COVER OF THE WEEK

Cover of the week # 31 is "The Nightfly" by Donald Fagen.

On the cover you see Donald Fagen posing as the fictional late night jazz DJ Lester "The Nightfly" broadcasting from "the foot of Mt Belzoni".
In fact the cover photo was shot in Donald's New York apartment, where they built a fake studio setting.
And back in the real recording studio an assistant engineer saw that the microphone faced the wrong way, so they had to redo the cover shoot!

In the lower left corner you can see a record on the table.
It's tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins And The Contemporary Leaders from 1958:

Donald is smoking Chesterfield Kings as it is mentioned in the lyrics to "The Nightfly".

The original title of the album was "Talk Radio", but ended up carrying the name of DJ Lester from the albums title track. He's the type of radio jock that a young Donald Fagen listened to in the late 1950s to experience new music and new worlds:

"There was a great emphasis on technology at the time. The Cold War was going strong. Kids, through the media and what the government and their parents wanted them to know, grew up with a certain vision of the world. I think my discovery of black music and the hipster culture really broke all that apart. It made me see it a different way. And that's basically what the record is about."

Fagen wanted to do an album covering the period from the mid-50's to the early 60s. A lot of the songs are written from a teenager's innocent point of view. Innocent times. Innocense lost.

This was Donald's first solo record, released in October of 1982, one and a half year after Steely Dan's "Gaucho".
Using the same producer and lot of the same musicians its no surprise that it sounds very much like a Steely Dan record. The difference being lyrics that are more straightforward and autobiographical.

The linernotes says it all:

"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.

D.F."

22 years on it is considered a classic.
Already having trouble finding inspiration during teh making of "The Nightfly" it would take 10 years for him to get around to recording the follow-up "Kamakiriad".

For more on the recording of "The Nightfly" and Steely Dan in general I recommend the book "Steely Dan Reelin' In The Years" by Brian Sweet.

N.S.