This track, when the Steelies first released it, was marked by its distinctive 'voicebox' guitar, quite an innovation at the time when it was initially released Technology has moved on so much since the original track was recorded.
The original voice box was a tube attached to your amp the sound from which went up a plastic tube and you mouthed vowels etc with your mouth close to a microphone. I have a pedal with a superb setting that does in digitally! I don't use it often but when I do I love it. So you get a clean guitar solo and a voice box one too for the same money!
I always wondered why the almost reggae beat - that would mean it was called Jamaican Divorce! Slick move Donald to not do the obvious).
source http://www.songfacts.com
The lyrical meaning of the original refers to the odd practice of going to Haiti for a quickie divorce. You could go to Vegas for a quickie marriage, but what if you want a quickie divorce? In the early '70s, Haiti made it easy, allowing foreigners to divorce with hardly any restriction; the big sell was that only one member of the married party had to be present and request it.
For Haiti, this was a tourism ploy, as travel agents would send Americans looking for a quick and easy divorce to the island, where they would often spend some time on a resort. In many cases, these divorces were requested so that the person could immediately get remarried - a service Haiti also provided. So it was not uncommon for a married man to show up in Haiti with his mistress, get a divorce, and marry the new girl all in the course of a weekend. .Donald Fagan talked about the Haitian divorce in a 1976 interview with Sounds. Said Fagen: "It's a fierce and terrible ritual. I'll tell you that. You wouldn't want your sister to have a Haitian divorce, believe me. It was the quick 'divorce, without too much red tape. If you can say 'incompatibility of character' in French you're as good as gold. But we added a few elements to the ceremony itself."
In this song, it's the woman who goes to Haiti for her divorce. She has some fun while she is there, and presumably hooks up with a local - their sex scene is implied in cinematic terms in the lines:
Now we dolly back
Now we fade to black
When she returns to America, she is pregnant, as Fagen sings, "Some babies grow in a peculiar way."
The girl in this song drinks a zombie from a coconut shell, which at the time was a very typical island experience. A zombie is a rum-based cocktail that was popular at the time - an alternative to the Pina Colada.
