Name	Artist	Time	Price
1.	Kid Charlemagne	Steely Dan	4:38	$1.29
2.	The Caves of Altamira	Steely Dan	3:33	$0.99
3.	Don't Take Me Alive	Steely Dan	4:16	$1.29
4.	Sign in Stranger	Steely Dan	4:23	$0.99
5.	The Fez	Steely Dan	4:01	$1.29
6.	Green Earrings	Steely Dan	4:05	$0.99
7.	Haitian Divorce	Steely Dan	5:51	$1.29
8.	Everything You Did	Steely Dan	3:55	$0.99
9.	The Royal Scam	Steely Dan	6:30	$1.29

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Our Review

With its pairing of venomous lyrics to enthralling grooves, The Royal Scam contains some of the most potent work of Steely Dan’s career. The album begins with “Kid Charlemagne,” in which Donald Fagen addresses a fallen idol: “Now your patrons have all left you in the red / Your low-rent friends are dead / This life can be very strange / All those DayGlo freaks who used to paint the face / They've joined the human race… You are obsolete / Look at all the white men on the street.” (Fagen later revealed the song was about LSD guru Owsley Stanley.) The title track is a scathing, impressionistic vision of America’s settlement: the lyrics are at once funny and frightening, and the music is sublime. In a perfect paradoxical formula, “The Caves of Altamira,” “Sign in Stranger,” and “Haitian Divorce” mine rhythms that are relaxed yet fiercely precise. The Royal Scam is a complex work but its depth is almost always implied rather than expository. Ironically, for such a wordy album, its most essential song might be “The Fez,” which features Fagen simply repeating a single phrase over a cyclical rhythm.

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Customer Reviews

Absolutely the Best: See the glory (5 stars)
1976 brought The Royal Scam, considered by many as Steely Dan's second best album (next to Aja), personally it's my favorite. By far Steely Dan's hardest album, Don and Walt put aside their jazzy reverb guitars and Rhodes pianos for overdrive crunch and B-3 organs. Side A opens with the legendary Kid Charlemagne about a disoriented drug dealer, unreal guitar work by Larry Carlton and dig the clavinet driving the harmony. Caves of Altamira is

Scam is no scam (5 stars)
I applaud the first reviewer for nailing it on the head. Please disregard the "official" review, I find it to be far off the mark. This album was the turning point for the "mature" Steely Dan sound of the last 3 albums of the original 7. Katy Lied is great but young. This album is amazing, in my opinion the best Dan record and considering I think they're all great, and it's my favorite band, that is high praise. It is by

Heh? (5 stars)
The front-page review of this album (and just about every other SD album) makes me laugh. Seriously....who is ANYONE to say that these guys ever did anything that was "weak" or "over-produced"???!!! The duo that is Becker & Fagen seem to accomplish what they intend on every album I've ever heard from them. They are meticulous NOT to a fault...they make it the way they want it. They are perfectionists. That is why

Biography

Formed: 1972 in Los Angeles, CA
Genre: Rock
Years Active: '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s

Most rock & roll bands are a tightly wound unit that developed their music through years of playing in garages and clubs around their hometown. Steely Dan never subscribed to that aesthetic. As the vehicle for the songwriting of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Steely Dan defied all rock & roll conventions. Becker and Fagen never truly enjoyed rock — with their ironic humor and cryptic lyrics, their eclectic body of work shows some debt to Bob Dylan — preferring jazz, traditional...

Top Albums By Steely Dan
A Decade of St..	Aja	Can't Buy a Th..	The Royal Scam	Gaucho

Top Songs By Steely Dan
	Name	Album	Time	Price
1.	Reelin' In the Years	Can't Buy a Thrill	4:37	$1.29
2.	Do It Again	A Decade of Steely Dan (Rem..	5:56	$1.29
3.	Peg	Aja	4:00	$0.99
4.	Dirty Work	Can't Buy a Thrill	3:08	$1.29
5.	Deacon Blues	Aja	7:36	$1.29
6.	Hey Nineteen	A Decade of Steely Dan (Rem..	5:07	$0.99
7.	Rikki Don't Lose that Number	A Decade of Steely Dan (Rem..	4:32	$1.29
8.	Josie	Aja	4:30	$1.29
9.	Black Cow	Aja	5:10	$1.29
10.	Aja	Aja	8:00	$1.29

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