The Royal Scam

Sessions began at Davlen Sound in North Hollywood with Elliot Scheiner, who talked the band into the Eicosystem, two 16-track machines linked to make 32 tracks. Two weeks with half a dozen different lineups of session players produced nothing they liked, so they moved to A&R in New York and laid down half the backing tracks in two weeks, including Kid Charlemagne in one take. Scheiner flew to Haiti for a quick divorce and his account of it, with fictional additions, became Haitian Divorce. Editing proved impossible with the linked machines, so the band returned to Los Angeles, transferred the tapes to 24-track, told Scheiner he would not work with them again, and finished at ABC Recording Studios with Roger Nichols.

Becker and Fagen played hardly anything. Larry Carlton played on most tracks, wrote charts and acted as their liaison with the studio musicians, and Pitchfork's Winston Cook-Wilson notes that Bernard Purdie played drums on all but two. The Fez is one of three songs with a credited writer beyond Becker and Fagen, in this case keyboardist Paul Griffin, and Becker said they gave him the credit in case a scandal developed later. Green Earrings was over seven minutes long before it was edited to four in the mix, and I Got the News was written here and reworked for Aja. Everything You Did contains the line about turning up the Eagles, which Glenn Frey said came from Becker's girlfriend playing them constantly. The Eagles answered in Hotel California with a line about steely knives. Timothy B. Schmit sang backing vocals here and joined the Eagles in 1977.

The cover shows a sleeping man on a Boston bus stop bench, photographed by Charlie Ganse, over Larry Zox's painting of skyscrapers with beast heads, which Zox made for an unreleased Van Morrison album. Designer Ed Caraeff suggested combining them. In liner notes written in 1999, Becker and Fagen called it the most hideous album cover of the seventies, bar none.

It reached 15 in the United States and 11 in the UK and went platinum. Neither US single reached the Top 40. Cook-Wilson called it the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of the band's career.