Steely Dan The Royal Scam (1976)

From rollingstone.com

With each successive album, Steely Dan’s popular success and appeal become more obscured by sundry admirers’ claims of abstruseness and complexity. To some it seems inevitable that the Dan will eventually produce the Finnegan’s Wake of rock. And that’s silly: Steely Dan is trying just as hard as any random country/disco/metal band to capture our attention, i.e., sell records. For all their jazzy influences, they are a florid rock band, immersed in popular concerns and styles. True, songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen bow to no one in the matter of composing immaculate, catchy cul-de-sacs, but it is that same immaculateness, the way the words, as impenetrable as they may appear, fit with metrical seamlessness into the melodies that makes their impenetrability of little importance to any casual listener caught up in the sound of the entire song.

That said, one must immediately note that their latest, The Royal Scam, is the Dan’s most atypical record, possessing neither obvious AM material nor seductive lyrical mysteriousness. It also contains some of their most accomplished and enjoyable music.

The core of the Steely Dan sound is the interplay of sharp, even grating, lead guitar (most often that of Denny Dias) and the cushion of Fagen’s various keyboards, always smooth, gliding, pulling the rest of the composition along. It has always been the hard nasal edge of both the lead guitar and Fagen’s vocals that rescued the band from slickness, and on The Royal Scam this contrast is more obvious and effective than on any previous record.

In fact, such is the pervasiveness of both musical and narrative tensions that the overall feeling of Scam is one of just that: tension. There is little of the self-confident gentleness that dotted Pretzel Logic, less still of the omniscience that suffused Katy Lied. The Royal Scam is a transitional album for Steely Dan; melody dominates lyric in the sense that the former pushes into new rhythmic areas for the group (more “pure” jazz, semireggae and substantially more orchestration than before) while the verbal content is clearer, even mundane, by previous Dan standards.

While Scam is certainly not a concept album, every song—with the possible exception of “The Fez”—concerns a narrator’s escape from a crime or sin recently committed. Becker and Fagen have really written the ultimate “outlaw” album here, something that eludes myriad Southern bands because their concept of the outlaw is so limited. Rather than just, say, robbing banks (“Don’t Take Me Alive,” in which the robber is a “bookkeeper’s son”), Becker and Fagen’s various protagonists are also solipsistic jewel thieves (“Green Earrings”), spendthrift divorcées (“Haitian Divorce”) and murderously jealous lovers (“Everything You Did”).

But the Dan’s outlaws are also moral ones, guilt-ridden over comparatively minor sins. (Last time out, remember, Katy’s chief offense was that she lied, after all.) “Kid Charlemagne” is a selfish egotist, and suffers for it; “The Fez,” a sort of Dan-esque answer to Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” concerns a rather pathetic, if kinky, megalomaniac. At their best, these songs yield up concise surrealist introspection; at their worst, they suggest a paranoic death wish that is very amusing, if a bit unnerving. The lyrics are also pretty histrionic, and perhaps should not be scrutinized too solemnly.

In any event, I doubt that Steely Dan will ever become merely precious or insular; through five albums they have consistently circumvented their complexity with passionate snaz-ziness and fluky, cynical wit. If The Royal Scam lacks ready-made Top 40 fodder, it also widens Steely Dan’s already considerable parameters. Their next album, if one can speculate about this lovably perverse bunch, should be a pop killer. In the meantime The Royal Scam is well worth living with, pondering and, what the hell, even dancing to.

Steely Dan The Royal Scam (1976)

From pitchfork.com

For decades after their initial discovery in 1868, scholars dismissed the Paleolithic cave paintings of Altamira, located in the north of Spain, as forgeries. The use of cracks and shading to create perspective, and abstract images created out of ghostly impressions of handprints, all seemed too advanced to be the work of prehistoric Homo sapiens. But after similar designs were discovered at nearby sites in France and Cantabria, a French historian published an apologetic paper in 1902 affirming Altamira’s authenticity. In the first half of the century, cave painting blossomed into a major field of scientific study, and in 1976, the caves were fully legitimized, finally, when Steely Dan named the best song on The Royal Scam after them.

The narrator begins by remembering a visit to the Spanish caverns as a child—how the animal figures on its walls and ceilings seemed to come to life when he held a candle up to them. He remembers that he “understood” something after leaving the caves—a latent meaning in the “sad design”—but what was it? “Before the fall/When they wrote it on the wall/When there wasn’t even any Hollywood,” the chorus begins, and the question lingers: Why does it matter that Hollywood, specifically, didn’t exist the Paleolithic era?

“Sentient life in Los Angeles is a distinct rarity,” Walter Becker sneered to journalist Richard Cromelin in a 1976 interview for Sounds. As New York expats working in West Hollywood during an era that they felt out of step with—“Not much of a decade,” Becker said of the 1970s—nothing in the work or public comments of the increasingly reclusive studio team of Becker and Donald Fagen suggested they thought humankind had progressed much since the prehistoric days their protagonist had fantasized about. If anything, perhaps, we’d gone backwards.

Answering fan questions for the BBC in 2000, Becker claimed “Altamira” was about the narrator’s “loss of innocence,” and the rest of The Royal Scam seems to dramatize that descent across a series of more modern case studies. The narrators on the album are the most dissolute bunch Fagen and Becker ever assembled: Kid Charlemagne the washed-up acid guru, the suicidal criminal in “Don’t Take Me Alive,” the kleptomaniac in “Green Earrings,” and the violent cuckold in “Everything You Did,” among others. Recorded somewhat reluctantly at ABC Studios, where the noise reduction system had fried the sound quality of Katy Lied in the previous year, The Royal Scam found Fagen and Becker using their burgeoning studio budget—and the continuing absence of other obligatory collaborators—to create knotty, darkly playful arrangements that animated their dismal fables. The result stands as the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of their career, as well as their most misunderstood.

In interviews at the time, Fagen and Becker expressed their disenchantment with a perceived 1970s monoculture, as if working their hardest to nail in their reputation for being sneering curmudgeons. If today we view the decade as one of the most stylistically variegated time periods in popular music—one in which, after all, a band as weird and iconoclastic as Steely Dan could thrive commercially—Fagen and Becker still seemed to view the industry as one big, vapid dance party. “It’s a lot like the ’50s,” Fagen grumbled to Sounds. “The same music on the radio. I think the Four Seasons, when they started really slamming out this current string of hits, that was the capper.” Still, no matter how they might have felt about “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” and its ilk, modern dance music still seeped into their arrangements. The sound of the rhythm sections on Scam, as much as anything, firmly places the music in 1976, and far away from the band’s roots in more conventional, upbeat radio-rock and harmonized guitar leads. Becker and Fagen consciously wanted “a more live, rhythmic sound” on the record, as Fagen described it to Melody Maker in 1976, and began recording songs with six or seven different rhythm sections.

Ultimately, Fagen and Becker used veteran session drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie—the namesake of a very particular kind of shuffle beat, purveyor of chattering hi-hat patterns—on all but two tracks. Purdie was a key collaborator during the band’s career, going on to define the groove-based sound of 1977’s Aja and 1980’s  Gaucho. On Scam, though, “The Fez” was the closest thing to an attempt at disco, and it seemed to be satirizing itself, incorporating an eerie, vaguely Eastern European synth lick, a short aberrant lyric—either an extended metaphor about the importance of condoms or an unambiguous statement of purpose from someone who insists on only having sex while wearing a Shriner’s hat—and moments of jokey complexity that threw the groove. All of this felt fairly remote from “Play That Funky Music,” to say the least.

Although Scam was Steely Dan’s slickest album to date, it was also, in some ways, their ugliest. Its arrangements are a jungle of Rhodes stabs and the most aggressive—and finest—guitar work on a Steely Dan album since 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy. On “Don’t Take Me Alive,” Larry Carlton seems to take up most of the space, snarling, feeding back, advancing the simmering tension at the song’s stakeout (in a 1979 radio interview, Gary Katz said they’d directed the guitarist to play as “nasty and loud as possible.”) In “Sign in Stranger,” Elliott Randall’s erratic guitar breaks jostle for space with Paul Griffin’s bluesy piano—hard-bop comping in double-time. Together, they seem to mimic the crooked vendors vying for customers in the song’s marketplace, which Fagen claimed to have modelled on the “Sin City/Pleasure Planet” trope from some of his favorite sci-fi stories.

Techniques like these illustrate how Fagen and Becker pushed the music on Scam to feel as grotesque as their words—to be vignettes musically as well as lyrically. This tendency toward the theatrical is most apparent in the album’s queasy emulations of reggae and Carribean music. “I think Duke Ellington’s whole exotic jungle trip contributed a lot to our tropicality numbers,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1976. “It’s an idealized, exotic atmosphere…Showtime, Ricky Riccardo stuff. More I Love Lucy than Bob Marley.” There is the rock-steady backbeat of “Sign in Stranger,” with a closing horn line that sounds like Cuban jazz pouring in from somewhere outside of the song.

On the more extreme side is the white elephant in the room: “Haitian Divorce,” complete with an intermittent Jamaican accent and a talkbox-treated guitar that sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Allegedly inspired by tracking engineer Elliot Scheiner’s attempt to finalize a divorce in a matter of a couple of months through a Central American loophole, it was a cinematic bit of storytelling, and Fagen and Becker framed it explicitly as such: “Now we dolly back/Now we fade to black.” It would be easy to write off as a misguided aberration if it didn’t rank among the record’s musically inspired moments: The song’s central modulation when the backing vocalists enter makes for one of the most satisfying chorus drops they ever recorded. It was also the band’s highest-charting single in the UK to date.

The song is a microcosm of what makes The Royal Scam both singular and frustrating: a combination of sharp songwriting, a resourceful approach to narrative, piss-take musical references, and willfully poor taste. More than on any album they ever released, Fagen and Becker foregrounded their jarring stylistic pivots, tying them directly to their lyrical scenarios; Aja and Gaucho, on the other hand, would create a sleek musical surface that functioned just as well apart from the sordid narratives. The Royal Scam is the Dan album where the music doesn’t allow the listener to escape the mindset of its characters and their stories’ grim implications: real progress is rarely possible, and we are doomed to repeat our worst behaviors over and over again.

Nowhere on The Royal Scam does this feel more apparent than on the title track and closer, a plodding epic about Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City. With little in the way of vocal melody, verbose phrasing inspired by the King James Bible, and a beat that never really seems to kick in, it sounds like a smooth-rock version of what it might have felt like to row a Viking warship. It is based around harsh melodic cells traded back and forth between Fagen’s Rhodes and Carlton’s guitar, with a few solo horn interjections. The motifs feel oddly mechanistic—a process that never gets anywhere. The corruption and abuse that crop up throughout the rest of the album descend on the undeserving populace. “The Caves of Altamira” may be about a loss of idealism, but we never see the fallout; here, Fagen and Becker shove our faces in the characters’ dashed dreams. In the album’s final moment, they perpetuate the scam they fell victim to like a game of telephone, crafting fabricated success stories for their relatives at home: “The old man back home/He reads the letter/How they are paid in gold/Just to babble in the back room/All night and waste their time.” By all indications, the cycle of hope, subjugation, and destruction will begin again.

Steely Dan The Royal Scam (1976)

From sputnikmusic.com

I really want to give this album a five, but I cannot. It is not a ‘Classic’ album, but it is a fine recording. It seems that amongst this site, Steely Dan is not well known, which I fell is very unfortunate.

This album, their fifth, is by far my favorite album in their catalogue for a few reasons. Number 1: The music (I’ll start with the obvious). The music is very tightly constructed, so that the songs have a lush, seamless sound. Everything is proportionate. The music is not overly noodley, nor is it too caught up with time signatures and changing a rhythm every 2 seconds. It’s simple and straight forward to the ear, but it reveals a good deal of subtelty upon closer inspection. 2: The lyrics: It becombes apparent very quickly while listening to this that the lyrics have a bite.

The opening song for example, is about a once prosperous drug dealer who is suddenly finding his former clients moving away from him. He becomes alienated realizing that his prime has past and he is now nothing but an outlaw. “Don’t Take Me Alive,” the third cut, speaks of a man’s encounter with a brutal group of policemen, with lyrics like, “Can you hear the Eagle cying? The lies and the laughter..”

The album start with “Kid Charlemagne,” which is probably the best song on the album. The entire song has a very down-to-earth, funky sort of vibe to it. The mid-section consists of a jazzy guitar solo done by studio musician Larry Carlton. “The Caves of Altamira” follows, and while it does not compare to “Kid Charlemagne,” it is an enjoyable slab. The verses consist of maily piano chording to give it a richer, jazzier texture as opposed to the funk of the preceeding joint.

The next wedge is “Don’t Take Me Alive,” which has some of my favorite lyrics of the entire album: “I’m a bull keeper’s son, I don’t want to shoot no one. Well, I crossed my old man back in Oregon – Don’t take me alive.” This song opens up with Larry Carlton again, going for a more blues/rock style, this time. The song combines piano and guitar, but the song is less-riff based in order to let the lyrics shine through. This is a very solid track, it’s one of my favorites on the album.

The fourth selection is “Sign in Stranger,” a song which is about some utopia in which is visitors are pampered, refering to the newcomer as a “zombie.” This song is almost entirely piano, with some very tricky fingerwork going on. A guitar solo crops up at the end, which contrasts the breezy pianowork throught the rest of the song with a slightly more agressive delivery. Next is “The Fez.” This song is mostly insturmetal, with a floating sythizer melody over a choppy rhythm section serving as the verse. Gnarled blues guitar parts spring up throught the song. This is not one of my favorites, but it’s a decent song.The sixth song “Green Earrings,” is another mediocre chuck of music. Like “The Fez,” there is nothing particulary bad about it, but it is just less immediate than the previous wedges.

“Haitian Divorce,” is a great song that pulls the listener out of a minor slump. Throughout the song, guitar lines and played through a talk-box or something, and the song’s rhythm is similar to reggae music. Very cool. “Eyerthing You Did” is again, mediocre. It’s a very listenable, tasteful piece of music, moslty piano, with a few synths or keyboards or magical robots that breathe soda in the backround. It’s a good song, but not a stand-out. The last slab is the title track, “The Royal Scam.” This song has a very plodding, repetitive rhythm, but it is, I think, one of the best tracks on the album. It sounds very minor-key-ish and moody. The and sparse guitar lines are used in a very effective way, so that the point is articulated well, but the song does not become tiresome with repetition. There are also some cool keyboard and saxaphone parts thrown in for good measure.

I conclude that you can’t go wrong with Steely Dan. This is an awesome album, and I recommend it to anyone, as Steely Dan’s music is a hybrid of several different syles.

Steely Dan The Royal Scam (1976)

From starling.rinet.ru

I find it very hard to like this one. Very hard. On Royal Scam, Steely Dan shifts their musical paradigm further – one more step, and they’re completely in jazz-pop land with Aja. Likewise, here they veer away from any signs of folk or traditional rock beat. These ditties are mostly bouncy, jingly-jangly and very danceable – whether you’d want to dance to a tune entitled ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’ is another matter, of course, but for the most part this is DANCE POP. And quite forgettable, uninspired dance pop, too. It’s obvious that the ‘new’ Steely Dan sound was not quite worked out yet: the instruments are way too blatant and prominent here, with generic MOR guitars slashin’ in and out, cheesy, conventional synth lines added at every juncture, and not even a tiny sound of emotional roughness which was so suitable on songs like ‘Black Friday’ and would be suitable on ‘Josie’ a year later.

It all comes down to culminate in ‘The Fez’ – one of the most atrocious musical pieces ever set to tape by a decent band. Take this away and I’ll clench my teeth and give the album a nine; as it is, an eight seems to be a forced compromise. Yes, I understand that the utmost stupidity of the song was probably intentional: the guys have only bothered to write two lines repeated over and over again – ‘Ain’t never gonna do it without a fez on; that’s what I am, please understand, I wanna be your holy man’. If this is some kind of anti-Muslim provocation, I’m not too interested; what I am interested in is skipping the song whenever and wherever it appears on my CD player. The main synth riff that drives it, to me, personifies everything I could ever hate about mainstream braindead pop: for some reason, about a good third of the worst Russian pop music seems to have been based on endlessly recycling it. There are tons more ways of applying ‘provocative stupidity’ – just look at T. Rex’s ‘New York City’, for instance! Okay, okay, I’ve vented my frustration enough, so it’s time to talk about the rest.

Nothing on here except for ‘Fez’ really irritates me that much, but nothing is that attractive, either. I count one great song – ‘The Caves Of Altamira’, a tune about naive, romantic childish fantasies whose relaxed flow, with nicely ebbling saxes and keyboards and a driving, non-disco beat, perfectly suits the lyrics. The vocal melody is the greatest hook on here – ‘before the fall when they wrote it on the wall…’ That’s what I call a terrific resolution of the vocals-flowing problem. The song really belongs somewhere else – it would make a fine addition to Katy Lied and definitely improved its rating one point. Hey, woncha do that for me? After all, one great number still won’t save The Royal Scam of sinking to the very bottom!

Most of the other songs combine the formula ‘cynical, unconventional lyrics’ with the formula ‘bland, forgettable melody’… hmm, wasn’t that the case of the second half of Katy Lied? Oh, I forgot, it’s about the same band. I can easily tolerate the spooky ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’ – a cheerful ditty about such an innocent, ordinary subject as a bookkeeper’s son who’s not gonna give up and even has a case of dynamite to defend his case. The guitarwork on there is at least a little bit impressive, and the chorus is catchy. But I can hardly tolerate mediocre dreck like ‘Sign In Stranger’ or ‘Green Earrings’, not to mention the endless, droning title track telling the saga of two unfortunate drug dealers. I don’t even know how to start describing these songs – ‘jazzy’ is too diluted a word. Completely lifeless they are, lifeless, cold and vague – but not the kind of shiver-sending ‘coldness’ you’d meet on a contemporary David Bowie record. Just dull, energy-less coldness. No hooks, either.

‘Haitian Divorce’ is at least entertaining because it’s all built on a cool synth-processed guitar – they achieve the sound that would be taken over by Pink Floyd a year later and used on ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. But that’s where the comparison ends: on ‘Pigs’, the sound was ideally suited to the very idea of the song – the synth treatment imitated the pigs grunting; on ‘Haitian Divorce’, the tone only dissettles the reggaeish groove the band is trying to establish.

And, while the lyrical matters of ‘Everything You Did’ are absolutely shocking, even more so than ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Movies’ (a husband accuses his wife of adultery, then proceeds to force her to show all the dirty things they did), after five listens the song still doesn’t strike a bell on me. I guess it’s all a matter of desperation. The melody is way too stupid and diluted.

Let’s sum up. One great song. Two decent ones (I haven’t yet mentioned ‘Kid Charlemagne’ – an energetic enough, menacing enough opening dance number with some obscure personal critique I’ve forgotten all about already). Two so-so ones, with a few interesting elements. Three completely forgettable ones. One atrocious, friggin’ worthless piece o’ crap. You do your little mathematics if you want to waste your time, but on my wasted intuitive level that more or less equals a weak eight. Which means I’ll hardly get the urge to listen to this tomorrow. You gotta give me my due – I have patiently listened and listened to this, hoping that the magic would finally show up. It didn’t. I’m not surprised.