his nickname that appears on many of his credits): ...they were trying to kill me. I was working on a Johnny Winter session on the weekends, with Steve Barri all day and with Steely Dan all night, so they had me going 24 hours a day. They tried running me into the ground, but it didn't work. Then there was the time when we were working at Cherokee Studios when two of the tape machines were grounded improperly and I touched both of the machines and everything shorted out. The face plate on one of the machines was completely melted but I didn't feel a thing. They figured something weird was going on. Innovations for 'Countdown to Ecstasy' and 'The Hand' When Becker and Fagen expressed frustration during the band's second album Countdown to Ecstasy with the difficulty in acquiring a steady drum tempo, Nichols was forced to improvise. The track "Show Biz Kids" had proved especially challenging in regards to a steady beat. As quoted in Brian Sweet's biography of Steely Dan, Reelin' in the Years, Nichols recalled: It was just one of those tunes that that was so very difficult to play exactly in tempo, with every instrument in sync. ... There were no drum machines in those days, so we made a 24 track, eight bar tape loop, which at 30 ips was a considerable length of tape, trailed it out through the door into the studio, around a little idler which was set up on a camera tripod, back into the studio and then copied that to a second 24 track machine. Everything was on tape except the lead vocal and the lead guitar. It worked like a dream. The album's back cover photograph featured a photo of Steely Dan in the recording studio control room, and included Nichols' seemingly disembodied hand on the mixing console while he hid beneath it. Steely Dan's studio-only years After the third Steely Dan album Pretzel Logic and the tour by the band in support of it, Steely Dan ceased touring and turned into a band that only performed on recordings. Nichols' duties became more diverse, and ranged from diagnosing a flaw on the master tape of the band's biggest selling single, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," (a workman's gob of mustard on the tape was found by Nichols to be to blame), to helping to recover the sound on