Later that year in a nod back to Steely Dan for the free publicity, and inspired by Steely Dan's lyric style, the Eagles penned the lyrics, "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" in their hit " Hotel California". So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day and that was the genesis of the line." Given that the two bands shared a manager ( Irving Azoff) and that the Eagles proclaimed their admiration for Steely Dan, this was more friendly rivalry than feud. In the song "Everything You Did", a lyric says, "turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening." Glenn Frey of the Eagles said, "Apparently Walter Becker's girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time. In the liner notes for the 1999 remaster of the album, Fagen and Becker claim it to be "the most hideous album cover of the seventies, bar none (excepting perhaps Can't Buy a Thrill)." Designer Ed Caraeff suggested superimposing a photograph by Charlie Ganse of a sleeping vagrant. The cover was based on a painting by Zox, which was originally created for an unreleased Van Morrison album. The album cover shows a man in a suit, sleeping on a radiator, and apparently dreaming of skyscraper-beast hybrids. The album was re-issued by MCA Records in 1979 following the sale of the ABC Records label to MCA. The album went gold and peaked at number 15 on the Billboard 200. It is also influenced by Plato's Cave Allegory and Keats' " Ode on a Grecian Urn". 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. In common with other Steely Dan albums, The Royal Scam is littered with cryptic allusions to people and events both real and fictional. Fagen later said of Griffin, "There are some musicians who are hacks, and then there are guys like Paul who can create something so different and unique they make the record." The composition was explained as "a cheerful ode to the importance of always wearing a condom" in an AugLos Angeles Times article written by Chris Willman. As Becker said, "There is an instrumental melody that Paul started playing in the session, and when we decided to build that melody up to a greater position, since we had some suspicion that perhaps this melody wasn't entirely Paul's invention, we decided to give him composer credit in case later some sort of scandal developed and he would take the brunt of the impact." However, Griffin claimed that Fagen already had the keyboard riff, and that he took it in a different direction. "The Fez" has the distinction of being the only Steely Dan song with an additional writer credited beyond Becker and Fagen, namely keyboard player Paul Griffin. Guitarists on the recording include Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Larry Carlton, Elliott Randall and Dean Parks. 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. It was produced by Gary Katz and was originally released by ABC Records in 1976. The Royal Scam is the fifth studio album by American rock band Steely Dan.
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