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OFFERS THAT
SEEM A TAD
SUSPICIOUS: |
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| “You’ll find 1001 uses for ‘The Money Weasel.’ We’ll never be sorry you bought it.” |
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| “Can you draw the dog on this matchbook cover? Then send $20.00 today for our instruction book, ‘The Artist in You Has a Forgery Career Waiting’ ... ” |
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| “For only $8.50 per day, you can support a starving actor. Call your local theater for details.” |
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| “We have located your share of the national debt—it’s thousands of dollars! Finder’s fee of only $500 required!” |
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Mark Easy — Deal, New Jersey
"I should have know it was a scam when they mentioned their 'low-interest-rate, easy-payment ripoff plan' and they gave me a 'guaranteed satisfaction customer-service phone number' that began with '555-'..."
Do claims about the coming of "peak oil" and the collapse of civilization seem a tad suspicious? Find out whether it's real, a scam, or just a bad joke by reading our
Peak Oil FAQ ...
Or go to list of jokes
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ADVERTISEMENT
| SONGS FOR A SCAM-RIDDEN PLANET |
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“The Royal Scam”
– Steely Dan, from the album The Royal Scam |
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They are paid in gold
Just to babble in the back room . . .
See the glory
Of the royal scam.
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Album Review: Steely Dan's fifth album, The Royal Scam, was a turning point for the band's sound. Before this album, Steely Dan really sounded like a band—sort of like "The Doobie Brothers with less country rock and more attitude." On The Royal Scam, Steely Dan's apt cynicism remained but the "band sound" was replaced with a glossier, more studio-oriented approach. When bands break new ground, they sometimes stumble onto "the sound they were always meant to have" and produce a masterpiece.
This is not exactly the case with The Royal Scam—perfection would have to wait until their next album, the amazing
Aja.
But these guys were so good that even when they were not at their best, they were still very, very good. On The Royal Scam, occasional disappointments like "Everything You Did" or "Haitian Divorce" are more than compensated for with gems like "Green Earrings," "The Caves of Altamira," "Sign in Stranger" and the two best tracks on the album, "Kid Charlemagne" and "Don't Take Me Alive." The remaining tracks are interesting more for their film noire plot lines than their melodies or
instrumentation, but that's enough—Becker and Fagen definitely knew how to write intriguing lyrics. While The Royal Scam doesn't top the list of "best Steely Dan albums," it easily bests the Fagen-dominated, amelodic, "L.A. insider" albums that Steely Dan put out in the 2000s (though fans of these later albums
(Two Against Nature and
Everything Must Go)
will find some of the seeds of that sound on
The Royal Scam).
Whatever its minor flaws,
The Royal Scam
cannot be simply dismissed as a lesser work—there are too many great songs on it. There are seven classic Steely Dan albums—from
Can't Buy A Thrill through
Gaucho—and
this is one of them.
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For reviews, to hear clips, or to get purchase info,
go to Amazon.com . . .
Or search Amazon.com for more
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AD-VERT
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Peak Oil FAQ
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