Happy 40th Anniversary to Steely Dan’s seventh studio album Gaucho, originally released November 21, 1980.
Here comes that noise again, another scrambled message from my last best friend…
Somewhere in the unyielding blight of 2020, there was, in fact, some good news.
In a Facebook post on August 23, engineer Roger Nichols’ daughter Cimcie posted that she had found a box of tapes labeled “Second Arr.”
The tapes, she explained, were "three work tapes left the recording studio the night before the infamous Steely Dan ‘Second Arrangement’ deletion” during the Gaucho recording sessions.
“We’ve never played it,” she wrote. “Probably smart to play and transfer at the same time. What should we do with it?”
Living hard will take its toll…
Gaucho is nothing shy of a miracle in its creation, which was plagued with problems so deep that a superstitious man might call it cursed. So, it’s right, somehow, that the curse should finally break, exactly 40 years later, as we are collectively miring through the worst year most of us can remember.
In late December 1979, the two were working on “The Second Arrangement,” which Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, as well as Nichols and producer Gary Katz, agreed was their favorite song on the album. But a careless studio tech erased all but 19 seconds of it, and though attempts were made to re-record, it was never up to Fagen and Becker’s standards, and the song was abandoned, “Third World Man” substituted in its place.
Demos have floated around the internet for years; there are groups dedicated to cleaning up the demos to as close to studio perfection as one might have. The band has only performed the song live once, at the “Rarities Night” show at the Beacon Theatre on September 17, 2011. I was there in the balcony, the first of many, many Steely Dan shows. It’s a story I tell anyone who will listen, a date I remember as closely as my wedding anniversary.
But the plagues didn’t stop there. Becker was not only struggling with his own drug addiction—sometimes not even showing up for sessions. Fagen himself was depressed and tired. In January 1980, Karen Stanley, Becker’s girlfriend, died of a drug overdose in their home. He was sued by her family for introducing her to drugs, a case settled out of court in Becker’s favor. Four months later, he was hit by a car, breaking his leg in multiple places, leading to a six-month recovery that kept him out of the studio. He listened to the tapes at home, working out parts with Fagen over the phone.
As such, “Time Out of Mind,” a poppy, pleasurable, Michael McDonald-aided confection that makes doing heroin sound like the most fun thing ever, feels like a weird inclusion, practically a mockery of Becker and Stanley’s struggles with addiction.
Even “Glamour Profession,” with its shadows and midnight dumplings, recognizes the seedy underworld beneath the slick coo of Fagen’s electric piano. Like “Babylon Sisters,” the narrator —or rather, the backup singers, including Valerie Simpson, who act as his conscience—know that he is only a momentary pleasure, a kept man for the Showbiz Kids—in this instance, a Lakers player—who would dispose of him as soon as it comes time for him to undertake the rehab-and-redemption part of the Hollywood fairytale.
Both of these songs, on the A-side, and even the casual mention of cocaine in “Hey Nineteen,” are burdened with the darkness that addiction brings, a warning that is remarkably absent by the time we hit the B-side. But knowing Becker and Fagen, that’s probably exactly why they included it.
I should know by now that it’s cheap but it’s not free / that I’m not what I used to be…
Every record collector has the album they test their stereo with. An album the listener knows so intimately that they can detect the slightest variations in speed or sound, a needle that has gone just a micro-fraction too dull, an otherwise perfect note turned static and sour. Gaucho is mine; there is something sacred about the way one puts the needle down and “Babylon Sisters” begins to hum and throb, a small and lonely quiet that will immediately betray any fault in wax and diamond and metal. It is a sound that calls to some distant memory from before I was even born, of the body, of blood. It is primal but never urgent, lying in wait as though predatory.
Gaucho isn’t even my favorite Steely Dan album (that would be 1976’s The Royal Scam). Many fans argue that Aja (1977) is their peak, but through all the drama, the drugs and the drum machine, Gaucho is, in many ways, Steely Dan distilled down to their purest essence.
It’s nearly conceptual; seven tracks of sex workers and johns, dope addicts and coke dealers, spoiled love affairs and the one man everyone in their neighborhood knows not to go near. Seven tracks of high-class pulp, elevated with elaborate horns and impossible chords.
If anything, “The Second Arrangement,” with its melody line like a high school sweetheart, was almost too romantic for the album. Musically, it’s more in line with Fagen’s solo debut The Nightfly (1982), a record that starts with prostitutes and ends with PTSD. But that’s the Steely Dan experience. It’s what we all come here for.
Hard times befallen the sole survivors / she thinks I’m crazy, but I’m just growing old…
The last time I saw Steely Dan was in October 2019, one of the last shows I saw before the pandemic hit. It’s just Fagen and the band now, he played through The Nightfly and “select hits,” including, of course, “Hey Nineteen.” It’s a song the live-show fans associate with Walter Becker; on a regular night it would be played third and include “the ramble,” a stream-of-consciousness story, usually linked in some way to the venue (at Saratoga in 2016, for example, he called the show a “toga-toga-toga party”) that winds up queuing the Danettes to sing “The Cuervo Gold / the fine Columbian…”
The ramble is no more. And sadder still, Aretha Franklin had died earlier that year, another in the long list of rock icons that have departed or will soon depart. Her name got a cheer from the crowd, but Fagen conspicuously left the “s” off the end of “sole survivors.” He’s the only one left, the last man standing.
There’s a moment in all Steely Dan fandom (Dandom) where you begin not just to listen to “Hey Nineteen,” but to feel it in a dark and ugly place in your soul. Maybe there’s no perky co-ed or fine Columbian, but you are, in fact, growing old.
I myself have reached such a milestone, when I looked around the lawn of Bethel Woods and realized that I was no longer the youngest girl there. There were two beautiful girls in loose, hippy dress. They were dancing in the rain. They knew all the words.
I’ll drop him near the freeway / doesn’t he have a home?
The album’s title track opens the B-side, a song that is pure Steely Dan in its absurd storytelling of a gay couple arguing about a flamboyant new boy-toy brought home to their luxury condominium. In Steely Dan: Reelin’ In The Years, Brian Sweet writes that Becker and Fagen had a rule—if they were listening to a song and it didn’t make them laugh, they regarded it as a failure. Buoyed by that same late-night saxophone, courtesy of Tom Scott, it’s the lightest track on the album, its music slickness only eclipsed by “Hey Nineteen.”
My friend Matthew says the sax intro on “Gaucho” is the outro for his imaginary talk show. Every time we listen to it, he starts thanking special guests. It’s a joke we’ve been running for years. Try it sometime.
I was the whining stranger, a fool in love with time to kill…
But with Steely Dan, the levity never lasts, and two tracks later, the same theme of infidelity emerges with a much darker tone on “My Rival.” Private detectives have been hired, and there will be stomping done. It’s a line that always makes me laugh, because Fagen, who stands in physically for the narrator as he’s singing, does not cut an intimidating figure. The flugelhorn and Fagen’s own organ only serve to emphasize this point, a threat that carries all rage and no weight.
He’s been mobilized since dawn, now he’s crouching on the lawn…
Steely Dan has never shied away from darkness, but “Third World Man” is the band’s bleakest closure (although “The Royal Scam” comes close), especially when you consider that it is in place of “The Second Arrangement.” Describing a man convinced of a war only he is fighting—Vietnam PTSD perhaps, or a friend of the neo-Nazis of “Chain Lightning”—it is sonically oppressive, lacking the horns of the rest of the album.
In other words, it’s a perfect theme for 2020. We all know that guy, the memes he has posted and the flags he has hung outside his house.
Someday we’ll remember, that one red rose and the one last goodbye…
It’s yet unknown if Nichols’ “Second Arr.” tapes will yield anything usable. If they do, they might be, in themselves, the sole survivors of the Steely Dan masters, many of which were believed destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.
Even if it is salvageable, we’ll likely never get an official recording. Its loss is part of the lore of Steely Dan, the fun is, in part, knowing that you possess some wild and rare thing, what separates the fans from the “TV babies,” as Fagen himself disparaged in Eminent Hipsters.
But it’s comforting to know that there are still surprises out there, that what is believed to be lost can be found again.
LISTEN: