In August 2020, Cimcie Nichols posted a picture of an old cassette to Facebook. The tape had belonged to her father, the late recording engineer Roger Nichols; she had found it while archiving his possessions and shared it from his fan account.
She didn’t think it would get so much attention so fast. Within an hour, news made it to Reddit, and her post was descended upon by a passionate group of online fans of Steely Dan.
Cimcie had just posted a picture of their holy grail: a never-before-heard recording of The Second Arrangement, a near-complete version of the song by the US band which was lost forever after an assistant accidentally recorded over it in 1979.
“It went viral,” Cimcie says, of her post. “I started getting messages every day.” On the Steely Dan subreddit, minds were exploding; it was, said one user, “the most important day in history”; another described what she had found as the “most important cassette on the planet”.
“People were freaking out,” Cimcie says. It had made all the hours she spent archiving feel worth it.
The Second Arrangement was meant to appear on Gaucho, Steely Dan’s seventh album. Roger Nichols had been the recording engineer on all seven. The band were known as meticulous and obsessive in the studio, demanding perfection from the musicians they worked with. In a 1993 interview with Brian Sweet for Steely Dan magazine Metal Leg, Roger said a whole day of recording might just be “Donald [Fagen] singing one or two lines of the song over and over and over for eight hours”.
“Donald and Walter [Becker] had this vision, and my dad was the only one that had the patience to help them bring this vision to life,” Cimcie says. But perfection takes time. “My mom and dad met, dated, got married, had me, and brought me into the studio during the making of one record.”
That perfectionism made every recording session precious – and Roger’s wife, Connie Nichols, still remembers the night of the accident. When he came home early, she could read in him that something devastating had happened. “He walked in the door and he was pale and looked strange and couldn’t talk for a minute,” she says. “And I was like, ‘What happened? Somebody die?’”
Roger told her that “somebody had erased the song they had already spent about $80k on, and many, many months,” she says – just as the band had almost completed it. “He was beyond angry. They tried to cut it again and tried to move on, and that never happened. So they never finished it.”
Steely Dan have only ever played The Second Arrangement live once, on a rarities night at the Beacon Theatre in 2011. Before launching into the song, Fagen says: “We tried to reconstruct it, but we just didn’t have the heart to do it over.”
Despite never being officially released, The Second Arrangement has developed a cult following over the years, as different versions have leaked online. These include an early demo of the song with just piano bass and vocals, a warbled mix of the unfinished song prior to its deletion, and an instrumental recreation of the song that was never seen through. Each version is pored over. There is cover after cover. People train AI models to improve the quality of shoddy vocals.
The desire to hear the song in high quality is so immense it is often described as painful. What Cimcie’s post teased at was an end to that pain.
The tape that Cimcie had posted on Facebook, she says, is from the night before the song was deleted. Roger had come home with a cassette, as he would most nights; rough recordings mixed down at the end of the day. But after the incident, Connie says Roger threw the tape in a drawer and forgot about it. As the years passed, it became just another forgotten cassette, but it held spun gold for the fans: one of the most finished recordings of the song that would ever exist.
Roger died in 2011 of pancreatic cancer aged 66; Connie says the only reason the tape stuck around was because of the label. “When he died, it was hard to throw anything away that had his handwriting on it.”
On top of the tragedy of illness, Roger was also haunted by the bitter demise of his relationship with Steely Dan. In 2002 he was fired from the band. Connie describes it as an “emotional dagger to his heart and soul”. His daughter remembers the way it shook the man who for her was larger than life: “That ending was heartbreaking for him.”
It was that heartbreak that spurred her to create the Facebook page. “We wanted to celebrate him and I wanted to make sure the world remembered who he was,” Cimcie says. The world knew about Steely Dan, but they did not know enough about Roger Nichols.
During his life, Roger won seven Grammy awards; six for his work with Steely Dan and one with John Denver. He won an eighth a year after his death for contributions to the field. He was also a scuba instructor, a teacher and an inventor. He was a pilot and had once been a physicist. He knew about boats and cars. Connie says he knew everything, except how to fix his own body.
Once Cimcie realised the importance of what she had, her next step was to get it digitised. But in September of 2020, the pandemic kept her inside. “The tape was really old and actually falling apart,” she says – and being the daughter of a recording engineer, she knew she might only have one chance to play it before it degraded. So she waited until she could take it to a professional.
Waiting brought its own complications. “I got nervous. What if nothing’s on it?” she says. “I’ve created this whole storm on the internet. I felt this responsibility to the fans.” The internet reinforced that feeling at every turn. “I would post something and they’d be like, ‘Awesome. So what about the tape?’” she says. “‘We love the photo. Hey, have you gotten to that tape?’”
It took a year until she was able to get to an archiving studio, on an emotional day in 2021. Her sister flew across the country to support her, and when they discovered there was something on the tape, they both started crying. Their mum, Connie, was there via Zoom.
Although the recording was far from perfect – just cassette quality, with the first line of vocal missing – she describes the moment as otherworldly. “It was kind of like Roger stepped into the room again.”
Two years later, on 24 June, the recording has finally made its debut in the Substack “Expanding Dan”.
Also revealed in the Steely Dan newsletter is that Cimcie has since made another discovery: a separate DAT tape with “2nd Arraingement” (sic) on the label. It contains an even better-sounding version of the song. “And it’s so good,” she says. “I’ve actually been jamming out to it in the kitchen and living room.”
Cimcie thinks often about what Roger would think of all this. “My dad hated bootlegs and he hated cassettes,” she says, laughing. “He’d actually be really mad right now. But he’s not here. He didn’t leave any instructions.”
Connie remains a fan, after all these years. “There’s something about that groove.”
You can listen to The Second Arrangement via the latest edition of Expanding Dan
