There is an argument — and I will make it without apology — that Gaucho is the most expensive-sounding record ever made, and also one of the loneliest.
Fagen and Becker spent something like fourteen months in the studio, burned through an estimated $1 million, and cycled through dozens of musicians before arriving at forty-six minutes of music so precise it almost doesn't breathe. Almost. That's the trick. Underneath all that polish is a genuine ache, and if you're not listening for it, you might miss it entirely.
The Machine Behind the Music
The sessions for Gaucho stretched from 1978 into 1980, logged mostly at the Hit Factory and Cherokee Studios, with additional work at A&R Recording in New York. Roger Nichols — one of the great unsung engineers of that era — ran the boards with a ferocity for sonic perfection that matched Fagen and Becker's own obsessive temperament. Nichols built a custom digital recording system called Wendel, essentially an early drum sample playback machine, which he used to layer and tune the snare hits on certain tracks with a precision no human drummer could replicate. He has described the sessions as methodical to the point of madness.
And yet they kept calling in players. Steve Gadd. Bernard Purdie. Rick Marotta. Jeff Porcaro, whose half-time shuffle on "Babylon Sisters" is one of the defining drum performances of the rock era — unhurried, deep in the pocket, the whole song floating on it. Larry Carlton brought his '68 ES-335 and laid down the solo on "Babylon Sisters" that still sounds like it's coming from somewhere slightly outside the room. Michael McDonald ghosted through the background vocals, as he did on Aja, his voice a kind of harmonic glue you feel more than identify.
What the Album Actually Sounds Like
Gaucho is a record about moral vacancy dressed up in cashmere. The title track watches someone step out on his wife with a particular kind of detached shame — the narrator doesn't even seem that bothered, which is the whole point. "Hey Nineteen" is a man realizing he has nothing to talk about with a younger woman except Retha Franklin and cocaine. These are not sympathetic characters. Fagen's voice, always slightly nasal and emotionally sealed, is perfectly cast.
The production is the emotion the lyrics refuse to display.
Tom Hidley designed the mix rooms at Cherokee and the Hit Factory to near-anechoic standards, and you can hear it. There's a dryness to the low-mids, a hyper-separation of instruments that wasn't fashionable at the time and still sounds slightly alien today. Put on "Time Out of Mind" on a decent system and notice how much space there is between the bass and the kick, how the synth pads just hover. Nothing crowds anything else. Every element has its own air.
The Records Between the Records
There is a real casualty in the Gaucho story that deserves mention. An entire completed album's worth of material — the so-called The Second Arrangement — was accidentally erased mid-session by an assistant engineer. The track had already been through months of overdubs. They attempted a rebuild and abandoned it. The loss reportedly darkened the already fraught mood of the sessions considerably.
What survived is what we have. "Glamour Profession," seven and a half minutes of mid-tempo West Coast sleaze, a vignette about a drug dealer with a sideline in celebrity adjacency — it's journalism disguised as pop music, and it's criminally underrated. "Third World Man" closes the album on something close to sorrow, the guitar line winding down like a conversation nobody wanted to end but nobody knew how to continue.
Gaucho won the Grammy for Best Engineered Recording in 1981. Nichols deserved it. So did the room.
Put it on late, when the house is quiet, and pay attention to what's happening in the spaces between the notes. That's where Fagen and Becker hid everything they couldn't quite bring themselves to say directly.