The Royal Scam Remastered

Product Description The revamping of the classic Steeley Dan catalog of orginal albums on CD continues with a truly revered album. Complete with upgraded, state of the art sounds, complete original art, notes and lyrics, plus newly penned liner notes by none other than Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the Dan themselves. Amazon.com Ever the primary conceit of mainstays Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, 1976's The Royal Scam marks the first time the Steely Dan duo actually owned up to the fact. Musically, it's their edgiest, most guitar-driven record (thanks to Becker and a murderer's row of session greats that includes Larry Carlton, Elliot Randall, Dean Parks, and Denny Dias). Lyrically, the songs cut an ever-sardonic, presciently discomforting slice of modern life that was a couple decades ahead of the game (who else was extolling the virtues of condom-couture, à la "The Fez," mid-Me Decade?). Though it didn't garner the radio attention of Aja, its more jazz-suffused, multiplatinum follow-up, Scam boasts a diverse, occasionally muscular musical rhetoric and some of the Dan's most telling portraits (the deranged, yet all-too-familiar killer of "Don't Take Me Alive," "Kid Charlemagne"'s drug-culture celebrity, the tropical convenience of a "Haitian Divorce"). Small wonder many Dan fans consider it their best. --Jerry McCulley