JUPITER — Even if you don’t recognize the name Roger Nichols (rogernichols.com), you’ve almost certainly heard his work. That’s because his most heralded efforts, and six of his eight Grammy Awards, stem directly from the entire recorded output of Steely Dan, the omnipresent California-based band that’s fused pop and rock; jazz and R&B for 50-plus years.
Nichols (1944-2011) had the good sense not to pursue the often fickle, fleeting glory of the celebrity side of show business. Instead, he chose to make Steely Dan’s celebrity co-songwriters — vocalist/keyboardist Donald Fagen and guitarist/bassist/vocalist Walter Becker (1950-2017) — sound glorious with their ever-present all-star ensembles from the opposite side of the board as their recording engineer.
Those ensembles have featured a who’s-who of modern music, including guitarists Larry Carlton, Denny Dias, Dean Parks and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter; bassists Chuck Rainey and Tom Barney, saxophonists Wayne Shorter, Chris Potter, Cornelius Bumpus and Tom Scott, drummers Steve Gadd, Dennis Chambers, Jeff Porcaro and Peter Erskine, and backing vocalists Michael McDonald and Timothy B. Schmidt.
Before Nichols succumbed to pancreatic cancer at age 66, he lived a life of comparative peaceful anonymity with his wife, Conrad (“Connie”) Reeder, in nearby Jupiter.
“Roger and I sold a place in Miami and moved to Jupiter in 2003,” Reeder says, “because we liked being close to the ocean and having the space for his recording and mastering room. In 2010, Roger got a job teaching in Los Angeles, and we were in the process of relocating when he got sick.”
While packing up the house several months after his death, Reeder and their daughters Cimcee and Ashlee Nichols came across what would prove to be a figurative Holy Grail for Steely Dan fans — a cassette copy of the original studio recording of a lost song called “The Second Arrangement.” The track was practically complete, even though the reel-to-reel master copy had been mistakenly erased by an assistant engineer in 1979.
That technician has purposely and successfully remained anonymous in order to continue working in the industry ever since, and the never-released song had practically been forgotten, other than the sub-par bootleg versions with inadequate vocal quality that surfaced, plus Steely Dan’s lone live performance of it.
“We tried to reconstruct it, but we just didn’t have the heart to do it over,” Fagen said of the song on stage at the Beacon Theatre in New York City in 2011, promising it would never be played live again.
A re-recording had been attempted with Nichols and longtime Steely Dan producer Gary Katz, but Fagen made the decision to scrap it. Luckily, Nichols had the foresight to keep a low-fi document of the original studio recording, because a newly remastered version now exists as one of the few pluses of the COVID-19 lockdown. More on that later.
Had the song been more high-tech than an outdated cassette reference tape, the family might certainly have done more than stow it away in a safe in 2011. They recognized its significance, but having spent ample time around Fagen and Becker, they also knew that Nichols and his two associates were extreme audiophiles. As known for their quest for sonic perfection as for their fusion of styles and Fagen’s often-cynical lyrics, the Steely Dan co-leaders bonded with Nichols, in fact, over that quest starting with their 1972 debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill.
“We’re all perfectionists,” Nichols said of himself, Fagen and Becker in Ben Sisario’s 2011 obituary of the engineer in the New York Times. “It wasn’t a drag for me to do things over and over until it was perfect. It would have driven a lot of other engineers up the wall. In my own way, I’m just as crazy as they are.”
That combined craziness resulted in more iconic releases through the 1970s — like Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), The Royal Scam (1976), and Aja (1977). The group’s output slowed afterward, continuing with Gaucho (1980), the live Alive in America (1995), and its two most recent studio efforts, Two Against Nature (2000) and Everything Must Go (2003).
“The Second Arrangement,” with its lilting rhythm and reggae undercurrent, could’ve been a Gaucho single alongside “Hey Nineteen,” and wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Aja, Steely Dan’s preceding commercial blockbuster. The lost track’s vibrant chords, and uplifting vocals by Fagen and backup singers, offset typically dark Steely Dan lyrics hinting at loneliness, distrust and frustration.
All three women Nichols left behind have connections to the late engineer that go beyond familial. Connie is a professor and published poet who has a recording career as a vocalist dating back to the mid-1970s; Ashlee is a film and TV editor, and Cimcie is a certified practitioner in sound therapy and vibrational medicine. So they all had plenty to do other than obsess over a found cassette. Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, Cimcie found time in isolation to focus on her father’s archival materials, and especially “The Second Arrangement.”
The two daughters want to put together a documentary on Nichols’ life and achievements, and they post occasional finds on Facebook to increase interest and awareness. In August of 2020, Cimcie unveiled a photo of a cassette marked “Second Arr.” Unbeknownst to anyone, the tape also included “Were You Blind That Day,” a track that would morph into “Third World Man” on Gaucho.
“We’ve never played it,” she wrote to introduce the tape on the Facebook page they’d created to honor “The Immortal” Nichols at www.facebook.com/Roger.The.Immortal.Nichols. More on his nickname later as well.
“Probably smart to play and transfer at the same time,” Cimcie continued. “What should we do with it? It feels like a magical treasure that my mom has kept safe for decades. Good job, Mom!”
It didn’t take long for the Dan-fan floodgates to open. With much of the world also in quarantine, requests to hear the song poured in immediately.
“The reaction was way more than any of us expected,” says Reeder.
Of course, the normal 40-year-maximum shelf life of a cassette had already been eclipsed, so the Nichols sisters resisted the urge to plug it into the nearest tape deck, lest it disintegrate. Instead, they waited until September of 2021, when they nervously went to the United Recording studio in Los Angeles with a videographer in hopes of documenting the long-awaited climactic moment. Recording engineer Bill Smith had transferred the cassette’s tape spools into a new case with fresh reels as a necessary precaution.
A higher-tech digital audio tape (DAT) of the song was also discovered in the archives. Both tapes have since been digitally transferred, and if you want the most poignant experience of the lost artifact, check out “Second Arrangement DAT” within the “Cimcie Shares All” link on YouTube (www.youtube.com/@iamcimcie). It’s the video of both sisters experiencing the full range of emotions in the moment at the L.A. studio — exulting, laughing, bopping, hugging, crying and dancing to the realization that their discovery was still intact after all those years. Reeder was there virtually via Zoom.
There’s additional archival footage of Fagen and Becker in the video, along with the sisters interacting with them as children. And at the end, you see a framed copy of the cassette and sheet music to “The Second Arrangement.” The family plans to auction the package, which will also include a Wendel drum sample pack — one of Nichols’ revolutionary technological inventions that’s now present throughout the recording industry — to help offset the costly tape transfers and raise funds toward his documentary.
“We have amazing interviews, many done right after he Roger died,” Reeder says. “Some of the interviewees are also unfortunately gone, which further inspires us to continue. There are current talks with several film companies. We have a lot of in-house talent, but it’s hard for us to look at Roger’s picture or hear him talk without crying, even after all this time. So it will take an outsider to help us get to the finish line.”
With Steely Dan, Nichols won Best Engineer Non-Classical Grammy awards for Aja (in 1977), the soundtrack’s title track to the film FM (1978) and Gaucho (1981). In 2000, he pulled the trifecta in winning the Album of the Year, Best Album by Duo or Group and Best Engineer Non-Classical awards for Two Against Nature.
The late engineer’s two other Grammys came in 1997 for producing the Best Children’s Album by John Denver (1943-1997), and one posthumously in 2012 for special merit and technical contributions, which included inventing the futuristic Wendel drum sampling computer. Nichols also worked as an engineer and producer with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Toto, Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, James Taylor, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Roy Orbison, Rosanne Cash, Al Di Meola, and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Like Tom Dowd (1925-2002), who produced and engineered recordings by Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Allman Brothers Band, Cream, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Derek and the Dominos, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Spinners, the Coasters, Rod Stewart, Eddie Money, and the Drifters, Nichols was also previously a nuclear physicist.
Dowd, in fact, worked on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s before turning to music and becoming a renowned multi-tracking genius. An excellent 2003 documentary by Miami-based director Mark Moorman, Tom Dowd & the Language of Music, spearheaded by daughter Dana Dowd, could prove a precursor to one about Nichols’ life and career. That film includes footage of its star working at Criteria Studios in Miami, not far from where he lived (and died of emphysema at age 77).
“Tom was a good friend,” says Reeder. “He and Roger were on the board of directors for the South Florida NARAS [National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences] chapter until Tom died. A great guy, and they had a lot of fun talking about their past. We’re very proud of Dana and her perseverance. She’s been a huge encouragement for our girls to carry on their own dad’s legacy and not give up on finishing the documentary.”
Obviously more of a touring legacy act than recording artist for the past 20 years (and set to open for The Eagles during that group’s stated final tour starting in September), Steely Dan does have a small subset of detractors — usually rock purists resistant to the use of jazz chords and its mantra of technical perfection.
There’s also those opposed to Nichols having been fired by Steely Dan, with no advance warning, when the Everything Must Go recording sessions resumed at River Sound in New York City in 2002 after having been suspended because of the 9/11 attacks several months earlier. Time hasn’t healed the fracture between the family and Fagen, who Reeder says won’t be consulted for the forthcoming documentary.
“Neither he nor Walter reached out to Roger when he was dying,” she says, “so we are not inclined to reach out to him about anything. Gary Katz, however, has been very supportive of our girls’ efforts.”
As is a swath of musicians, and obviously beyond, in paying homage to the most successful band ever named for the vibrator from William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel The Naked Lunch. Like other transplants to Los Angeles between the 1950s and 1970s (Fagen was born in New Jersey; Becker in Queens, N.Y.), Steely Dan joined a unique, heady legion of genre-splicing artists whose uncommon song forms will continue to be studied in music schools, like singing guitarists and composers Zappa (from Baltimore) and Joni Mitchell (Fort Macleod, Canada).
Much of Steely Dan’s credit is due to the sonic wizardry of Nichols, who was born in the music-rich San Francisco Bay city of Oakland, Calif., and nicknamed “The Immortal” early on by Fagen and Becker. That’s because they saw him defy death by unknowingly touching two improperly grounded tape machines simultaneously in the studio, which theoretically should’ve killed him. Instead, it only made him stronger.
“The face plate on one of the machines was completely melted,” Nichols recalled in a 1993 interview, “but I didn’t feel a thing.”
Steely Dan’s fan base certainly would. The remainder of Nichols’ years spanned nearly another 40, and included marriage to Reeder, the births of their daughters, and all of his Grammys other than the one awarded posthumously.
However mortal, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime version of a second arrangement.