Steely Dan - The Royal Scam

1976. The Bicentennial.  The 4^th of July Parade.  Kool’s.  Ten Speed bikes and smoke bombs.  YMCA water polo champions.  Jr. High Track.  I had a girlfriend with a nice stereo, I had a Panasonic Dynamite 8 and I had a big stack of 8 Track tapes.  One of my all time favorites was Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam.  I didn't know many people that seemed to like Steely Dan as much as I did, but that didn't stop me from taking that 8 Track almost everywhere for that whole summer.  It still seems weird to me that a 14 year old kid would like that album so much, but I wore that tape out (it turned into one of my patented stash boxes – looked like a tape, opened up to reveal a pretty big storage area that you could keep anywhere!).  After I wore it out, I had to buy it on vinyl.

That record is long gone.  I wore it out, too.  I think the copy I have now I bought in the mid 80’s – it has a gold stamp on it proclaiming its Platinum status.  So it’s obviously not an original pressing, but it’s still good.  I think when push comes to shove, the Citizen Steely Dan boxed set is the better sounding version, but this record smoked the original Steely Dan cd’s.  It’s an MCA, not ABC, but I think it’s a great sounding record.  It’s clean and flat and it sounds great, like a Steely Dan album should.

I can understand why I like it now.  It’s perfectly played, and it’s a great way to kick back and relax.  The lyrics are generally smart and cover mostly adult subjects and the guitars are plentiful and exquisite.  Why I liked it so much when I was a kid, I don’t know.  Maybe it was the Technicolor motor home line in Kid Charlemagne, or maybe it was Larry Carlton’s amazing guitar solo in the same song.  I don’t know but it seems to have stuck.  I think this is one of those rare albums where I just love every song.

I remember long ago WBWC (Baldwin Wallace College’s radio station) used to use the beginning of Green Earrings as their music for the news.  It’s funny, I suppose that song really does start out like the theme from Action News, but every time the news would come on, I’d get excited thinking they were playing an old Steely Dan song!  Then some kid would use his best professional broadcaster’s voice and proclaim over Green Earrings that WBWC was “bringing you the news from The World, and Your Town.”  It was kind of a rotten trick, and I think it pretty much fooled me every time.

I used to think The Caves of Altamira was really profound, probably even more so after I went in the school library and found out that those are the famous caves in Spain where the early cave drawings were found.  I love the closing lines:

Nothing here but history,

Can you see what has been done?

Memory rush over me,

Now I step into the sun

I’d like to see those caves.

I never could roller skate, either.  I’d like to have been better at it because I love Roller Derby and I seem to like listening to people talking or singing about roller skating.  All I could really do is go counter clockwise, and I just seem to go faster and faster until I think I’ll wipe out, and then I just run into a pole or the wall so I won’t crash (I can’t really stop, either).  But I must have had some kind of thing for girls on roller skates because I always loved Everything You Did, too.  There’s not really much to most of the songs on here, and I think that leaves a lot of room for the listener’s imagination to use the music and lyrical sketches to come up with your own meanings.  I think a lot of the songs on The Royal Scam are like that, and I like it because no one can tell me I don’t understand what the songs are about.

Which kind of brings me to the last song; the title track.  There’s not much room for your own interpretation here, but it’s still a great groove and a cool story about immigrating to America and finding out the streets aren’t exactly paved with gold.  I really like Donald Fagen’s cynicism so I’ve always liked this one.  Larry Carlton gets another chance to stretch out and play his guitar, too.  I used to play this on my headphones when I came home late, and it was a great way to conk out for the night.  I guess I can listen to this one just about anytime, anywhere.  It's definitely one of my favorites.