Music Video Of the Week - March 20, 2026

"Locomotive Breath" by Jethro Tull  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - June 28, 2024

 "Stray Cat Strut" by the Stray Cats  (Go to the link in the upper right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - January 5, 2024

"I Melt With You" by Modern English  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Donald Fagen - The Nightfly (1982)

Released between the end of the seventies and the rise of MTV pop, Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen's first solo album is simultaneously an affectionate tribute to pre-British Invasion hipster jazz culture and an acknowledgment that the optimism of the fifties and early sixties rarely complemented reality, its songs clearly the work of a man who, as Robert Christgau wrote, "doesn't believe the world was a decisively better place before John Kennedy died."

The Nightfly doesn't so much look back on those days as it embodies the fantasies and expectations Fagen had growing up in that period, placed in an ironic context.  Gorgeous jazz arrangements shimmering with brass and keyboards on the slower songs are contrasted by the faster, more pulsating uptempo numbers with steady, solid bass lines and subtle guitar undertones.  Fagen views romance as offering possible adventure in the beautifully crooned "Maxine,"  contemplating the world beyond the suburban housing developments, while the electric energy of "Green Flower Street" presents the dangers of an interracial liaison in the city.  "The Goodbye Look," with a Caribbean bossa nova vibe, is a subtle satire of a military coup disrupting a Caribbean vacation, whereas the following song (and album closer) "Walk Between Raindrops" looks at those more innocent times with a buoyant sense of excitement even as it expresses regret for how they ended as an older Donald Fagen looks back on those blissful days.

Fagen's use of imagery and old-school arrangements on The Nightfly transports both himself and the listener back to the days of nighttime shows at the jazz clubs on Manhattan's 52nd Street.  At times you feel like can hear the light rain falling on the 52nd Street itself and see the puddles illuminated by the neon lights of the clubs, while at other times you imagine yourself by a Philco radio receiver late night listening to the DJ on the cool-jazz station, as the title song demonstrates with its sardonic acknowledgment of call-in listeners and the heartbreak that the best jazz symbolizes.  The Nightfly is a time machine allowing the listener to experience the optimism of the early postwar period but also its cynicism, with all of its misplaced faith in technology and authority.  "New Frontier" cleverly parodies the hopeless strategy of surviving nuclear war in a bomb shelter by depicting a nerdy kid using it for a party.  But The Nightfly is as warm and as inviting as Steely Dan albums generally are not.  On the surface, The Nightfly sounds like a Steely Dan album thanks to Fagen's employment of former Dan sidemen - guitarists Hugh McCracken and Dean Parks, drummer Jeff Porcaro, keyboardist Michael Omartian - and Fagen's own voice.  But the music is more comfortable than combative, and Fagen's vocals sound wistful.  He isn't singing about  knaves and fools this time; he's creating a vivid world in the Eisenhower era where boys like himself in their prepubescent years dream of flying to the moon or finding love and joy on the streets of the city.

Fagen's gift for irony comes to the fore in The Nightfly's opening song, "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)."  Set to a warm brass ensemble, the song is set during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, as Fagen's ten-year-old self looks forward to a future of solar-powered cities, an undersea transatlantic rail line getting you from New York to Paris, with compassionately programmed computers governing the planet and letting everyone look forward to eternal youth and leisure.  But the sterile world Fagen's younger self looks ahead to is one the listener clearly recognizes as being not unlike the world of Levittowns, chrome-plated cars, shopping centers and freeways just beginning to take over the landscape in 1957.  It leaves the listener - and Fagen - wondering if a world that the  International Geophysical Year promised for the future was really all that desirable (and by '76 we were anything but AOK).  Nostalgia may not be what it used to be, but The Nightfly makes it sound as exciting as it is sobering.  An older, wiser Donald Fagen has earned his right to jam. 

Music Video Of the Week - September 23, 2022

"Subdivisions" by Rush  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - September 9, 2022

"What Do All the People Know" by the Monroes  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - August 26, 2022

"Vacation" by the Go-Go's  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - August 19, 2022

Who Can It Be Now?" by Men At Work  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - January 28, 2022

"Just a Song Before I Go," Crosby, Stills and Nash  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)  

Music Video Of the Week - September 11, 2020

"Six Months In a Leaky Boat" by Split Enz  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Music Video Of the Week - September 27, 2019

"Since You're Gone" by the Cars  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner,)

Music Video Of the Week - September 13, 2019

"Valerie" by Steve Winwood (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - May 24, 2019

"Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills and Nash  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Music Video Of the Week - March 22, 2019

"Edge of Seventeen," Stevie Nicks  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - June 1, 2018

"Long Time Gone" by Crosby, Stills and Nash (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Genesis - 3x3 (1982)

The rise of punk in Britain in the late seventies meant that British progressive bands known for their innovative but pretentious rock music had to adapt to the changed musical landscape or fall by the wayside.  Genesis were more successful in adapting than most such bands, slowly evolving with a more streamlined, pop-oriented sound while still keeping one toe in art rock, as their early-eighties albums Duke and Abacab proved.  But Genesis's attempt at a prog-pop compromise left their sound, well, compromised; while the band - down to a trio since the departure of lead singer Peter Gabriel and, later, guitarist Steve Hackett - came up with interesting singles, their albums were not as consistent.  So a Genesis extended player - a record with more material than a single but not a full-length album - made sense.

3x3 is a British-release EP of three songs that Genesis - drummer/vocalist Phil Collins, guitarist/bassist Mike Rutherford, and keyboardist Tony Banks - recorded during the Abacab sessions but left off that album.  It was not released in the United States, since, except for a brief period in the mid-eighties, EPs were never popular there.  (Its contents were included on the U.S. edition of the 1982 double concert/studio album Three Sides Live, the studio-track side being side four.)   The songs on this record provide an excellent sampler of Genesis's music at the time, with elliptical keyboard riffs, tight guitar passages, and some punchy rhythms. As a singer, Collins shows a surprisingly diverse range, going from tough to wistful with ease.  "Paperlate," the first cut, is a forceful commentary on working one's way up to the top, with a brilliant contribution from Earth, Wind & Fire's horn section - much better than their playing on the Abacab track "No Reply At All."  The group gets wistful with the autumnal ballad "You Might Recall," a tender but strong paean to a lost love.

Collins has disavowed the third tune, "Me and Virgil," an earnest effort at fusing Americana with a modern sound; it tells the tale of two brothers in the country who take care of their mother until she dies and then go off to find themselves in the city.  The song is indeed too long and loses its way musically, but the premise is still interesting, and the vignette of the dying mother is touching.  "Me and Virgil" sums up 3x3 as much as the previous two tracks; it shows Genesis as a band smaller and more musically diminished than the grand enterprise Peter Gabriel fronted, but determined to carry on and find new means of expression.  Criticized for their pomposity in the seventies and their mainstream pop sound in the eighties, Genesis has nonetheless come up with enough good work to earn a place in rock and roll history, and the songs on 3x3, while varied in quality, are more than just a bunch of tunes that deserve to go by like leaves upon the water.

(I've never reviewed an extended player before!  This is the last record review of mine for awhile, I need another break.)  

Music Video Of the Week - July 21, 2017

"I Don't Care Anymore" by Phil Collins (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - May 26, 2017

"New Frontier" by Donald Fagen  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight (1982)

Chuck Berry, who just turned ninety years old, invented rock and roll.  Period.  Despite its country origins and the hillbilly sensitivity that Bill Haley and Elvis Presley brought to the nascent form back in the fifties, Berry created the blues-based template that the best rockers have adhered to for the past six decades.  The proof is in these twenty-eight songs that were released between 1955 and 1965 and featured in this 1982 compilation.

The Great Twenty-Eight doesn't assemble all of Berry's greatest songs, but it comes damned close.  All of these songs crackle with energy and sizzle with wit, and many of them derive from three simple chords.  When Berry illustrates the more innocuous scenes in life, from dating pretty girls to rocking out in the dance halls, he provides the most detailed descriptions in only a few words.  The sexual tension of the car-chase song "Maybelline," the innocence of "Sweet Little Sixteen," and the teenage rituals of "School Days" all feel like a release.  But many times Berry's words leave us with something to think about as well as entertain us - the parables of rock and roll dreams and stardom in "Johnny B. Goode" and its sequel "Bye Bye Johnny," the sense of freedom in the road trip song "You Can't Catch Me," the racial pride of "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," the ironies of "Back In the U.S.A." -  while getting us to dance, or at least play air guitar. Now that's genius.

Berry has always considered himself an artist, something Elvis was never able to consider himself so long as Colonel Tom Parker directed his career.  Only a sharp observer like Berry could come up with something as perfect as "Memphis," a heart-rending tale of a man separated from the love of his life (and if you've never heard it, you'll be in for a surprise), or explore what happens after high school and the pleasures of youth in "Too Much Monkey Business."  The deceptive simplicity of his music and the bite of his impeccable guitar set the standard for rock and roll - a standard that still shines under the dross of overproduction and hyperprofessionalism that has long since overtaken pop.  Although rock and roll is going to a tough period these days, the best way to resuscitate it is to get today's kids to hear The Great Twenty-Eight . . . and all of Chuck's children will continue to play his licks.      

Music Video Of the Week - October 7, 2016

"Like a Hurricane" by Neil Young (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)