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Steely Dan brings "The Royal Scam" to Nob Hill
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Tonight, Steely Dan plays their 1976 album The Royal Scam at the Nob Hill Masonic Hall. In honor of the event I am posting a look back at that album to give concert attendees an idea of what to expect from the show. (The first Dan Fan to identify the Royal Scam cut that I do not mention in this review wins big-time kudos.)
Steely Dan
The Royal Scam
MCA, 1976
Steely Dan’s sordid and cynical album The Royal Scam snuffs every warm ember of the American Dream that hadn't been extinguished by the end of the '60s. Over the course of eight tracks the provocative lyricists Walter Becker and Donald Fagen tarnish the gloss of mind-expanding drugs, holy matrimony, and the golden opportunities of the immigrant narrative. The happiest moments on the record--at least the passages that are treated with major keys--deal with escape, from the law and from identity.
The record is as dark as it wants to be and it sounds so damn good.
When Steely Dan was prepping for recording The Royal Scam they had established themselves as a studio band only, meaning they didn't tour and they didn't act as a band; they were two writers who brought in musicians and vocalists to fulfill recording duties as they saw fit. The only other original bandmate left is guitarist Denny Dias, but he is joined in the stable by such six-string luminaries as Elliott Randall, Dean Parks, Hugh McCracken, and Larry Carlton. Drumming duties are handled almost exclusively by funky hitmaker Bernard "Pretty" Purdie. The rhythm section ranks also include bassist Chuck Rainey and percussionist Victor Feldman.
So what's it add up to? I like to think of the record as a set of three pairs and two oddities. "Kid Charlemagne" and "Don't Take Me Alive" are possibly the two heaviest guitar tunes that Steely Dan ever put together, and both songs are appropriately outlaw narratives. "Everything You Did" and "Haitian Divorce" are songs about disintegrating relationships that bring to mind the the sick, suburban realism of John Updike. Then there are the only two club tracks Steely Dan ever cut, which they toyed with under pressure from MCA Records, who demanded dance floor hits for the boomers who had traded in their weed for cocaine. Steely Dan gave them catchy jingles, like advertisements for sexy accessories, "The Fez" for him, and "Green Earrings" for her.
"Caves of Altamira" is one of Fagen's nostalgic tracks, about growing up in isolation, and it was recorded as a demo before their debut album Can't Buy a Thrill was released in 1972. So in terms of subject matter, though not tonality, it is an oddity on this set. The the title track, the thesis, "The Royal Scam" also stands on its own as a long, slow, villainous march that tells of the hardships faced by Puerto Ricans who moved to New York under the false pretense that therein lay the American Dream, and found nothing but rubble and hardship.
Steely Dan is geographically associated with New York, where they first hawked tunes in the Brill Building, and Los Angeles where they finally got their break. Their songs are brimming with references to each, from the quizzical "Brooklyn owes the charmer under me" to the obvious, "California tumbles into the sea / That'll be the day I go back to Annandale." Although they found themselves globetrotting on "Pretzel Logic" and falling for a New Orleans prostitute on "Pearl of the Quarter," the locations are more relevant on The Royal Scam:
They stretch their legs and observe a stand-off stemming from an incident of patricide in Oregon and a San Francisco dealer of day-glo substances made "obsolete" by changing tastes in drugs. Beyond the Americana there are the immigrants who "wandered in from the City of St. John without a dime," but I think the international "Haitian Divorce" is really the crux of this album.
I didn't like or completely understand "Haitian Divorce" until I heard it maybe the 30th time. For starters, I can't stand reggae, but this is the funky appropriation of reggae, and with Purdie and Feldman providing straight-forward counter-rhythms on drums and vibraphone respectively, the whole thing clicks. Melodically there are the growls and burps of Dean Parks' fuzzy wah guitar with his apparent nods to the Perry Mason theme song. Haiti was the go-to spot for quickie divorces in the '70s, but the lyrical joke is that in the Dan version, a wife gets restless and escapes to Haiti for a weekend and returns with a secret blossoming in her stomach.
So the "Haitian Divorce" doesn't refer to the act, but to her souvenir offspring, which ostensibly ends matrimonial bliss for good after the neighbors begin to wonder, "Who's this kinky so-and-so?". This is the synthesis of the album because it is American funk steeped in Caribbean balladry, an American nightmare played out on foreign shores, and a paradigm of an alternate route to American citizenship that is much stranger than traditional immigration.
When The Royal Scam was released in 1976, it was enjoyed but not adored. Kenneth Tucker, writing for Rolling Stone, summed up the reception and predicted the future when he wrote, “[Steely Dan’s] next album, if one can speculate about this lovably perverse bunch, should be a pop killer. In the meantime The Royal Scam is well worth living with, pondering and, what the hell, even dancing to.” The “pop killer” turned out to be Aja, one of the great jazz-rock records of all time, and it made everyone forget about The Royal Scam.
Fast-forward to the Dan's reinvention as a touring band in the early '90s, and it turns out that every one of these songs--save "Caves of Altamira"--make for fine opportunities on the live stage. This has led to some historical revision on the part of fans.
I would count myself among the revisionists, but I was not yet born when this savage monolith sprang up from the canyons of American consciousness, so this is my first stab at it. Still, the American Dream seems as false today as it must have for all the failed aspirants of the American century, so the content of this record still cuts deep. Give it a listen, on wax preferably, but when you do make sure you have some hard, American whiskey handy. Then clench your teeth, dig your cleats in, and hold on for dear life.
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