Free Republic

Steely Dan’s long lost song "The Second Arrangement" has surfaced online. The track, recorded in December 1979 while the band was laying down material for their 1980 album Gaucho, has long held a kind of mythological place among Steely Dan fans. As the story goes, the group recorded the majority of the song, with only a few simple additions needed to bring it to completion. After heading home for the night, they returned to the studio the next morning, only to discover that the "The Second Arrangement" tapes had been accidentally erased. The band tried to recreate what they’d recorded,...

On December 9, 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on TV screens across America and instantly captured the hearts and ears of a generation. Bolstering the animated special, based on Charles M. Schulz's immensely popular PEANUTS comic strip, was an engaging score from Bay Area jazz artist Vince Guaraldi, who brought characters like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Snoopy to life through his evocative cues... Guaraldi's soundtrack, meanwhile, has since become one of the best-selling jazz albums in history, second only to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, and regularly ranks among America's top-selling holiday albums every December.Vince Guaraldi Trio - Christmas...

Jeff Baxter played psychedelic music with Ultimate Spinach, jazz-rock with Steely Dan and funky pop with the Doobie Brothers. But in the last few years he has made an even bigger transition: Mr. Baxter, who goes by the nickname "Skunk," has become one of the national-security world's well-known counterterrorism experts. A wiry man who wears a beret to many of his meetings, Mr. Baxter, who is now 56 years old, has gone from a rock career that brought him eight platinum records to a spot in the small constellation of consultants paid to help both policy makers and defense contractors...