And yet in the following poll, Countdown placed last among the first six albums. Which of these Steely dan albums is your favorite? And here it Beat only Gaucho: Best Steely Dan albums. Choose 3!
It's in second place for me. But that's beside the point. You think maybe it's time for a new poll? (Btw, I edited my last post.)
Not much to add, enjoying reading the reviews, etc. It took me a heck of a long time to like Royal Scam, but it started once I got what "Caves of Altamira" was about. What an oddly gentle and inquisitve song. I don't know how they made arcane subject matter sound so grounded and interesting. Got to love them getting John Klemmer to do the sax solo. Klemmer was known for his echo-ey sax solo and a certain overstatement at his worst. At his best (on this track for instance) he's a very effecting player, I think the echoes in this context works well with the sense of exploration, the caves... "Don't Take Me Alive" has some of my favorite singing from Donald, in fact Royal Scam is probably his more consistent work in that regard. The song's protagonist shouldn't have been sympathetic here, but he was. It's great this wasn't treated like a wry joke or overwrought, it's all very life-life and when the seriousness of the title really seeped in for me, I was stunned. It's sad.... After years of not liking "Kid Charlemagne" I totally get that now too, and that "Is there gas in the car/Yes there's gas in the car" is one of the coolest things, Fagen nailed it so well the only thing left to do is laugh. "Green Earrings" is cool too, the best song about domestic theft we're likely to hear. Both of those songs have a vaguely dance able beats which is, odd. Not much to say, I love Larry Carlton's work throughout. He humanizing some pretty dark lyrics and gives the work his great more often than not sunny LA sensibilities, great dichotomy and it fit SD and the studio productions of the time like a glove. The only song I don't like is "Everything You Did" it's OK, the album itself is brilliant, liked it more than Katy Lied.
I first heard The Royal Scam at a friend's house in early 1996 at a friend's house. I already knew the tracks that were on Greatest Hits as well as the title track and "Don't Take Me Alive". Hearing "Green Earrings" and "Sign In Stranger" convinced me to buy the album along with Can't Buy A Thrill that spring. This is where the Dan moves towards the sound that characterized the next two albums albeit with more guitar. One of my favorite albums of all time.
Five year old thread.. QUOTE="Monosterio, post: 17232695, member: 37182"]And yet in the following poll, Countdown placed last among the first six albums. Which of these Steely dan albums is your favorite? And here it Beat only Gaucho: Best Steely Dan albums. Choose 3! [/QUOTE] Poll : yeah ..I picked Pretzel Logic. Wouldn't be my poll choice now
It was a big European hit. I had it on a Canadian KTel compilation called Streetwave in 1980 so it might have had some chart action in bigger areas such as Toronto.
My son got me a nice pair of Sennheiser headphones for my stereo so I'm going to break them in with a listen to Royal Scam (and Aja, too. I mean, c'mon!)
Here At The Western World, not top notch Dan, but darn good anyway 6.5/10, still I like all 9 RS tracks more than HATWW.
Yes Marvin, it is possible to be a fan of guitars and of melodies and of funk, rock, pop, jazz - probably you are one and I am one. But we have an array of posters here with different preferences and then different preferences just for Steely Dan. There's no doubt there are a lot of rock fans here that aren't into pop and posters can say that they like all kinds of music but a lot have certain music they just like better. The Dan changed their sound enough here that we find a lot of posters saying that there is less melody or it was harder to get into initially. I found that 'The Royal Scam' is not commercial enough to immediately like for your casual music fan hence we see something more commercial like 'Aja' getting the accolades more than this album from critics all-time lists, from DJ's that only play 'Kid Charlemagne' and ignore the rest of this album in favor of more commercial items from the others and from fans that get excited at the live shows for songs like 'Peg', 'Deacon Blues', 'Hey Nineteen' etc. There is an obvious guitar and rock emphasis on this forum hence more fans here for 'The Royal Scam' then elsewhere in the media and general society that includes casual Dan fans. Check back thru the comments and you'll see a lot about great guitar moments but not as many comments about great horn or piano moments. ____________________________________________ Monosterio- I think any surveys on this forum are more accurate than the comments we're seeing from people on this thread because every survey thread has posters that don't like to post but will do a survey. We see this from all the 'forum count' and 'forum post' number differences. Like this thread has 1700 posts but way more views (50,000). What would be great is for the readers-only to post their opinions so we can get a better overall sense of reaction. There seemed to be more posters here early and now we're seeing a lot of the same posters a lot. I wish all the readers would post cause its great seeing everyone's reactions for each. From reading every little and big post here I'm guessing this is the ranking so far; 1-Countdown to Ecstasy 2-Katy Lied tie3-The Royal Scam tie3-Pretzel Logic 5-Can't Buy a Thrill But only a couple of posters were not into 'Countdown' and we had a lot more posters than now.
Who would be game for a Real Gone SD ABC/MCA complete singles comp? Yes, the Dallas/Waterway 45 must be included. Does DF and the WB estate own the SD masters?
The Royal Scam is a marvelous album. Sign in Stranger, Don't Take Me Alive and the title track are probably my favorites though all tracks excepting Everything You Did and maybe The Fez are absolutely bursting with brilliance. Can't get enough of this album. Haitian Divorce, extremely convincing vocal work... If most of this group's output wasn't so damn good I'd say this album is either my 1st or 2nd favorite of them all.
R.S. and Gaucho are the two non essential SD albums IMO. Only 3 good songs I hear - Kid Charlemegne, Caves of Altamira and Green Earring. The others are just flat out boring (Royal Scam) or overstay their welcome, or just plain bad (Everything You Did). Some hotshot guitar work doesn't cover up their medicore material.
I sort of like the fact that their covers are awful...it says, we are so about the music we have no clue how to do something visual
I'm sure they'd love to point out that Caves comes from the diary of some famous Nazi but I don't get any sense from the lyrics that this "deep background" is part of the song. But I feel like these are Walter's lyrics, mostly
Without a doubt, your Photoshop skills are amazing. How did you choose which names to feature on the covers?
