Reelin’ In The Beers: Hear Steely Dan’s Long-Lost Schlitz Jingle

In 1972 or 1973 Steely Dan recorded a jingle for use in a Schlitz Beer commercial. While the band submitted the 110-second song to the advertising company in charge of the campaign, the jingle never aired and sat in the archives of longtime Steely dan engineer, the late Roger Nichols until his daughter Cimcie shared the track on YouTube this past Friday, July 21.

Steely Dan — consisting for this recording of co-founders Donald Fagen (vocals, piano) and Walter Becker (bass) joined by Jim Hodder (drums), Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (Spanish voice, guitar) and Denny Dias (guitar) — laid down the track at Studio A at the Village in Los Angeles during the period between the releases of debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill in 1972 and sophomore LP Countdown To Ecstasy in 1973 according to the Expanding Dan newsletter.

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

“The band was still pretty young in its career,” Jeff “Skunk” Baxter added, “so everybody was reaching out for whatever opportunities there were.” Fagen and his bandmates at the time used a melody and lyrics from Schlitz’s “Once Around Life” campaign. Steely Dan’s jingle, which features the group’s signature sound, was supposed to be part of the same campaign.

The jingle recorded by Steely Dan starts with Baxter reciting a few lines which are translated by Fagen. Schlitz had a problem with the word for “grab” Baxter used. “The verb coger,” Baxter recalled, “can be used as a slang term for sexual intercourse.”

“What it sounded like in Spanish was: ‘When I get home from a hard day’s work, I bleep for all I’m worth, because I can only do it one time,’” Becker mentioned while appearing with Fagen on Los Angeles radio station KPFK on June 26, 1977. “So the commercial was rejected by the beer company … much to my joy.”

“It didn’t have enough gusto, basically,” added Fagen.

Cimcie Nichols unveiled the recording her father Roger held onto from the time of the session through his death in 2011. Listen to the jingle as shared by Cimcie this past Friday, July 21 as well as a remastered version that the Steely Dan fan community uploaded the following day: