The Royal Scam

The recording sessions began in Davlen Sound Studios in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, with engineer Elliot Scheiner, who Steely Dan members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had met during the recording sessions for the 1970 Jay and the Americans album Capture the Moment.^[8] Scheiner convinced them to upgrade from 24-track recording to the Eicosystem, which involved linking together two 16-track recorders to produce 32-track recording.^[9] However, two weeks in the studio with a half dozen different lineups of session musicians failed to produce anything Steely Dan were happy with, so they relocated to A & R in New York City, where they laid down half of the backing tracks for the album over two weeks.^[10]

The A & R recordings included the backing track for "Kid Charlemagne", which was done in one take (though the dubbed-on guitar solo required multiple takes).^[11] The horns for "The Caves of Altamira" were arranged by Becker, Fagen, and the trumpet player Chuck Findley, and Garry Sherman, a veteran in the business, was employed to write the charts.^[11] However, Sherman's abrasive and condescending manner led many of the players to develop a dislike for him, and one evening he brought a photographer into the studio and requested his picture be taken with Becker and Fagen, which irritated them. At Scheiner's suggestion, they initiated the revenge prank of locking Sherman up in the studio for an entire weekend, but at the last minute they feared this might cause Sherman to have a heart attack (despite him being in his early 40s at the time), so the plan was called off.^[12]

Scheiner requested time off from the sessions to fly to Haiti and get a divorce; his lawyer had advised him to divorce before the end of the year for tax purposes, and Haiti was the only place where he could get a divorce so quickly. Becker and Fagen pumped him for details and, upon his return, asked him to recount the trip. With the additional of some fictional elements, this became the basis for the song "Haitian Divorce".^[13]

When Scheiner attempted to edit the tapes for the album, he discovered a fatal flaw with the Eicosystem: It was impossible to edit tape when the 16-track recording machines they were using were linked together. Becker, Fagen, and producer Gary Katz held Scheiner responsible for this, so they returned to Los Angeles, where they transferred the 16-track recordings onto 24-track, and told Scheiner he would never work with them again.^[9] The recording sessions were completed at ABC Recording Studios, where Steely Dan resumed working with their usual engineer, Roger Nichols.

"The Fez" is one of three Steely Dan songs with a credited writer other than Becker and Fagen, the others being "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" on Pretzel Logic (1974) and the title song from 1980's Gaucho. Of keyboardist Paul Griffin's contribution to the song, Becker has said that "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", while Griffin has said that Fagen already had the keyboard riff, and he just took it in a different direction.^[14] 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."^[15] Chris Willman described the song in an August 22, 1993, article in Los Angeles Times as "a cheerful ode to the importance of always wearing a condom".^[16]

"Green Earrings" was originally over seven minutes long (and thus would have been Steely Dan's longest studio recording to date), but during the mixing it was edited down to four minutes.^[17]

"I Got the News" was written during The Royal Scam sessions, before being drastically reworked and recorded for the following Steely Dan album, Aja.^[18]

The Royal Scam was even more reliant on session musicians than most Steely Dan albums, with Becker and Fagen playing hardly anything on the album.^[4] Larry Carlton emerged as a major collaborator; he played on most of the tracks, wrote charts, and acted as the songwriters' liaison with the studio musicians.^[4]

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, songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen revealed that "Kid Charlemagne" is loosely based on Owsley Stanley, the notorious drug "chef" who was famous for manufacturing hallucinogenic compounds, and that "The Caves of Altamira" is about the loss of innocence, the narrative about a visitor to the Cave of Altamira who registers his astonishment at the prehistoric drawings.^[19]

The album's cover features an image of a man in a suit sleeping on a bus stop bench in Boston and dreaming of skyscrapers with monstrous animal heads at the top. Meant as a satirical take on the "American Dream", artist Larry Zox originally created the painting of the skyscraper/beast hybrids for an unreleased Van Morrison album, and designer Ed Caraeff suggested superimposing a photograph of a sleeping vagrant taken by Charlie Ganse, his house guest, to make the cover for The Royal Scam.^[23] Fagen remarked that the cover had "a rather delightful relation to one of the tunes on the album. Also it had a nice colour. It looked vaguely purple; royal, regal."^[24] In the liner notes for the 1999 remastered reissue of the album, Fagen and Becker jokingly called it "the most hideous album cover of the seventies, bar none (excepting perhaps Can't Buy a Thrill)."

More information Review scores, Source ...

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[25]
Chicago Tribune	[26]
Christgau's Record Guide	B[27]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[28]
The Great Rock Discography	6/10[29]
MusicHound Rock	3/5[30]
Pitchfork	8.3/10[31]
Q	[32]
Rolling Stone	[33]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[34]

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Upon its release, the album was not met with as much critical acclaim as its predecessors, with many reviewers finding that it did not show any musical progress.^{[citation needed]} The original Rolling Stone review was more positive, however,^[35] and the magazine later gave the album five stars out of five in a Hall of Fame review.^[33]

In 2000, the album was voted number 868 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums.^[36]

• "Kid Charlemagne" spent three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, reaching a peak position of number 82 in July 1976.^[37]
• "The Fez" spent five weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 59 in October 1976.^[38]
• "Haitian Divorce" spent nine weeks on the UK Singles Chart, peaking at number 17 in January 1977.^[39]

Steely Dan

• Donald Fagen – lead and background vocals, keyboards, horn arrangements
• Walter Becker – guitar, bass guitar, horn arrangements

Additional musicians