There were big discoveries this week. Sure, there was the one about low level laser therapy being effective in treating tinnitus, the discovery of a new species of eel in the Palur Canal in Odisha, India, and the unearthing of seven 12,000-year-old flutes made from the bones of a small waterfowl in Northern Israel. Those pale, however, next to the discovery and release of "The Second Arrangement," the erased song from Steely Dan's 1979 "Gaucho" sessions.
To be fair this was earth-shattering news only to a very small set of fanatics who track all things having to do with the seminal band. As devoted as any Taylor Swift or Giants fans, they listen, dissect and continue to discuss the music and lyrics of a group that stopped touring for 20 years, but who made 9 albums over nearly three decades. To be fair, there's lots to talk about: their lyrics are cryptic and their music is complex. Pejoratively classified as "yacht rock," they none-the-less have the identifying characteristics of crystalline production and harmonic sophistication that help to define the genre. That classification, however, is somewhat at odds with their name, which came from the term for a steam-powered dildo mentioned in the William S. Burroughs novel "Naked Lunch."
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the group's nucleus, were famously perfectionists about their music, which led to them giving up touring in 1974 and becoming a studio band with a rotating group of top session musicians. It was during a session for "Gaucho" that they laid down the beginning tracks for "The Second Arrangement." Producer Gary Katz and chief engineer Roger Nichols liked it enough to lobby for it to be a single from the forthcoming album. But then one morning an assistant engineer thought he was using a test tape to record and calibrate test tones for the recorder. It was only after he hit stop and heard a few seconds of what was on the tape that he realized that he had just erased the master. And with no backup, the song was lost.
Becker and Fagen re-recorded it, but were unhappy with the second take, and decided to just drop it. Save for one live performance of it in 2011, it was lost to history. Or so it was thought. Seems that standard procedure was for Nichols to make a rough mix, dump it to a cassette tape, then bring it home to listen. He did just that, tossed it into a drawer and there it lay for more than 40 years.
Nichols died in 2011, and his adult daughters took possession of his material. It took them years to go through it all, but in 2020 they came upon the tape. "The tape was really old and actually falling apart," Cimcie Nichols said. As the daughter of a recording engineer, she knew that she might only have one chance to play it before it disintegrated. She put it aside amidst the pandemic, her divorce and a move out of LA, eventually also discovering a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) with a version of the song. She finally got them to a studio that could handle the extinct formats, posted the results and Danfans went wild.
You can hear both the 20-minute lofi-cassette (which also included an early mix of "Were You Blind That Day," the track that became "Third World Man") as well as the higher quality DAT of "The Second Arrangement" on Cimcie's YouTube page. The audio files serve as a background to home grown videos that show the sisters listening to the tapes for the first time, as well as archival shots and videos of the band, the girls' father during recording sessions and other shots of the Nichols family sorting though stuff. Also shown is a framed copy of the sheet music for the song along with the cassette itself, which they are planning on auctioning off to pay for the costs involved, as well as a documentary about their dad's career.
Perhaps it's not as startingly a discovery this week as scientists confirming that ancient horses had toes instead of hooves, or that hummingbirds are drinking alcohol when they suck up that older sugar water. But if you're the kind holding out hope for a copy of the Beatles "Carnival of Light" or Green Days "Cigarettes and Valentines," have faith: second chances (or in this case, arrangements) do happen.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves music new and rediscovered. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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