Steely Dan - 'The Royal Scam'

 

Done up in blueprint blue

The other morning, I awoke from a very pleasant dream in which the "soundtrack" was the song "Sign In Stranger".  For the rest of the morning, the song was stuck in my head.  As many of you already know, the only way I can exorcise an earworm is to smoke some flower, in this case a very nice sativa strain: Cinderella Jack (at 32% THC, not for neophytes), and play the song several times. Works every single time.  Is Paul Griffin's piano playing on "Stranger" sublime, or what?

It's been my observation, that by and large people either love or hate Steely Dan.  Myself, I've always found their albums to be very entertaining.  The musicianship is impeccable, as is the production, and the absolutely flawless sonics.  Walter Becker and Donald Fagen didn’t just polish their albums; they would spend something like 4,000 hours buffing, burnishing, lacquering, and airbrushing them until they were as perfect as one of David Bowie’s coifs.  Steely Dan albums have the high gloss of a Lamborghini that just rolled off the assembly line.  If you bought high-end audio equipment from the 1970s onward, chances are the sales person wanted to demo the equipment with a Steely Dan or Donald Fagen solo recording.

Steely Dan’s songs are adventures in their own fictional world.  Who else in rock music has assembled a more vivid cast of protagonists, whom are rogues, heroes, creeps, LSD chemists, child molesters, coke dealers, schmucks, lovers, dreamers and cold-blooded operators, or injected their characters with so much humanity? 

Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker created people with complicated pasts.  Scars they don’t talk about, delusions, desires, and memories they just can’t forget.

 'The Royal Scam' released in May 1976 has all of the above in spades.  Many people refer to this album as Steely Dan's "guitar album", thanks to the tasty playing of Larry Carlton, Denny Dias, Dean Parks and Elliott Randall.  The rest of the players are cream of the crop studio musicians, including Paul Griffin, Chuck Rainey, Bernard Purdie, Victor Feldman, Jim Horn, and John Klemmer.

The freeload is a very nice Japanese 2018 limited edition reissue (MQA-CD and UHQCD).  It was DSD flat transferred from US original analogue master tapes by Eli Brown at Universal Music Studios, LA, in 2018, and edited in DSD by Manabu Matsumura at Universal Music Studios, Tokyo, in 2018.

For the freeload, post some of your favorite Steely Dan Lyrics.