That time Donald Fagen made a life-affirming song about backyard bunkers in the Cold War
In the fall of 1982, Donald Fagen released his first solo album, not long after he put his Steely Dan partnership with Walter Becker on ice.
The Nightfly was inspired by the late-night DJs Fagen had heard while growing up in the late Fifties and early Sixties in the suburbs of New Jersey.
New Frontier was the second single from the album, and it may be one of Fagen’s more heartfelt songs, even though it is also deeply dipped in his trademark irony and sarcasm.
New Frontier is set in the Kennedy-era Cold War (“new frontier” being a phrase JFK ushered to prominence during the 1960 presidential election), specifically in a backyard bunker.
The setting is “just a dugout that my dad built/ In case the Reds decide to push the button down,” sings the teenage protagonist, who has “provisions and lots of beer/the key word is survival in the New Frontier.”
I recall seeing a televised interview with Fagen on the album’s release (my recollection is that it was on NBC’s Friday Night Videos), where he talked about New Frontier — as well as its video —being life-affirming, even though the story plays out in a place associated with death.
And that’s the charm of the song. The kids are there for “a wingding, a summer smoker underground.” While there’s a conversation between the kids in the song, in the video, it’s just the teenager and his date, the one with a “touch of Tuesday Weld.” They find things in common (“I hear you’re mad about Brubeck; I like your eyes, I like him too,” the awkward boy sings) and make a connection.
As a single, New Frontier was not much of a hit, but the video got a lot of attention in the early MTV era. It was by the British duo of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, who used animation and period-specific production design to nail an era that was filled as much with can-do optimism and consumerist exuberance as a fear of annihilation. True to the aesthetics of the young protagonist, the animation brings modern art pieces — including the expressionist cover of Dave Brubeck’s Time Out — to life, with Brubeck himself and saxophonist Paul Desmond bopping about.
And, yes, it’s sweet to see the couple connect in a bunker, coming up in the bright light of dawn. Life-affirming, indeed.
Morton and Jankel even added another emblem of the era — the peace symbol created for the U.K.’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — right at the end, twinned to the final notes on the piano.
The Nightfly still holds up as a very good album. Fagen recruited producer Gary Katz and much of the studio crew who gave Steely Dan its polished-to-perfection sound, and also enlisted the cream of studio musicians of the day. It never sounds out of place with, say, Aja or Goucho.
An updated playlist
Since reviving my old blog, Dot Dot Dot, earlier this year, I’ve been gradually adding songs to a Spotify playlist. Each one was mentioned or included in a post here.
Feel free to sample it over there, or play it from the embed below.