During Steely Dan‘s 1979 sessions for Gaucho, what would be the final album of their original run, a song titled “The Second Arrangement” was accidentally erased from the master tapes. These were the days before Ctrl-Z, and when they tried to record it again, the band’s famously perfectionist leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were never happy with it, so they scrapped it.
What they didn’t know was that their recording engineer Roger Nichols had made a rough mix of the song and a few others onto a cassette that he had taken home and then forgotten about. When Nichols died in 2011, his wife found the tape. “My dad wasn’t the trashman, but anything anyone would throw away in the studio he’d want to save,” Nichols’ daughter, Cimcie, told the Expanding Dan substack. “Much to our dismay, though, because when he died we had hoards of stuff. Dad kept everything.” She put the tape, labeled “SECOND ARR,” in a safe along with other items from her father’s house
Cut to 2020, and during the pandemic Cimcie started going through the contents of the safe. She posted on Facebook, “Three work tapes left the recording studio the night before the infamous Steely Dan ‘Second Arrangement’ deletion. We’ve never played it. Probably smart to play and transfer at the same time. What should we do with it? It feels like a magical treasure that my mom has kept safe for decades. Good job mom!”
“As my father’s daughter, I wanted to make sure it was getting played and recorded digitally at the same time just in case,” Cimcie told Expanding Dan. “I felt a lot of pressure, because the fans wanted it so badly. I was like, ‘What if nothing’s on it, and I disappoint all these people? They might hang me by my toenails.’” In September 2021, the Nichols’ sisters took the tape to LA studio United Recording where archive engineer Bill Smith transferred the tape to new cassette housing. They put it in the tape deck and there was “The Second Arrangement.” Bootlegs of other rough mixes had been traded but the fidelity here was higher. There was also an instrumental mix of “The Second Arrangement” as well as a song titled “Were You Blind That Day” that would become “Third World Man.”
Though the rough mix had moments where Fagen’s voice dropped out, a DAT of the song was also discovered that had no such problems but suffered from inferior sound quality. “DATs are awful and it sounds muddy and we had to de-noise it. Help us Peter Jackson!,” she wrote.
Cimcie has now uploaded HQ transfers of both the DAT mix and the entire “SECOND ARR” cassette to her YouTube. “Here it is! The infamous Steely Dan Cassette Work tape brought home by Engineer Roger Nichols the night before the deletion,” she wrote in the YouTube description. “It’s great, there’s tape hiss (sorry dad), but it’s here (finally). It sounds pretty good for a 40 yr old cassette tape! But it def needs a hiss removal. The background vocal harmonies ARE AMAZING. And the instrumental track after the song is pretty good too.”
Listen to both below.