With each successive album, Steely Dan's popular success and appeal become more obscured by sundry admirers' claims of abstruseness and complexity. To some it seems inevitable that the Dan will eventually produce the Finnegan's Wake of rock. And that's silly: Steely Dan is trying just as hard as any random country/disco/metal band
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to capture our attention, i.e., sell records. For all their jazzy influences, they are a florid rock band, immersed in popular concerns and styles. True, songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen bow to no one in the matter of composing immaculate, catchy cul-de-sacs, but it is that same immaculateness, the way the words, as impenetrable as they may appear, fit with metrical seamlessness into the melodies that makes their impenetrability of little importance to any casual listener caught up in the sound of the entire song.
That said, one must immediately note that their latest, The Royal Scam, is the Dan's most atypical record, possessing neither obvious AM material nor seductive lyrical mysteriousness. It also contains some of their most accomplished and enjoyable music.
The core of the Steely Dan sound is the interplay of sharp, even grating, lead guitar (most often that of Denny Dias) and the cushion of Fagen's various keyboards, always smooth, gliding, pulling the rest of the composition along. It has always been the hard nasal edge of both the lead guitar and Fagen's vocals that rescued the band from slickness, and on The Royal Scam this contrast is more obvious and effective than on any previous record.
In fact, such is the pervasiveness of both musical and narrative tensions that the overall feeling of Scam is one of just that: tension. There is little of the self-confident gentleness that dotted Pretzel Logic, less still of the omniscience that suffused Katy Lied. The Royal Scam is a transitional album for Steely Dan; melody dominates lyric in the sense that the former pushes into new rhythmic areas for the group (more "pure" jazz, semireggae and substantially more orchestration than before) while the verbal content is clearer, even mundane, by previous Dan standards.
While Scam is certainly not a concept album, every song—with the possible exception of "The Fez"—concerns a narrator's escape from a crime or sin recently committed. Becker and Fagen have really written the ultimate "outlaw" album here, something that eludes myriad Southern bands because their concept of the outlaw is so limited. Rather than just, say, robbing banks ("Don't Take Me Alive," in which the robber is a "bookkeeper's son"), Becker and Fagen's various protagonists are also solipsistic jewel thieves ("Green Earrings"), spendthrift divorcées ("Haitian Divorce") and murderously jealous lovers ("Everything You Did").
But the Dan's outlaws are also moral ones, guilt-ridden over comparatively minor sins. (Last time out, remember, Katy's chief
When they concocted The Royal Scam, in 1976, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were under the influence of "a seemingly inexhaustible supply of whatever" (as they put it in their notes to the 1999 reissue), which surely helped them summon the on-the-edge characters who populate the album. "Kid Charlemagne," which describes the misadventures of a San Francisco acid dealer who has run out of customers and time, introduces a song cycle on which making a getaway is high on the agenda of practically every one of the protagonists. These urban desperadoes are captured by Fagen and Becker in vignettes as sharply focused and unromanticized as Diane Arbus photos -- such as the conjugal combatants of "Everything You Did," one of whom interrupts the hurling of recriminations to civilly suggest, "Turn up the Eagles/The neighbors are listening."The individual performances seem to rise out of the narrative itself, thanks to the rarefied capabilities of the hired studio help; having dispensed with their original lineup three years earlier, Fagen and Becker assembled a talent pool composed primarily of jazz specialists who showed they could rock and swing all at once when so inspired. Drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie lashes out the roiling grooves on most of the nine tracks, establishing the album's anxious feel, and Larry Carlton's jaw-dropping guitar work provides a running commentary to Fagen's strangulated vocals, notably on the noir rocker "Don't Take Me Alive," in which the howling, jagged opening riff brutally articulates the psyche of a bookkeeper's son gone wild. On "Haitian Divorce," Dean Parks' extended guitar solo is transformed by Becker's talk-box manipulation into the quintessence of henpecking. These are not the sort of Steely Dan songs favored by smooth-jazz stations. The Royal Scam vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself. (RS 959 - Oct. 14, 2004)
