Song of the Day 3/20: Steely Dan, “The Second Arrangement”

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, initially the leaders and eventually the only two permanent members of Steely Dan, were rather obsessive. Known for fussing endlessly over their recordings, they stopped touring in 1974, after their third album, to concentrate on chasing studio perfection. And it was perfection they sought, to the point of having players perform dozens of takes of their parts and spending weeks fiddling with final mixes.

During the torturous recording sessions for their 1980 album “Gaucho,” their last before Fagen and Becker split for more than a decade, an engineer accidentally erased about 75% of a nearly-finished track called “The Second Arrangement.” Producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols thought the song, which lacked only its horn parts when it was lost, would have made a good single, but Becker and Fagen deemed all subsequent efforts to re-record it inferior to the original – so they dropped it entirely.

If you thought that would be the end of it, you don’t understand Steely Dan fans, who can be as obsessive as their idols. Various fragments of the tune emerged as bootlegs over the years – a piano-only demo, a bass and piano demo with Fagen’s guide vocal, a 6-minute-plus version thought to be the scrapped re-recording – all engendering arguments among fans about what the track was really supposed to sound like. They got a better idea in 2011, when the touring version of the band played the song, horn parts included, at their Rarities Night concert.

Nichols, who had worked with the band for 30 years before he was fired without explanation in 2003, died in 2013. It wasn’t until 10 years later that his daughter, going through his voluminous cache of material, found a cassette tape he made of the song the night before it got erased. She released it publicly in June 2023.

Various people have covered it. I was impressed by this version, posted last year by a collective of Dan-fan professional musicians.