KEY ELEMENTS: PERFORMANCE, MELODY, LYRIC, RECORDING, PRODUCTION, ARRANGEMENT

The jewel of Nightfly is its first band, “I.G.Y.” (International Geophysical Year), which surprisingly made it only to No. 26 on the pop charts. The real I.G.Y., a worldwide study of the earth and its terrestrial and space environment conducted by sixty-six cooperating nations, lasted from July 1957 through the end of 1958. The song’s lyric is a glowing send-up of a then-prophesied glittering vision of our future. Transatlantic trains in undersea tubes, recreational rides on the space station, solar-powered cities, and the biggie—eternal youth. There are only glancing references to the U.S./Russian space race, “that game of chance in the sky,” and to the possibility of computers making all the major decisions for humanity.

Beneath the humor, “I.G.Y.” represents the absolute state-of-the-art for production and recording in the early 1980s.The record is easily the best arranged, recorded, and mixed cut Fagen or Steely Dan ever did, and helped earn The Nightfly a Grammy as Best Engineered Recording. Gaucho had earned the same award just one year earlier.The engineers were also separately honored.

Roger Nichols developed a sampling device (affectionately named Wendel) that enabled him to replace each beat drum of the live drummer’s performances with perfect snare, kick, tom-tom, and other sounds. The samples were recorded in a separate session, with each drum played solo and mic’d perfectly, eliminating leakage from other drums and cymbals. When drummer James Gadson played the drum part straight through, Nichols recorded each drum and cymbal onto a separate tape track, as is normal in rock production.

During playback, for example, he fed Gadson’s snare drum track into Wendel to trigger his snare sample. Thus, each snare hit played by Gadson was replaced with the better sounding snare, each kick drum hit with its sampled cousin, and so forth. The outputs from Wendell were simply recorded onto blank tape tracks in parallel to their real counterparts. Since then, sampling and replacement have become commonplace in all genres of popular music, and have been applied to every type of instrument, from accordion to zither.

Samples may also be “triggered” by computers and other devices into which instrumental parts can be programmed one note at a time—not in real time, but so-called step time. Thus, a non-drummer can create drum parts hit by hit, or non-bassists can compose bass parts, letting the computer or “sequencer” play the finished parts back in real time. In some cases, the resulting parts can be quite clever, as they are not hampered by the human physics of what can be played by two hands and feet. Nevertheless, many such programmed parts feel strange because a real drummer could never move his hands and feet in the programmed pattern.

From its first note “I.G.Y.” is sonically dazzling. The twenty-five-bar intro begins simply with chords defining a repeating four-bar progression: a lush chorused Rhodes piano, synth chords on upbeats for accent, kick and bass providing a puff of lows on each new chord, and a few cymbal flourishes. From the left, a veil of sparkling, atempo, synth arpeggios cascades like stardust across the stereo stage, following the chord progression with jewel-like precision. It is a sonic version of an impressionist painting by Seurat, who applied tiny dots of color to the canvas. When viewed from a distance, the picture has a shimmering surface and vibrating, almost psychedelic colors. Seurat’s “dot” technique later became known as pointilism.

After eight bars, full drum and bass parts kick in, along with bouncy guitar chords and muted synth chords that define a pop-reggae feel. The snare sound literally snaps with punch and presence. This combination cooks for eight bars, whereupon an ultra-smooth, four-part unison brass line enters, punctuated by harmonica fills. The brass have a warm, velvety quality that becomes even more striking when they break into two and three parts. In contrast, the harmonica is etched in reedy detail, as though one’s ear were six inches from the player’s cupped hands.

Verse 1
Standing tough under stars and stripes,
We can tell this dream’s in sight.
You’ve got to admit it,
At this point in time that it’s clear,
The future looks bright.

Prechorus
On that train, all graphite and glitter, undersea by rail,
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris.
Well by ’76, we’ll be A.O.K.

Chorus
What a beautiful world this will be.
What a glorious time to be free.

The verse bounces along with a single-line muted guitar line and the ongoing Rhodes piano. The brass ease in with warm three-part harmony in the prechorus. Four bars later, a pair of bright, suspended guitar chords usher in the breathy four-part harmonies of the chorus, whose rhythm tracks turn out to be identical to the second eight bars of the intro, with the addition of a lazy tambourine on the left. Four-part vocals float like a warm breeze above the etched rhythm tracks. These two motifs operate separately, yet their interplay makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The complete effect is again similar to that of a fully developed four-part fugue: the listener has heard each new part enter, and is able to follow the structure and interplay of all the lines at once.

Verse 2
Get your ticket to that wheel in space while there’s time.
The fix is in.
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky.
You know we’ve got to win.

Prechorus
Here at home we’ll play in the city, powered by the sun.
Perfect weather for a streamlined world,
There’ll be Spandex jackets, one for everyone.

Chorus

The instrumental parts of the second verse and chorus are slightly elaborated versions of the first run-through. However, my ear is always drawn to the mix itself in this section. Elliot Scheiner, who mixed The Nightfly, carefully highlights each subsequent line, lyric, riff, and fill. Our eyes and ears follow the play of sounds back and forth on its stage. The dynamics of brass lines are such that we hear and feel them swell and subside, punctuating individual lyrics.
Chorused guitar chords shimmer like mercury above the Fender Rhodes. Facilitated by a meticulously dovetailed arrangement, sounds move in and out of the foreground seamlessly, with all the sure command of our ears that a well-lit and -edited film has over our eyes. Shot by shot, Fagen and Scheiner tell us where to look and when to move on.

Verse 3
On that train all graphite and glitter, undersea by rail.
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris.
More leisure for artists everywhere.

Prechorus
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.

Chorus

The Artist Speaks—A New Man After Drugs and Dan
Walter Becker, who vanished from the pop spotlight after Steely Dan’s 1980 breakup, finally released his first solo outing, China Crisis, in 1985. Interviewed by Mark Rowland for the September 1985 issue of Musician, he speaks freely about his partnership with Donald Fagen, his lengthy “recovery,” and his evolving view of their accomplishments. Becker implies that his partnership with Fagen was smooth and collegial. Separately, Becker’s years away from the studio relaxed his approach and enabled him to make music more from the gut than the cerebral cortex.