Donald Fagen: "New Frontier"

3 February 1983

"The guitar licks are quite tasty too."

— Fred Dellar

With Single of the Fortnight having been established in the middle of 1981, it's notable that the late Fred Dellar seemed to opt out in what would turn out to be his final singles review go in Smash Hits. Nothing thrilled him enough to give a record similar treatment to The Jam's "Absolute Beginners", Stevie Wonder's "Do I Do" and Kim Wilde's "Child Come Away". Held up against those three, I can't say I blame him. There are a handful of good records present but almost nothing I feel like I need to ever hear again.

Among them is Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" which Dellar forces into a shared review with baby sister Janet's "Come Give Your Love to Me". While he admits that the former is a grower he is far less impressed by the younger Jackson's "effort". (Surprisingly, this dismissal of the global smash from the blockbuster Thriller album wasn't included in the early '85 Hits feature Our Most Embarrassing Singles Reviews, though Dave Rimmer's even less enthusiastic assessment of follow-up single "Beat It" did make the cut) While it may seem to beggar belief that such a pop classic could be shrugged aside, under the circumstances I can understand such a move: the sheer thrill of "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" could render anything that follows it just a tad disappointing.

In truth, there are just a pair of numbers that Dellar seems to have any affection for. One of the is "Cath" by Scots The Bluebells, while the other is the second single from The Nightfly, the debut album from former Steely Dan co-leader Donald Fagen. Since his enthusiasm for the former doesn't quite match that of the latter, "New Frontier" takes the proto-SOTF "honours". How nice that these are precisely the same pair of singles that I'm fond of as well.

As I suggested before the last time this record came up three years ago, much of what is on The Nightfly is autobiographical. This isn't information I sought out in any particular way, I merely looked it up on Wikipedia and it presented itself to me. Sorry but that's as much due diligence as I was willing to put in. Perhaps had I persisted with more than just the first bit of Fagen's autobiography Eminent Hipsters I could've found out more but I only had the audiobook to rely upon. Much as I dig Fagen as a vocalist — even if he isn't much of a singer per se — his Long Island deadpan is not the sort of sound I can tolerate for long. "Read by the Author" may be an enticement when you're dealing with Alan Bennett or Stephen Fry but it acts as more of a warning when you've got Donald Fagen narrating.

Back to the autobiography: I'm not sure it matters. While I misinterpreted my initial reading of "New Frontier" by thinking that it's about a young man using his family's little-used fallout shelter as a pathetic nightclub, this is actually a perfectly good narrative with which to base a Steely Dan song around. More to the point, whether Fagen himself tried to lure girls from school into the family bomb shelter or he just invented such a scenario isn't especially important to us as listeners. I imagine the memory of this means something to him but for me it only goes to show just how much of a Dan-type character he has always been. If "New Frontier" is indeed extracted from his life then why not "My Old School" or "Barrytown" or "Deacon Blues" as well?

And, indeed, why not a whole lot more while we're at it? Let's be honest here: "New Frontier" sounds like a Steely Dan song: there's Fagen's faintly desperate-sounding voice, those familiar backing vocals, that trademark exactitude in the musicianship. With all due respect to the late Walter Becker, would anyone have noticed that he's not on it? Had there been an eighth Dan album it would've sounded not unlike The Nightfly. Come to think of it, there was an eighth Dan album! 2000's comeback Two Against Nature routinely gets slammed because it won a Grammy that it allegedly didn't deserve (though to be fair, voters undoubtedly didn't see the point of listening to Kid A more than the once and couldn't understand that the genius of The Marshall Mathers LP was that every song was meant to sound the same) but it's a worthy effort all the same. That said, it's no Nightfly. Few things beyond prime Steely Dan are.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Virginia Astley: "Love's a Lonely Place to Be"

Listen to a Virginia Astley single and it's too much; listen to a Virginia Astley album and it's not enough. Dellar isn't crazy about this piece of "pretty-pretties" and I know what he means. Three or four minutes just doesn't do her sound justice. It isn't that her work requires patience or persistence or hard work, it's just that a good deal of it needs to spread itself all over the listener in order for them to appreciate it. Either that or she was just too good and too important for singles even if this didn't stop her from releasing them. All I know is I've liked what I've heard from her, limited though it may be, but "Love's a Lonely Place to Be" just passed me by, like a dewy cherry blossom pedal that fell to the ground just as I looked the other way. Or something to that effect.

(Click here to see my original review)

Donald Fagen: "New Frontier"

3 February 1983

"Near MOR fare (of four star quality) from the ex-Steely Dan mainman..."

— Fred Dellar

We're going back a bit for this post. Having decided earlier this year to include singles from before mid-1981, I realised that I had skipped one from the start of 1983. Though Smash Hits had begun giving a more prominent space for Singles of the Fortnight, they failed to do so this time round with largely unflattering reviews of Rockers Revenge and Jimmy Cliff sharing the top left hand spot usually reserved for critic picks. A stingy with praise Fred Dellar (the latest from Michael Jackson is only able to "almost convince you that "Bille Jean" is a great record. Which it isn't") doesn't specify a favourite so I refrained from covering it back at the beginning of 2019 but now that I'm inferring earlier SOTF, I feel more comfortable putting words in his nibs' mouth.

~~~~~

An ambition of mine that I'm sure never to realise is to write a a jukebox musical based on the music of Steely Dan. Glamour Profession, as it is so named, is about a rotating cast of musicians who toil in the studio under the direction of an unseen pair of demanding and persnickety composers named Don and Walt. Beginning at around the time of 1974's Pretzel Logic, just as this organization was transitioning from a "proper" five-piece band into a diarchic unit surrounded by crack jazz and rock sessioners, it examines the hired hands as they rehearse under watchful eyes and, during the odd lull between songs, discuss their lives as working musicians. A backing vocalist, guitarist or saxophonist breaks into a full rendition of whatever song that they happen to be working on (I always imagine "Bad Sneakers" from the Katy Lied album working particularly well) before receiving word that Don or Walt (if not both) are unhappy with that take and wish to do it again (wheels turnin' round and round...).

One scene I've thought about at length (which I nearly wrote for this entry until it dawned on me that I haven't the faintest idea what I'm doing) is about a pair of musician buddies meeting in a quiet studio and catching up before another session is to begin. One has been out of the country and is surprised to discover that Walt is out of the picture. They spend much time discussing the implications of this new arrangement, unable to work out if it's for the best or not. Only one stern teacher barking at them seems to be a plus but then Don doesn't have his old partner to blame for sabotaging the session: the studio musicians will have to take the brunt of the blame. This new direction leads them into a rendition of "New Frontier".

Lead singers who go solo could do a lot worse than stick with what they know. The natural thing to do is stretch out from the confines of a band but does that ever really work out? Why not just do what's easiest: it worked before so why not keep it going? Fans who are already familiar with a group's material can appreciate hearing more of the same from a newly solo artist, especially since it helps dull the sting of a break up. The musically illiterate Morrissey emerged following the dissolution of The Smiths with a number one album and a string of top ten hits. Was Viva Hate a better work than The Queen Is Dead or Strangeways, Here We Come? Not at all but it greatly impressed people that he was able to cut it on his "own".

Sticking with a familiar sound also allows the vocalist to control the narrative. Keith Richards was said to have been livid when he first heard Mick Jagger's debut solo album She's the Boss — not because it spat on the legacy of The Rolling Stones but because it sounded too much like them. But coming on the heels of the patchy Undercover, it's not a bad effort and reaffirms the vital role he plays in his day job (though it probably helps that this was prior to Richards becoming everyone's favourite Stone). Bryan Ferry had long held solo ambitions and interspersed albums released under his own name with Roxy Music LPs. Again, the stuff he did on his own is decent but seventies Roxy is a much different beast than eighties Stones. Gradually, however, his band moved away from their remarkable art rock and their polished and slick later work began to fall closer in line with his solo recordings. Avalon was a commercial and critical success and Ferry deftly harnessed it into Boys & Girls, in effect its follow up. (Such was his blurring of the lines between group and solo artist that many subsequent compilations have drawn from both sources)

In a sense, Donald Fagen doesn't really fit in with Ferry, Jagger and Morrissey — which, considering the company, is probably for the best. Steely Dan fell apart following the sessions for their seventh album Gaucho and Fagen appears to have continued where he left off with The Nightfly but there's no sense of him having any prior solo ambitions, there wasn't a grand strategy involved and he wasn't setting out to proven anything to anyone. Eighteen of the album's twenty-eight session musicians were veterans from prior Dan works, with all but two having appeared on Gaucho, including Larry Carlton and Michael and Randy Brecker. That same old exactitude of the playing is present and correct, as are Fagen's witticisms.

"New Frontier" is Fagen's madcap tale of planning a party in a bomb shelter "in case the Reds decide to push the button down". The song isn't traumatically retelling how terrified he was by 'duck and cover' drill exercises or how he was kept awake with worry during the Cuban Missile Crisis but looks forward to the Bomb and the promise it brings. I imagine a fifteen-year-old geek, clipboard in hand, with a list of names that he has earmarked for a spot in the "dugout that my dad built". Is it even a list? Is the coming disaster just a ruse to get the Big Blonde to have a little nuclear fallout with our Donny? So much to chew on here.

Gone from The Nightfly are characters like Hoops McCann with Fagen instead using himself in the role. A bomb shelter becomes a teenage fantasy nightclub and he's the bouncer. The album is often described as a departure in that it got him being much more autobiographical. There's more than a little truth in this and certainly not having Walter Becker around to bounce ideas off would have made it much more convenient to look within. But I'm not so sure it goes into his own life and experiences, just the knuckleheaded thoughts that roamed in his mind. Perhaps this is what the jukebox musical should really be about.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Buebells: "Cath"

With Altered Images, The Associates, Aztec Camera, Big Country, Orange Juice, Simple Minds and Strawberry Switchblade, Scottish pop more than held its own in the early eighties. But what of The Bluebells, a group that lacked both the cool factor and/or the cultural import of their contemporaries? Obviously they'll always have "Young at Heart", a song I previously slagged, to keep the memories alive and the royalty checks coming but "Cath" is a much better song and gives one an idea of just how they manage to fit in. While Kenneth McCluskey didn't have the charisma of Billy McKenzie, Clare Grogan, Jill Bryson or Rose McDowall, the group didn't have a particularly distinct sound the way Big Country and Simple Minds did and they weren't songwriters like Roddy Frame or Edwyn Collins but they might have been the best possible compromise of all of 'em. I'll take "Cath" with "Party Fears Two" and "All I Need Is Everything" and you can have the rest.