Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Ever the primary conceit of mainstays Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, 1976's The Royal Scam marks the first time the Steely Dan duo actually owned up to the fact. Musically, it's their edgiest, most guitar-driven record (thanks to Becker and a murderer's row of session greats that includes Larry Carlton, Elliot Randall, Dean Parks, and Denny Dias). Lyrically, the songs cut an ever-sardonic, presciently discomforting slice of modern life that was a couple decades ahead of the game (who else was extolling the virtues of condom-couture, à la "The Fez", mid-Me Decade?). Though it didn't garner the radio attention of Aja, its more jazz-suffused, multi-platinum follow-up, Scam boasts a diverse, occasionally muscular musical rhetoric and some of the Dan's most telling portraits (the deranged, yet all-too-familiar killer of "Don't Take Me Alive", "Kid Charlemagne"'s drug-culture celebrity, the tropical convenience of a "Haitian Divorce"). Small wonder many Dan fans consider it their best. --Jerry McCulley
CD Description
It was the year of America's bicentennial celebration, but on 1976's THE ROYAL SCAM, Steely Dan masterminds Fagen and Becker did not share in the exultant spirit of the times. Thetitle track--a vision of fallen America from the point of view of immigrants--has a mock-celebratory chorus: "See the glory of the Royal Scam", which typifies SCAM's heartfelt cynicism. In their next two releases (their last), Steely Dan'ssound would smoothen and incorporate less rock. This is perhaps their darkest record, and for a band known for its archmixture of L.A. cool and ennui, that's saying something.
Guitar heroes were roundly worshipped in the '70s, and two of the record's standout tracks, "Kid Charlemagne" and "Don't Take Me Alive", feature incendiary axe work by Larry Carlton. Interestingly, both glorify outsiders: The former tells the story of legendary drug chemist Owsley Stanley, and the latter is a first-person account of a murderer on the lam. Other highlights: the crisp "Green Earrings" the lounge-chairfunk of "Haitian Divorce" and the inscrutable "Fez", whose principal lyric is "I'm never gonna do it without the fez on/don't make me do it without the fez on".