"Behind the Big Casino on the Beach..."

This whole thing started down at the bottom of an unrelated rabbithole.

A friend sent me a link to an obscure old video on YouTube. Dated 1990, it’s a clip from some sort of TV special. He sent it for several reasons.

Principally I guess, because I love Mel Tormé. I inherited this from my Dad who had to carefully explain to me how this shatteringly be-toupéed parody of a lounge singer, with a face like a smashed frog and a stage presence so ingratiating it could strip the veneers off your teeth... was in truth a phenomenal jazz musician. I was besotted. I love him, particularly when he regularly drifts off into vocal extemporisation.

I actually ran into him once. Must have been the late nineties. Charleston International Airport SC. He was coming out of the gents, fiddling with his flies and I came round the corner like a runaway rhino and flattened him.

The second reason is that I also revere Donald Fagen.

The clip is five minutes and forty seven seconds too long for anyone who doesn’t share my peculiar combination of interests. But check it out nonetheless.

The song is The Goodbye Look, which might be one of my favourites. What Fagen can do, with amazing economy, is create a scene, an image, in an almost filmic way. Whenever I play it, it stuns me again. The name may or may not be lifted from a hardboiled detective novel by Ross MacDonald, the story of which has nothing to do with the song... but does remind you of the skill of the American detective genre writers, in constructing a world entirely of atmosphere. Plot is convoluted and ultimately impenetrable.

The narrator of the story is an American ex-pat ...

The surf was easy on the day I came to stay

On this quiet island in the bay

I remember a line of women all in white

The laughter, and the steel bands at night

Marimbas, congas, a lot of tightly arranged Tiki tat... all enriching the happy scene. And then…

All the Americans are gone except for two

The embassy’s been hard to reach

There’s been talk, and lately, a bit of action after dark

Behind the big casino on the beach

I love Ross MacDonald, but he doesn’t have that kind of economy. This is Chandler or Hammet, but by way of Hollywood screenwriting. I’d sell my soul to write like Chandler or Hammett but neither of them can start a story in four lines, spin it on it’s head in another four and have the reader gagging to know how the hell it’s going to end.

I’d write phenomenal books if I could paint pictures like Donald Fagen.

Last night, I dreamed of an old lover dressed in gray

I’ve had this fever now since yesterday

Wake up, darling, they’re knocking

The colonel’s standing in the sun

With his stupid face, the glasses, and the gun

My friend loved the clip because the song is delivered by someone who shows absolutely no awareness of its darkness. Brilliantly but with the oleaginous gloss of a guy doing a dinner show at a tropically themed bar. This is Graham Greene, but delivered by Nick Apollo Forte in Broadway Danny Rose. And if the cognitive dissonance of that doesn’t give you a nose bleed, you might want to consult a therapist

Won’t you pour me a Cuban breeze, Gretchen?

Hold on...

WT actual F is a Cuban Breeze?

There are a few recipes online, but they all smack of commercial tie-ins from booze companies. Apparently it was ‘Popularized by the movie Glass Onion’ and is supposed to be made of vodka, Amaretto, pineapple juice and lime and sounds frankly revolting. One of those utterly abominable pan-tropical combinations you might expect as the signature drink at a swim up bar in a luxury resort. But now... today! Not in 1982 when Fagen wrote the song, nor indeed in 1952 when the last American diplomats were fleeing Cuban coup d’etat.

In ‘52 Gretchen would have made a Daiquiri. But in ‘59, the Ocean Spray cranberry growers’ collective began heavily promoting cocktails including the Sea Breeze (Vodka, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice). By the 70’s it was one of the American Association of Bartenders top cocktails.

In the 80s, when Fagen was writing The Goodbye Look, the Absolut vodka company recently launched in the US, were promoting the hell out of a series of vodka-based cocktails, including a revitalised Sea Breeze.

And sure enough, in the Absolut archive, there’s a forgotten ‘Cuban Breeze’ that swaps out the vodka for Cuban rum.

Now that, I can get right behind...

• 45g Eminente Claro Cuban Rum (Havana Club would possibly be more authentic)

• 75g Cranberry Juice. Ocean Spray’s ‘Cranberry Juice Drink’ is now a repellent sham of a thing that tastes like 90% HFCS. Alain Milliat does a real juice in small bottles. It’s criminally expensive and hard to find, but worth the inconvenience

• 50g Grapefruit Juice. Fresh if you can. I note that Waitrose has just started stocking huge pink Sicilian ‘Radically Seasonal’ ones via Natoora

But that actually makes quite a long, fruity drink, to be served in a highball full of ice. This might be my last drink. Lets spin the proportions to a classic Daiquiri that Gretchen would have know intimately how to knock up

.

• 100g Rum

• Then use the cranberry and grapefruit to make it a sour

• 30g Pink grapefruit juice

• 20g Cranberry juice

• Dash of Falernum

• Frozen glass in the shape of a cheap RGD-5 Soviet fragmentation grenade

I know a fellow with a motor launch for hire

A skinny man with two-tone shoes

‘Cause tonight, they’re arranging a small reception just for me

Behind the big casino by the sea

I know what happens, I read the book. I think we’ll call this ‘The Goodbye Look’.

Edited to add…

Just reading Fagan’s memoir Eminent hipsters I note he mentions en passant Gretchen as ‘Faust’s Girlfriend’ and, sure enough, via Cliff Notes…

“Gretchen (short for Margarete) is the tragic heroine in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's masterpiece, Faust. An innocent, pious young woman, she falls victim to Faust's seduction, aided by the demon Mephistopheles . Her relationship with Faust brings about ultimate ruin , culminating in her spiritual salvation.”