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Steely Dan – The Royal Scam album art

Contributed by Rob Hudson on Jul 2nd, 2023. Artwork published in
May 1976
.
Steely Dan – The Royal Scam album art 1
Source: www.ebay.com echomachine25. License: All Rights Reserved.

The Royal Scam is the fifth album from American rock band Steely Dan, released on ABC Records in 1976.

The artist and album title are set in all-caps Koloss, with an added shadow effect. On the back cover, the track listing and credits appear in all-caps Optima.

From Wikipedia:

The album’s cover features an image of a man in a suit sleeping on a bus stop bench in Boston and dreaming of skyscrapers with monstrous animal heads at the top. [Larry] Zox originally created the painting of the skyscraper/beast hybrids for an unreleased Van Morrison album, and designer Ed Caraeff suggested superimposing a photograph of a sleeping vagrant taken by Charlie Ganse to make the cover for The Royal Scam. In the liner notes for the 1999 remastered reissue of the album, Fagen and Becker called it has “the most hideous album cover of the seventies, bar none (excepting perhaps Can’t Buy a Thrill).”

Tom Nikosey is credited with the typographic design.

[More info at Discogs]

The back cover
Source: www.ebay.com echomachine25. License: All Rights Reserved.

The back cover

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  • Koloss
  • Optima

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