“I went pale white, my blood pressure dropped. I played it back, I went over it, I verified it, and there was almost nothing left. I thought, Oh, my goodness. What the fuck did I just do?”
In June 2023, Expanding Dan published the definitive story on the creation and destruction of “The Second Arrangement,” Steely Dan’s holy grail “lost” song. It featured the first-ever interview with the engineer who accidentally recorded over the one and only master tape of the nearly finished track during the making of 1980’s Gaucho. The event has come to be known as one of the most egregious studio blunders in the history of rock music.
To track down the eraser, I spent months talking to virtually every technician who was credited on Gaucho. Once I finally had his phone number in my possession and worked up the gumption to dial it, he agreed to speak about the mishap on the condition that his identity remain secret. In the story, I refer to him as “M.”
“Over all these years, I’m sure that there has been tons of speculation about this incident,” he told me. “But no one knows the full story, because there was nobody else in the room with me when it happened. And nobody has ever asked me until now.”
When the piece ran, in the same week that Expanding Dan premiered Roger Nichols’s long-awaited “Second Arrangement” cassette, it created a stir among Steely Dan fans and enthusiasts of lost media. Now, to mark the 45th anniversary of Gaucho, the tale returns in a thrilling new form: an audio story narrated by the legendary Chicago journalist Rick Kogan. With his gravelly timbre familiar to listeners of his WGN radio show, After Hours, the esteemed Chicago Tribune columnist elevates the article into the realm of hard-boiled detective noir, capturing the tragedy and absurdity of the sticky situation—and the life-altering toll it exacted on the person responsible.
