’s the final piece for you cats in the know: The video ends not surprisingly on the last strokes with the Peace Symbol – we widely connect that in the US with the Peace Movement of the late 1960s during the protests against the Vietnam War. It was created by the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958, it comes from the military semaphores for “N” and “D”. It also came to symbolize the swept-wing bomber.
We can while away the hours immersed in the fantasies of our New Frontier, and glorious freedom, but then The Nightfly throws on track 7, “the Goodbye Look”. With graphic artists looking toward a bright future under a sun shining on everyone’s spandex jackets — what is it about spandex jackets that so perfectly encapsulate the future as seen by the 1950s? — Fagen hasn’t forgotten the period’s undercurrents that lie beneath the glossy surface. Our New Frontier now spawns the world in which we find ourselves touring a sparkling Caribbean beach where the surf was easy and the narrator “remembers a line of women all in white/The laughter and the steel bands at night.”
But the reality of the Cuban revolution is undeniable:
Now the Americans are gone except for two
The embassy’s been hard to reach
There’s been talk and lately
A bit of action after dark
Behind the big casino on the beach
Here one quiet American finds himself perhaps in an Elmore Leonard novel, quietly, coolly negotiating his fate – unlike a desperate song-mate and fellow countryman somewhere else in Havana who’s got himself way in over his head. In contrast to the out-of-control naif in Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” our man seems to be facing the future with the steely calm of a Hemingway character. We’re with his last wistful memories, dreaming of an old lover dressed in gray, but inevitably comes “Wake up darling, they’re knocking/the Colonel’s standing in the sun, with his stupid face, the glasses and the gun.”
The books and baseball metaphors in the bridge and refrain aren’t about loss, they’re about the American Instinct of recognizing the next wave and riding it.
The rules are changed, it’s not the same
It’s all new players in a whole new ball game
I know what happens
I read the book
I believe I just got
The goodbye look
But our hero knows a fellow with a motor launch for hire, “a skinny man with two-tone shoes” because he’s aware of the small reception they’re arranging just for him “behind the big casino by the sea.” The Colonel will surely execute him and dump his body on the beach, unless he catches that boat out of town. Our hero knows what’s about to happen, he read the book, but we hope he figures out the plot just in time.
And where does he fortuitously land in his refugee boat? Miami! The final track of the Nightfly’s pre-dawn, “Walk Between the Raindrops” sees him here, free, walking between the raindrops with his lover, dodging all the realities of the storm engulfing the New Frontier.
The first image on the final track foreshadows an end of the fantasy with “a shadow crossed the blue Miami sky”. These first two verses then seem to reveal another lost love – “After all the words were said and the tears were gone/we vowed we’d never say goodbye.” While verse two has an optimistically idyllic outcome – walking between the raindrops, dodging the deluge of Cold War capitalism, as fantastical as every other sunny promise of our bright new future. By the third verse, “In my dreams I can hear the sound of thunder…That happy day we’ll find each other”, it’s clear that walking between the raindrops with the lover you lost, will never happen.
The track also reads as the Nightfly’s final illusion on the album, just before “dawn comes through, the skylight,” a long night of Lester’s lost dreams and regrets, a divine wish to be able to dodge the vicissitudes of his life.
The title of the final song, as the Nightfly’s shift ends, and the promises of a bright new dawn with glittering trains and spandex jackets fade away, the title of the song Walk Between the Raindrops, seems to become the impossible task of skirting the omnipresent torrent of ideology, avoiding the soul soaking effects of mass/media acculturation and the manufactured consent of cold war propaganda from the 1950’s up to today— and beyond!
Fan Voting is Open for the 2025 !Short Story Contest!
Go straight to the Contest to vote.
by 
by
Our sphere