a lost Steely Dan song & softball walk-up music
Hey guys! Nice to see you again. You look good.
The Return of the Curse of “The Second Arrangement”
It might be that you’ve never heard the best Steely Dan song - because in 1979, someone erased it.
The Steely Dan catalog is divided into two “eras”, with the first running from Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972) to Gaucho (1980). After that period, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker more or less broke up, and would not record as Steely Dan again until Two Against Nature (2000) and Everything Must Go (2003).
Gaucho, though, nearly destroyed them. Drugs, legal problems, and tabloids became distractions to the work and their already impossibly high standards.
“The Second Arrangement” was perhaps a favorite to be the lead single from Gaucho, with the band and management feeling it represented a step forward in songwriting for Steely Dan, but also had a potential commercial appeal. After a labored process of recording and re-recording, a studio engineer was asked to queue up the song for final review, but accidentally erased it instead. Subsequent attempts to re-record the song didn’t impress the perfectionists Becker and Fagen, and they gave up on it.
But something interesting has been happening with “The Second Arrangement” over the past five years. Scavengers of forums, file-sharing, and newsgroups have for years been rewarded with many of the partially-done recordings from Gaucho, but “The Second Arrangement” has been somewhat elusive. New tapes showed up in December 2020, which inspired a number of online musician fans to play with the pieces that had been found. Steely Dan’s material is complex and jazzy, but not unapproachable. “Covering” something that hadn’t actually been released was part-creative, part-research, part-preservation.
Tim Smolens's video describing his process to recreate the song is outstanding, including the imagination of how the song might logically end, and recruiting of coworkers to sing backup parts. Michael Caplan has another excellent version which may not be as robust, but he arguably does a better Donald Fagen impression.
I'm writing because this song is outstanding. “Arrangement” is a first-person account of a man who is toasting “reckless lovers” over wine - and has moved out of his (first) arrangement with all of his belongings in his car. Though he’s isolated and alone, he’s got a “sparkling conscience” and “no regrets” about the (unmentioned) events that precipitated all this. (And if you hear differently, everyone else is just jealous.) The driving riff would have been a smash on 1980 radio, and the intricate harmonics go down as smooth as Aja (1977)’s “Deacon Blues”. In the modern re-envisionings of it, it would fit OK in Fagen’s The Nightfly (1982), but it’s harder and heavier.
A Steely Dan engineer’s family found another tape in November 2023, which I find curious - 2023 is right around the time that AI technology could have taken the known/discovered bits, along with the overall style of Gaucho, and “imagined” a higher-fidelity version. I’m not saying that anyone did fake this, but it’s never been easier to fake this.
Universal Music Group has been exercising DMCA takedowns on the newly-discovered recordings, which is an interesting corner - these demos and studio artifacts aren’t “copies” of anything that was ever released, though UMG certainly can defend themselves against the eventual release of unreleased Gaucho material. (Once it’s recorded, even if it’s never released, they have “copyright”.) Even the covers are in a murky place, songwriting-rights-wise, as there’s no record of “The Second Arrangement” in either BMI or ASCAP.
In the end, “The Second Arrangement” embodies the contradictions that make Steely Dan so rewarding: perfectionist, to the degree that success escaped them, and polished, but not done. The story of the song wouldn’t be more perfect if it were ever released by them, and in a way, that’s sort of perfect for them.
Softball Walk-Up Songs
I’ve joined a softball team. It’s a long story, but at our first practice, our coach said “it’s a fun league, some teams even have like little walk-up songs to get everyone hyped”. And, just like that, nobody could focus on softball - we were all carried away thinking what ten seconds of what song spoke for us, personally. We'd stumbled on to a really motivating thing (for most of us).
I had a few hours free over the next weekend, and since I couldn’t shake how cool something like that would be if it existed, I spun it up. Glitch is a funky little development platform that lets you preview and host applications, and I’d been meaning to learn more about it.
A few hours later, I’d launched the thing and was soliciting ideas and feedback.
I absolutely knew what would be ideal for me: MF DOOM’s “Rapp Snitch Knishes”, from his MM..FOOD release, which samples David Matthew’s jazzy cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”. (And, actually, what I wanted was the instrumental, which was released by MF DOOM under his Metal Fingers alias as “Coffin Nails”.) If you’re still with me, the MF DOOM composition is one of the songs that Khruangbin plays live as part of their “hip hop medley”, which was a huge surprise when I saw them. (Because who cares that much about “Rapp Snitch Knishes”? Me… and Khruangbin? But if you know, you know.) But I have almost certainly lost you* by now.
*And if I haven’t: I eventually transitioned to Steely Dan’s “Black Cow”, which is also iconic, and then to MF DOOM’s “Gas Drawls”, which samples “Black Cow”, but again I used the Metal Fingers instrumental, which is called “Calamus Root”.
(And we’re back.) I was surprised about the selections people made, some with great thought and a lot of indecision, and others with total conviction or near-indifference. Some people have been resolute with their one song, while others want to change it up. Others still don’t seem to have any preference at all, so they get something random I pull up from the grab bag - songs I thought would work, or otherwise fit in with team themes. And frequently I don’t play anything at all, because it’s a softball game and I’m busy with something else, or I’m already on base.
There’s a little bit of prep work that has to be done - I am using a template in Logic Pro that puts a little volume envelope around whatever sample I drag in. This is all over Bluetooth to a SONOS Roam speaker, and I noticed that either the speaker or Bluetooth itself has a half-second “warm-up” period that means I lose a little bit of the start of the sample, so I added some crowd noise so it doesn’t matter if the beat comes in late.
It’s funny: no other team seems to have their own audio setup, aside from one team that started imitating my solution last year - except they’re clearly playing things from Spotify and appear to be manually ramping the volume down. (But they even stole some of our songs, like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”. Not that I have any sort of ownership over “Crazy Train”, but it’s obvious what’s happening if, after a couple months of me playing “Crazy Train” at you, you start playing “Crazy Train” at me.)
People seem to like it a lot. They frequently comment that this gives Minneapolis city-parks softball games a “leveled-up” experience. And the music, and my teammates’ love of it, is helping me learn about them in a deeper way.
Thanks!
I appreciate you making it this far. If someone sent you this, fill out my form, and next time, you’ll get this when they do.