Featured here is \"Were You Blind That Day\" which is both thought and considered by many...but not all...to be left over tracks that were recorded during the end of \"The Royal Scam\" sessions of 1975/1976, but left off the final album, for reasons unknown.
It has been disputed for years just when the original basic session tracks were recorded. If we take into account a 2011 video interview from featured guitar soloist Larry Carlton, he claimed that he recorded his solo guitar track in Los Angeles for \"The Royal Scam\" project of 1976. But when Donald Fagen was asked about it, he noted that those original tracks were left over from the \"AJA\" sessions of 1977 and that when looking for \"extra songs\" to add to the nearly completed & highly contested \"Gaucho\" project of 1980, he accessed the tapes of \"Were You Blind That Day\", re-wrote much of the lyrics, re-mixed the song from scratch, adding in synthesizer by Rob Mounsey, re-titled it as \"Third World Man\" & included the final work as the very last cut on side 2 of \"Gaucho\". So with all that being said, the truth has to be somewhere in between the \"guitar player\" (Carlton) and the \"songwriting/conceiver\" (Fagen).
Nevertheless, the finished & published work forever became \"Third World Man\"; which now brings us to the \"bootleg world\" circulating around \"Gaucho\".
Also for a number of years, there has been an unauthorized collection of material from \"Gaucho\" conveniently entitled, \"The Lost Gaucho\" or simply, \"The Gaucho Outtakes\". On these collections of songs that mainly came from unused material from \"Gaucho\", included \"Were You Blind That Day\" in it's original 2-track mixed version from 1976.
HOWEVER....again, for unknown reasons, the audio (as in many poorly distributed bootlegs) was haphazardly mastered & poorly presented. One of the most notable deficiencies was the mix was completely altered in a tilted 180 degrees/out-of-phase fashion, which...to most audiophiles, wreaks complete & disparaging havoc, to the human ear & auditory system. (However, to the \"average\", non-critical, casual listening ear...some, either don’t even know the difference, don’t care or simply don’t even notice.)
What was done here to restore it's titled axis, was to transfer in real live, linear form, the most pristine, most preserved uncompressed .WAV version of \"Were You Blind That Day\" from hard drive over to DAT cartridge tape using digital coaxial...then using the best digital-to-analog converters & a pair of balanced XLR cables to \"dub\" it over back to digital drive, I un-soldered & reversed just ONE of the cables; pin-2 (HOT) over to pin-3 (COLD) & vice-versa, retaining pin-1 (GROUND to GROUND). This \"old school trick\" of reverting & correcting out-of-phase recordings, has been in the book of \"Swiss Army/Audio Knives\" for years and trumps most complicated, kludgy, time consuming & overly-complicated \"too-intricate-for-it's-own'-good\" digital software tools. Case at point; the simple reason just why \"Were You Blind That Day\" was presented incorrectly on \"The Lost Gaucho/The Gaucho Outtakes\" in the first place, is probably because the bootlegger's \"dubbing\" pair of stereo cables he was using that day...ONE OF THEM...was simply...'wired wrong'. Unadorned, menial & layman as that.
Two other items noted to make mention of: During my final treatment, I noticed \"Were You Blind That Day\" was running approximately 100.65% faster in speed & pitch of \"Third World Man\". So...eenie meenie miney moe...I chose the running speed of \"Third World Man\" & restated \"Were You Blind That Day\" to exactly match the running speed of \"Third World Man\".
Finally, the equalization of \"Were You Blind That Day\" (also, for unknown reasons) was synthetically presented much brighter on the treble end, then that of \"Third World Man\", which had a much warmer & well rounded EQ pattern, as it appeared on the \"Gaucho\" project. So with that in mind, I minimally dropped about 2 or 3dB of \"12k/Hi-End\"; completing & finalizing my correction of the mysteriously time-lined, macabre recorded, much coveted and rather romantically treasured, \"Were You Blind That Day\" from Donald Fagen & Walter Becker...better forever known as, \"STEELY DAN\".
