SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

By: Michael Grasso
July 29, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite unfinished masterworks, legendary obscurities and cherished almost-weres.

STEELY DAN’S SECOND ARRANGEMENT

When news of a possible surviving copy of Steely Dan’s legendary lost song “The Second Arrangement” surfaced in August 2020, Steely Dan’s tight-knit online fandom erupted in a rare collective expression of joy during what was shaping up to be a world-historic horrible year. The story behind the loss of the Gaucho-era track is firmly fixed in the minds and hearts of all ’Dan-heads: an engineer accidentally erased the tape containing the song and notorious perfectionists Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were never able to recapture the track to their satisfaction on tape. It’s since become a holy grail for Steely Fans.

I of course joined in with the rest of Steely Dan Twitter in the gleeful memes and joyful jokes (even though I must confess I’m relatively lukewarm on the fragmentary takes of “The Second Arrangement” I’ve heard over the years: I find fellow lost Gaucho track “The Bear” much more compelling). But ever since last August I’ve been wondering: why does “The Second Arrangement” have such an aura about it? And what is it about Steely Dan that inspires obsessive fan fixation on rarities and lost songs? Well, part of it’s surely Steely Dan’s well-attested studio perfectionism; the impact of Don and Walt losing a track like this — a loss that irrevocably changed Gaucho’s track listing and may have even contributed to the band’s breakup until the ’90s — is incalculable and invites a kind of quasi-mythic narrative framing.

But it goes deeper than just that. The aura of mystery around “The Second Arrangement” is a function of the lyrical and musical universe that Steely Dan created over its meteoric 8-year career in the 1970s. For those of us who grew up with the sound of Steely Dan on pop and classic rock radio in our parents’ station wagons, Steely Dan hinted at urbane mystery, at a sophisticated, cryptic, and, yes, occult form of adulthood. And for those of us who kept the fire alive, rediscovering Steely Dan in our own middle-age, we found a universe overflowing with parallel timelines, weeping cryptids, louche narco-alchemists, trips to the Bermuda Triangle, and characters who wouldn’t be out of place in the paranoid gardens of authors such as Philip K. Dick or Thomas Pynchon. In my mind, Steely Dan are the soundtrack for the Weird Seventies.

Steely Dan themselves navigate alternate universes in their songs, so naturally their fans are going to spend their time wondering “what if” while listening to the band’s activities apart in the ’80s. “What if that engineer hadn’t erased ‘The Second Arrangement’? What if the drugs and the disappointment and the music industry’s rejection of Yacht Rock in the 1980s hadn’t scuttled the ’Dan and they became pop culture fixtures in more than just one decade?” Steely Dan’s output and the band’s very mythology invites this kind of science fiction thinking, of lost worlds and hoped-for endings that don’t terminate in ironic disappointment. Let’s hope when they finally decode that cassette that we get to hear a haunted missive from a better world than the one I come from.

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SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

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