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Steely Dan's gold-selling fifth studio album The Royal Scam, was produced by Gary Katz and was originally released by ABC Records in 1976. The Royal Scam features more prominent guitar work than the prior Steely Dan album, Katy Lied, which had been the first without founding guitarist Jeff Baxter. Guitarists on the recording include Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Larry Carlton, Elliott Randall and Dean Parks.The album was certified gold-selling and peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard 200.In common with other Steely Dan albums, The Royal Scam is littered with cryptic allusions to people and events both real and fictional. In a BBC interview in 2000, Becker and Fagen revealed that 'Kid Charlemagne' is loosely based on Owsley Stanley, the notorious drug 'chef' who was famous for manufacturing hallucinogenic compounds, and that 'Caves of Altamira, ' based on a book by Hans Baumann, is about the loss of innocence, the narrative about a visitor to the Cave of Altamira who registers his astonishment at the prehistoric drawings.Rolling Stone, in it's review of the album, described The Royal Scam, as Steely Dan's 'mostatypical record, possessing neither obvious AM material nor seductive lyrical mysteriousness. It also contains some of their most accomplished and enjoyable music.'... 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, ' said the Rolling Stone review.Nearly every song on Scam concerns a narrator's escape from a crime or sing rece
