Top Steely Dan posts of 2023
The "Second Arrangement" saga, an oral history of "Aja," and more of the most-read newsletters of the year
1. Tale of the Tape
Listen to Roger Nichols's long-awaited "Second Arrangement" cassette.
“OK, let’s see what we’ve got on this baby,” Smith said, popping the cassette into the studio’s Tascam tape deck. Cimcie and Ashlee clasped hands in anticipation. Over the studio’s monitors came tape hiss, then clicking drumsticks, then what was unmistakably “The Second Arrangement.” The version would be familiar to anyone who has listened to the bootlegs that have circulated online for more than a decade. This one, however, was remarkably clear and crisp.
Cimcie smiled and raised her hands to the sky. As the song played on, the Nichols sisters held each other and began to cry. Their dad’s presence had entered the room. Soon they were out of their seats, dancing around the studio. “It was so emotional,” Cimcie says. “We were like, ‘Something's on the tape!’”
2. How Steely Dan's "Second Arrangement" was erased
In his first-ever interview, the engineer who recorded over the song tells all.
What haunted M. long after the “Second Arrangement” erasure were stories he had heard Becker tell in the studio, cautionary tales of comically inferior audio technicians who had not performed up to Steely Dan’s lofty expectations. “Walter would say, ‘They’re working at RadioShack now!’ And I was thinking, Oh, my goodness—now I’m one of those guys.”
3. The Eagle who soared with Steely Dan
A conversation with Timothy B. Schmit
There’s this perceived rivalry between the Eagles and Steely Dan. Gary told me, “We were contemporaries in the same city. We were both very popular, although the Eagles were more popular. We had the same manager, Irving Azoff. We all knew each other. Glenn Frey was a good friend of mine. There was never any rancor. It was just competitive.” What did that competition look like from the Eagles’ vantage point?
The rivalry was totally good-natured. There’s a lot of mutual respect. What’s the song where Donald sings, “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening”?
“Everything You Did” from The Royal Scam.
To me, it’s kind of a tip of the hat. The same as in The Big Lebowski: “I hate the Eagles, man.” [Laughs.] My father was a musician. He didn’t give me many words of advice, and I wasn’t super close with him. But one time he saw me getting ready to go to a gig in high school, and he said, “If you keep going and get some popularity, people are gonna write stuff about you. It’s not all gonna be positive. But just remember, it’s all good. If you weren’t important enough to be written about, they wouldn’t have bothered.”
4. Hear Steely Dan's Schlitz beer jingle
The long-lost ad is the latest artifact exhumed from the archive of Roger Nichols.
“As we were doing it,” Katz recalls, “somebody came by from Schlitz’s ad agency—you know, a guy with a powder-blue sweater tied around his neck and quite literally a stopwatch in his hand. He walked into the control room and thought he was going to take over, and that just wasn’t gonna happen. He started asking questions about the song. Donald said aloud to me, ‘Do you have your hand near the red button?’ Then he addressed the ad guy: ‘If you say another word about this song, we’re just gonna erase it.’ So the guy left.”
5. Donald Fagen: an interview
The maestro on life, music, and Snapple
You once said, “I basically listen to the same 40 albums that I listened to in high school.” Which have been on rotation most frequently over the years?
Columbia’s three-LP Ellington anthology [The Ellington Era, 1927–1940]. Bird and Diz. All of Monk’s albums. Miles on Prestige and Columbia. Mingus: East Coasting through The Black Saint [and the Sinner Lady]. All Sonny’s stuff through The Bridge. Bill Evans, Cannonball, Messengers, Oliver Nelson, Coleman Hawkins, Phil Woods, Thad Jones, Paul Desmond, Curtis Counce, et cetera.
6. Double helix: the oral history of "Aja"
How Steve Gadd and Wayne Shorter launched the title track of Steely Dan's 1977 masterpiece into outer space
Gary Katz: After that, we were sitting around wondering, “What do we need to do to finish ‘Aja’?” We had a running joke whenever Donald, Walter, and I were sitting around thinking about which musicians to get on a certain track. One of them would say, “Let’s call Ray Charles. Maybe he’ll come in and do background vocals.” I think it was Walter who said, “We should call Wayne Shorter” to do a sax solo [on “Aja”]. It was said almost like a joke. Wayne had been the saxophonist for the Miles Davis Quintet and at the time was in Weather Report.
7. Steely Dan's steeliest drummer
Keith Carlock on 20 years with the band
During the Two Against Nature sessions, I was nervous. I wasn’t really feeling like we were getting what Donald and Walter wanted. I felt like, This isn’t happening. Looking back on it now, I can remember not feeling so great about it. I wasn’t doing my best and didn’t feel like I was comfortable. That pressure wasn’t something I’d ever experienced before. I didn’t feel as bad when I realized a lot of people had the same experience.
8. Who is Aja?
New information about the enigmatic namesake of Steely Dan's 1977 album
Donald knew Aja pretty well, given the amount of time he spent at our house. She was a beautiful woman, but our marriage was a sad mismatch. People who’ve lived through a war and have been refugees are just not wired to be poor hippies, and my relatively comfortable upbringing didn’t equip me to understand the deep wounds that she’d endured.
9. Static: Making the film “FM”
Screenwriter Ezra Sacks looks back on the troubled production of the 1978 movie that birthed an immortal Steely Dan hit.
At the root of Azoff’s anxiety was the war over FM’s creative direction that had been waged daily behind the scenes. “It was a turbulent production,” screenwriter Ezra Sacks told me in a recent interview. “There was a constant battle throughout the making of the film between director John Alonzo’s sensibility and the rest of us.” Sacks, Azoff, and producer Rand Holston were deeply entrenched in the rock music of the day and wanted FM to realistically portray the unruly energy of a radio station. Sacks envisioned a tone akin to Easy Rider. Meanwhile, the more conservative Alonzo, who found himself at the helm of a film for the first time, had his own ideas—and by all accounts he became drunk with power.
10. Rare Steely Dan live photos from 1972
A teenage photojournalist captured what may be the earliest known images of a Steely Dan performance.
I worked for an alternative weekly newspaper in Milwaukee called the Bugle American. I was a music photographer. I was in my senior year of high school at the time. The newspaper’s office was two blocks away from Humpin’ Hanna’s. I literally walked over there from the office, had a beer, shot the band, and played pool with those guys afterward.
I love Steely Dan but the Second Arrangement worship baffles me.