According to stereogum.com, back in 1979 studio technician accidentally erased Steely Dan‘s song “The Second Arrangement.” Multiple attempts to rescue the recording failed and everyone thought the tune was gone for good.
Steely Dan tried to record the whole song again but Donald Fagen was not satisfied with the finished product and he decided to scrap the tune. No one realized that the band’s longtime engineer Roger Nichols had already created a rough mix of the original “The Second Arrangement,”which Nichols filed it away into a desk drawer.
It wasn’t until after Nichols’s death that his daughters discovered the tape marked “SECOND ARR” in 2011. The daughters were aware that “The Second Arrangement” was the song that had been deleted but they did not know what to do with the tape because the daughters’s were preoccupied with clearing out their father’s significant archive of possessions
During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, Nichols’s daughter Cimcie was taking a closer look at her dad’s stuff in the hopes of supplying some documentarian with material to tell her father’s story.
Cimcie posted a photo of the tape online with the caption, “We’ve never played it. What should we do with it? It feels like a magical treasure that my mom has kept safe for decades.”
The ladies were worried the tape might have disintegrated over the course of 40 years and they were being contacted by Steely Dan fans online. In September 2021, Nichols’s daughters took the tape to United Recording in Los Angeles, where archival engineer Bill Smith physically transferred the cassette’s magnetic tape to a new case.
While playing the tape everyone discovered “The Second Arrangement” as well as an instrumental mix of the song and “Were You Blind That Day,” which later became “Third World Man.”
The Nichols sisters did not want to just post the music on YouTube but now today the full cassette of “The Second Arrangement” is posted on Expanding Dan.
“The Second Arrangement” has dropped, and it’s glorious.”
Photo Credit: Owen Ela
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