COVER OF THE WEEK

# 11 is "The Royal Scam" from Steely Dan and the year 1976.
To quote The Complete Guide to the Music of Steely Dan:

"Another superb cover showed a man asleep on a Boston bus station bench as skyscrapers and angry skies towered above him. Each building had a different animal's snarling head superimposed onto it. At the center of the cover was a king cobra about to strike at a mongoose on the neighboring edifice."

What's not that well known about this cover is that the skyscraper painting part of it was supposed to end up as the cover of a Van Morrison LP!
When Van abandoned that album the photographer behind the pic of the man asleep on the bench, Charlie Ganse, together with art director Ed Caraeff got the idea to mix the photo and painting and ending up with what became the cover for "The Royal Scam".

This is Steely Dan's fifth album and the second one where the group consisted of just Donald Fagen and Walter Becker with hired hands making up the rest of the musicians playing on the record.
The two of them are able to take the music where they want to without having other band members to listen to.
This album leaning towards guitar and rock with darker lyrics than before, will in a years time be followed by their commercial and arguably creative peak; the more jazz-influenced "Aja".

I have found no clear connection between the cover and the title track on "The Royal Scam", and if you read the liner notes by Donald & Walter in the CD-remaster you get the feeling that they didn't have much to do with the way the cover came out:

"Our happiness at this particular point in time would be ultracomplete save for one thing - namely, we have not as yet found a cover shot for the album. ...
Luckily for us, we are in Los Angeles where, more than anywhere else in the known universe, bad taste abhors a vacuum, and before long we find ourselves staring into the maw of the most hideous album cover of the seventies, bar none (excepting perhaps Can't Buy A Thrill). Why are those buildings turning into reptilian horrors, or vice versa? What squalid back alley of the human condition is meant to be invoked by this contused nightmare palette? What manner of man - ill-shod, unshaven - dares sleep peacefully through this fearsome and repulsive protomorph?"

Nebukadnessar Stephenson