Here’s a bonus classic song of the day for you, Steely Dan’s “lost” track from the Gaucho album, “The Second Arrangement.” There’s a long story behind this one, and it’s worth telling.
First, though, the song. This is a terrific Dan song. It was written and recorded in 1979, after the success of their legendary Aja album, as the first track recorded for their upcoming Gaucho album, which was released in 1980. As such, “The Second Arrangement” kind of bridges the gap between the two albums—the highly professional yet still warm Aja and the cool perfectionism of Gaucho. It could have fit on Aja and would have been a, if not the, standout track on Gaucho.
“The Second Arrangement” tells the story of a typical Dan-ish “gentleman loser,” perhaps talking about a recent divorce and looking forward to his next relationship, the aforementioned “second arrangement.” The typically opaque Dan lyrics in the chorus (do you still have your Steely Dan decoder ring?) allude to this:
And I run to the second arrangement
It’s only the natural thing
Who steps out with no regrets
A sparkling conscience
A new address
When I run to the second arrangement
The home of a mutual friend
Now’s the time to redefine the first arrangement again
Not that we should identify with the narrator. This guy is the type of unsavory character that abounds in Steely Dan world. As one critic put it, the guy is a “rich, pompous asshole,” not quite like the self-absorbed but more sympathetic loser in the Dan’s classic “Deacon Blues,” to which this song has sometimes been compared. (To be honest, “The Second Arrangement” is not near as good as “Deacon Blues,” but what is?)
Musically, “The Second Arrangement” sounds more like a tune from Aja than the soulless, droning tunes on Gaucho. (Don’t get me wrong—I like Gaucho, but feel it is far from the boys’ best effort.) There are the jazz-influenced chords typical of the earlier effort, along with real studio cats giving it a warmth and lift that wasn’t present on the more machine-like later album. There are no credits that I can find for who played on “The Second Arrangement,” although some credit that snaky guitar part to Hugh McCracken, the bass line to Chuck Rainey, and the drum part (more definitively) to Ed Greene. Others say it’s either Steve Howe or Walter Becker himself on guitar. I can’t tell. (Note that some credit Steve Gadd for the drum part, but that’s not him on the version available today; he was brought in to rerecord the tune but that version was ultimately scrapped.)
Now the story behind the song. As noted, this was the first song recorded for the Gaucho sessions. The recording was pretty much finished; they’d even laid down the (wonderful) background vocals. All that was left was to add the horn parts and do a proper fade out. Unfortunately, the (still nameless after 50 years) assistant engineer who was supposed to copy the working tape to a blank reel for overdubbing got it backwards and recorded blank space onto the recorded version—and just like that, poof!, the track was gone.
Given how long they’d worked on the song and how good it was, losing all that work was demoralizing. When main engineer Roger Nichols broke the news to the band, Donald Fagen reportedly walked out of the studio in silence.
The boys tried to rerecord “The Second Arrangement” a few different times, at least once with Steve Gadd on drums, but they never captured the magic of the original and eventually gave up. “The Second Arrangement” was originally slated to be the closing track on side two of the album (a slot eventually filled by the less uplifting “Third World Man”) and the album’s first single (the honor of which then went to “Hey Nineteen”).
While bootlegs of “The Second Arrangement” have been circulating in fan circles for years, finding the original unwiped recording remained something of a Holy Grail for Dan fans, akin to discovering Orson Welles’ original edit of The Magnificent Ambersons (which has yet to be found, alas). It was something of a thing, then, when Roger Nichols’ daughter Cimcie discovered a cassette tape among her late father’s belongings bearing the handwritten label, “SECOND ARR.” It turns out that Roger used to regularly record rough mixes of the Dan’s work in progress on cassette tape; he apparently brought this one home sometime before the track was wiped, tossed it in a drawer, and forgot about it.
Cimcie Nichols discovered the cassette tape, along with a similarly labeled DAT cassette, in 2020. It took a few years (remember that whole COVID pandemic thing?) but she eventually got both the cassette and DAT professionally preserved and just last week released them on the Steely Dan Substack newsletter, Expanding Dan.
The result is a revelation. It’s great to hear a new Dan tune after all these years, especially one from arguably their most creative period. It helps that it’s a damned good song, probably ranking among their top ten or twenty tracks. Man, this would have made Gaucho a lot more listenable, at least in my humble opinion.
Here’s the thing, though. The cassette version was missing a vocal line or two and suffered from a handful of audio glitches. The DAT version was more complete but suffered, surprisingly, from lower fidelity. (Some speculate it was actually transferred from a cassette mix, and not well.) To that end, this YouTube video combines the best of both tapes, so you get the higher fidelity of the cassette mix and the missing vocals from the DAT.
So that’s your very special bonus classic song of the day—a long-lost Steely Dan tune from their golden era. Enjoy!
