Steely Dan – The Royal Scam (UHQR) / 45RPM 2LP Analogue Productions

Steely Dan sold more than 40 million albums worldwide and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2001. VH1 ranked Steely Dan number 82 on their list of the 100 greatest musicians of all time.

Rolling Stone ranked them number 15 on its list of the 20 greatest duos of all time. Steely Dan's fifth, multi-platinum studio album “The Royal Scam”, produced by Gary Katz and originally released in 1976 by ABC Records,

marked a turning point in the careers of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker: it features more prominent guitar work than the previous Steely Dan album, “Katy Lied”, the first LP without founding guitarist Jeff Baxter. The guitar

parts on “The Royal Scam” were played by Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Larry Carlton, Elliott Randall and Dean Parks. The album, which quickly reached number 15 on the Billboard 200, set the stage for the complex arrangements,

sophisticated musicality, and cynical lyrics that would become the band's trademark. It is considered one of the band's most musically experimental works. From the funky up-tempo track “Kid Charlemagne” to the Latin-tinged

“The Caves Of Altamira” and the jazzy “Don't Take Me Alive”, the album offers a wide range of musical styles and is considered the most experimental work by the brilliant duo!

The lyrics deal with themes such as betrayal, corruption, and disillusionment, and feature characters who are often morally ambiguous or downright evil. Like other Steely Dan albums, “The Royal Scam” is full of cryptic references

to real and fictional people and events. In a BBC interview in 2000, Becker and Fagen revealed that “Kid Charlemagne” was loosely inspired by Owsley Stanley, the notorious “drug cook” known for producing hallucinogenic substances

and that “Caves Of Altamira” was based on a book by Hans Baumann and dealt with the loss of innocence. The production is also extremely polished, with a clear and precise sound that highlights the band's technical prowess.

Rolling Stone wrote in a review: “Becker and Fagen have truly written the ultimate ‘outlaw’ album here, something that countless bands from the South have been denied because their concept of the outlaw is so limited.” AllMusic rates

the album 4.5 out of 5 stars and calls “Kid Charlemagne” and “Sign in Stranger” “true Steely Dan classics”. Incidentally, the album cover – created from a painting by Larry Zox and a photograph by Charlie Ganse – was originally designed

for Van Morrison's unreleased album “Mechanical Bliss”. In the liner notes to the 1999 remastered version of the album, Fagen and Becker described it as “the ugliest album cover of the 1970s, without exception – except maybe ‘Can't Buy a Thrill’”.

Analogue Productions is now paying tribute to this masterful album with a sonically outstanding UHQR double LP, strictly limited to 20,000 copies. The original tapes were mastered by Bernie Grundman and feature sound quality never heard before.

The elaborately designed box set contains the records, cut at 45 RPM and pressed on 200-gram Clarity Vinyl® – both packaged in individually numbered deluxe gold foil tip-on jackets. Each UHQR is manufactured by Acoustic Sounds at industry leader

Quality Record Pressings (QRP), inspected after pressing, and comes with a hand-signed certificate of authenticity: only the truly flawless copies make it to retail. The unique blend of rock, jazz, and funk, as well as the band's uncompromising approach to

songwriting and production, make the UHQR version of “The Royal Scam” a truly luxurious collector's item!

Title

LP 1

Side A
1. Kid Charlemagne
2. The Caves of Altamira

Side B
3. Don't Take Me Alive
4. Sign in Stranger
5. The Fez

LP 2
Side C
6. Green Earrings
7. Haitian Divorce

Side D
8. Everything You Did
9. The Royal Scam