Maps of Music

The Royal Scam (1976)

Where the lyrics of The Royal Scam take you, and where it was really made.

The cover's sleeping man sits on a Boston bus stop bench, but the skyscraper-beast painting behind him was first made for an unreleased Van Morrison album.

Key places

Half the backing tracks at A&R (1976)

Recording site A&R Recording Studio — After two weeks of unsatisfying sessions in Los Angeles, the band moved to A&R in New York City. Over two weeks there they laid down half of the album's backing tracks. The point marks the studio building. Google Maps · Apple Maps

How to get there: See the map for directions.

Sessions finished at ABC Recording Studios (1976)

Recording site ABC Recording Studios — The album's recording sessions were completed at ABC Recording Studios in Los Angeles. The band returned to their usual engineer, Roger Nichols, there. The point marks the studio building. Google Maps · Apple Maps

How to get there: See the map for directions.

Bus stop in Boston on the cover (1976)

Album cover Synchro Sound Studios — The cover shows a man sleeping on a bus stop bench in Boston. Only the city centre is marked, not the exact bench location. Google Maps · Apple Maps

How to get there: See the map for directions.

Album story

Overview

• The Royal Scam: fifth studio album by Steely Dan, released May 1976 on ABC Records
• Produced by Gary Katz, as with all of the band's earlier albums
• Primarily a funk album, while the neighbouring albums focused on jazz rock
• Neither US single broke the Top 40, but the album reached number 15 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart
• Reissued by MCA Records after ABC's sale of the catalogue to MCA in 1979
• Remastered and reissued on standard black vinyl, UHQR vinyl, and digitally on June 6, 2025

Background

• Recording sessions began at Davlen Sound Studios in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, with engineer Elliot Scheiner
• Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had met Scheiner during the 1970 Jay and the Americans album Capture the Moment
• Scheiner pushed them to move from 24-track to the Eicosystem, which linked two 16-track recorders for 32-track recording
• Two weeks with about six different session lineups produced nothing the band was happy with
• They relocated to A & R in New York City, where half the backing tracks were laid down over two weeks
• Editing flaw of the Eicosystem: tape could not be edited while the 16-track machines were linked
• The 16-track recordings were moved to 24-track in Los Angeles, and the sessions were finished at ABC Recording Studios with engineer Roger Nichols
• Larry Carlton played on most tracks, wrote charts, and served as liaison between the songwriters and the studio musicians
• The album relied more on session musicians than most Steely Dan albums, with Becker and Fagen playing hardly anything

Cover

• Cover shows a man in a suit sleeping on a bus stop bench in Boston, dreaming of skyscrapers with monstrous animal heads
• Artist Larry Zox first painted the skyscraper-beast hybrids for an unreleased Van Morrison album
• Designer Ed Caraeff proposed overlaying a photograph of a sleeping vagrant taken by Charlie Ganse, his house guest

Sources: en.wikipedia.org · fr.wikipedia.org

Artist

Formation

• Formed in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 1971 by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.
• Becker and Fagen met in 1967 at Bard College and began writing songs together.
• They moved to Los Angeles after producer Gary Katz hired them as staff songwriters for ABC Records.
• The band takes its name from a dildo mentioned in William S. Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch.

Members

• Walter Becker (guitars, bass, backing vocals) and Donald Fagen (keyboards, lead vocals) were the core duo.
• Early band members included Denny Dias, Jeff Baxter, and Jim Hodder.
• Fagen reluctantly took on lead vocals after the search for a suitable singer failed.

Career

• Debut album Can't Buy a Thrill (1972) produced the hits "Do It Again" and "Reelin' in the Years".
• After 1974 the band stopped touring and continued as a studio project using session musicians.
• Aja (1977) became the band's top-selling album and won a Grammy for engineering.
• The band disbanded in 1981 and reunited in 1993.
• Two Against Nature (2000) won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
• Becker died in 2017; Fagen continued the band until 2024 and retired in 2026.
• Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001; has sold over 40 million records.

Reception

At release

• Upon release the album drew less critical acclaim than its predecessors
• Many reviewers found that it showed no musical progress
• Circus: Bud Scoppa called it one of the best albums of 1976 and one of the peaks of the band's career

Reappraisal

• The original Rolling Stone review was more positive, and the magazine later gave the album five stars out of five in a Hall of Fame review
• Pitchfork described it as the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of the band's career
• In 2000 the album was voted number 868 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums

Records

• Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart peak: number 15
• UK Albums Chart peak: number 11
• RIAA certification: Platinum
• Kid Charlemagne: three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peak number 82 in July 1976
• The Fez: five weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peak number 59 in October 1976
• Haitian Divorce: UK-only single, number 17 in January 1977, nine weeks on the UK Singles Chart
• Haitian Divorce is the band's highest-charting single outside the United States

Sources: en.wikipedia.org · ko.wikipedia.org · fr.wikipedia.org

Trivia

• Engineer Elliot Scheiner took time off from the sessions to get a divorce in Haiti, and Becker and Fagen used his account as the basis for Haitian Divorce, adding fictional elements
• Green Earrings was originally over seven minutes long, which would have made it the band's longest studio recording, but was cut to four minutes during mixing
• Garry Sherman, the arranger the players disliked, was to be locked in the studio for a weekend as a prank, but the plan was dropped over fear of a heart attack
• In the 1999 remastered reissue's liner notes, Fagen and Becker jokingly called the cover the most hideous album cover of the seventies
• The guitar solo by Larry Carlton on the opening track Kid Charlemagne ranked 80th on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time
• Hotel California by the Eagles included a line referring to Steely Dan, and the two bands shared a manager, Irving Azoff, so the rivalry was seen as friendly

Sources: en.wikipedia.org · fr.wikipedia.org · ja.wikipedia.org

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