Steely Dan – The Royal Scam VG+/VG+

The Royal Scam is the fifth studio album by American rock band Steely Dan. It was produced by Gary Katz and was originally released by ABC Records in 1976. The Royal Scam features more prominent guitar work than the prior Steely Dan album, Katy Lied, which had been the first without founding guitarist Jeff Baxter. Guitarists on the recording include Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Larry Carlton, Elliott Randall and Dean Parks.

“The Fez” has the distinction of being the only Steely Dan song with an additional writer credited beyond Becker and Fagen, namely keyboard player Paul Griffin. As Becker said, “There is an instrumental melody that Paul started playing in the session, and when we decided to build that melody up to a greater position, since we had some suspicion that perhaps this melody wasn’t entirely Paul’s invention, we decided to give him composer credit in case later some sort of scandal developed and he would take the brunt of the impact.” However, Griffin claimed that Fagen already had the keyboard riff, and that he took it in a different direction. Fagen later said of Griffin, “There are some musicians who are hacks, and then there are guys like Paul who can create something so different and unique they make the record.

In common with other Steely Dan albums, The Royal Scam is littered with cryptic allusions to people and events both real and fictional. In a BBC interview in 2000, Becker and Fagen revealed that “Kid Charlemagne” is loosely based on Owsley Stanley, the notorious drug “chef” who was famous for manufacturing hallucinogenic compounds, and that “Caves of Altamira”, based on a book by Hans Baumann, is about the loss of innocence, the narrative about a visitor to the Cave of Altamira who registers his astonishment at the prehistoric drawings. It is also influenced by Plato’s Cave Allegory and Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.

The album went gold and peaked at number 15 on the Billboard 200. The album was re-issued by MCA Records in 1979 following the sale of the ABC Records label to MCA.

Source: Wikipedia

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