Steely Dan Shares New Vault Track — a Long-Lost Schlitz Beer Jingle

The song comes from the archive of Steely Dan's longtime engineer Roger Nichols

"Dan fans" have a new reason to be delighted.

A new Steely Dan vault track has resurfaced thanks to Steely Dan's longtime engineer Roger Nichols.

The newly-discovered track is a short jingle that was made for the beer company Schlitz, "during the eight-month gap between Can’t Buy a Thrill and Countdown to Ecstasy," per editor and writer Jake Malooley's Expanding Dan Substack, which features original interviews, oral histories and audio stories about Steely Dan.

Related: Walter Becker, Steely Dan Co-Founder, Dies at 67

“It was soon after ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ that someone called and asked if the guys would write a song for the Schlitz commercial,” Gary Katz, the band’s longtime producer, told Malooley. “And as I remember it, Donald [Fagen] said, ‘OK, but we’re gonna write it.’ By which he meant, they didn’t want to do a commercial somebody else wrote.”

Co-founding guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, added, “The band was still pretty young in its career, so everybody was reaching out for whatever opportunities there were."

Katz also recalled that Fagen, the lead singer of the yacht rock outfit, wouldn't kowtow to the ad agency's whims while creating the song. "As we were doing it, 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," the producer explained. "He walked into the control room and thought he was going to take over, and that just wasn't gonna happen."

Known as "The Schlitz Jingle,"  the track runs just under two minutes, featuring a jazz fusion beat, with Fagen singing, "Once around life / Once around livin’ / Once around beer / And you’ll keep around Schlitz."

At the time of its release, the track had a limited shelf life. The beer brand, which was sold to Pabst in 1999, shelved the band's jingle because of their use of the Spanish word for “grab,” or “take,” because "coger" is also a slang term for sexual intercourse. “If I were the Schlitz company,” said Baxter, “I would contact Donald Fagen and pay him a million dollars to do another one.”

The release of "The Schlitz Jingle" comes just weeks after "The Second Arrangement" — another buried Steely Dan track — that resurfaced.

Related: Steely Dan's Donald Fagen Apologizes for 'Screwup' After Aimee Mann Said She Was Dropped from Tour

According to the Expanding Dan Substack, a rough mix of the song was made by one of Steely Dan's longtime engineers on a cassette tape in 1979, before it was accidentally erased. Ultimately, it was discovered by Nichols' daughter, who confirmed with the group's advisers that the version of “The Second Arrangement” she found was really the “original recording of the song in its nearly finished form."

Last year, Steely Dan embarked on their Earth After Hours tour across North America. The band is supporting The Eagles for at least the first 13 dates on their final tour, The Long Goodbye, this year.

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