Steely Dan – The Royal Scam (1976)

The Royal Scam is the fifth album by Steely Dan, released on May 31, 1976, on ABC.

The album contains nine songs by the team of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, including the radio evergreens “Kid Charlemagne,” “The Fez,” and “Haitian Divorce.” Behind Fagen and Becker stood a 23-player backing cast led by guitarist Larry Carlton, drummer Bernard Purdie, bassist Chuck Rainey, keyboardist Paul Griffin, and backing vocalist Michael McDonald.

Their lyrics grapple fallen legend, armed siege, false rebirth, erotic ritual, domestic vengeance, immigrant fraud, and urban decay. “Kid Charlemagne” follows a celebrated chemist into panic and flight. “Don’t Take Me Alive” traps a cornered gunman. “Sign In Stranger” sells renewal through corruption. “Haitian Divorce” turns a holiday escape into permanent fallout. The title track turns promised-land rhetoric into a swindle that grinds down new arrivals.

Musically, The Royal Scam leans on cyclic figures, clipped guitar attack, and dark horn pressure. “Kid Charlemagne” opens with coiled keyboard motion, sharp rhythm breaks, and lead guitar lines that turn each section into a fresh burst of momentum. “The Caves of Altamira” rises on broad brass entries, firm drum pull, and a later saxophone ride that drives the track toward a fuller crest.

“Don’t Take Me Alive” strikes with a splintered opening chord, heavy electric force, and a lead guitar line that hardens the song’s siege. “Sign in Stranger” rides a stripped vamp, then snaps outward through a sudden bridge, a vivid piano break, and thick horn punctuation at the close. “The Fez” locks its lyric into a stubborn cycle, then opens the center through richer chord turns and a high guitar ascent.

“Green Earrings” runs on terse repetition, gains extra charge in the bridge, and leaves behind a warped guitar trail in the fade. “Haitian Divorce” sets an easy island sway under talk-box replies, vibraphone color, and a bass line that gathers more weight by the final stretch. “Everything You Did” leans on a sly midtempo pull, then jolts the center with a guitar passage that cuts across uneven bars. “The Royal Scam” closes on a six-bar cycle, brass stabs, and long instrumental breaks that deepen the album’s final sense of threat.

Production and recording

The Royal Scam extended the studio-only method Becker and Fagen implemented on Katy Lied. Sessions ran from November 1975 through March 1976 at ABC in Los Angeles with producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols. Additional work occurred at A&R Studios in New York City with engineer Elliot Scheiner, a recent soundman for Luther Vandross and Ashford & Simpson.

Auxiliary players include keyboardist Don Grolnick and guitarists Larry Carlton, Denny Dias, Dean Parks, and Elliott Randall. Bernard “Pretty” Purdie drums on all but “Don’t Take Me Alive” and “Everything You Did,” both anchored by serial sessionist Rick Marotta. The Royal Scam features six horn players, including saxophonists Jim Horn and John Klemmer and trumpeter brothers Bob and Chuck Findley.

The Blackberries—Clydie King, Sherlie Matthews, and Venetta Fields—return as backing vocalists alongside Michael McDonald, whose involvement coincided with his immersion in the Doobie Brothers, a link secured through former Steely Dan guitarist Jeff Baxter. Timothy B. Schmit also appears, just prior to joining The Eagles.

A1. “Kid Charlemagne” (4:39) | Becker/Fagen | vocals: Fagen

“Kid Charlemagne” opens with a clipped keyboard pattern, then lets Carlton carve long taut lines across a rhythm section that lands every accent with hard precision. Rainey and Purdie lock the bottom into short exact bursts, while the female backing stack and Michael McDonald widen the chorus without blunting the attack. Becker and Fagen later said the song draws loosely on Owsley Stanley, which fits the lyric’s portrait of a fallen acid chemist and street legend.

While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That’s when you turned the world around
Did you feel like Jesus
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes

He opens by placing Kid Charlemagne at the center of the San Francisco underground, working in secrecy while music and counterculture life surround him. The “diamond” and “pearl” suggest a rare formula or gift that he releases into the world, and the final questions frame him as a near-messianic figure to the people who saw him as a visionary and provider.

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home
Every A-Frame had your number on the wall
You must have had it all
You’d go to L.A. on a dare
And you’d go it alone
Could you live forever
Could you see the day
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away

The song sharpens his legend by contrasting his product with inferior, contaminated versions and by showing the fame, mobility, and glamour that surround him. Yet the last questions introduce the end already looming inside that success, asking whether he ever imagined the collapse that would strip away everything he built.

Get along, get along Kid Charlemagne
Get along Kid Charlemagne

The chorus becomes both warning and farewell. It urges him to move on, disappear, and keep ahead of the forces closing in.

Now your patrons have all left you in the red
Your low rent friends are dead
This life can be very strange
All those dayglow freaks who used to paint the face
They’ve joined the human race
Some things will never change
Son you were mistaken
You are obsolete
Look at all the white men on the street

He now shows the comedown in full: the customers are gone, the fringe companions have died off, and the old psychedelic scene has either vanished or been absorbed into ordinary life. Kid Charlemagne, once celebrated, now looks outdated and exposed, while the “white men on the street” suggest the law, the establishment, or the return of social order closing around him.

Get along, get along Kid Charlemagne
Get along Kid Charlemagne

The chorus returns with more urgency than before. What once sounded like a drifting refrain now sounds like practical advice for survival.

Clean this mess up else we’ll all end up in jail
Those test tubes and the scale
Just get them all out of here
Is there gas in the car
Yes, there’s gas in the car
I think the people down the hall
Know who you are

The scene shifts into panic and immediate danger, with evidence of drug manufacture needing to be removed before the police arrive. The exchange about the car gives the moment a clipped, nervous realism, and the last line confirms that anonymity is gone and the people nearby already recognize him.

Careful what you carry
‘Cause the man is wise
You are still an outlaw in their eyes

He closes with a final caution that strips away the old glamour. Whatever status Kid Charlemagne once held among his followers, the outside world still sees only a criminal, and that judgment has not changed.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals.
Larry Carlton — electric guitar.
Chuck Rainey — bass.
Don Grolnick — keyboards.
Michael McDonald — backing vocals.
Clydie King — backing vocals.
Sherlie Matthews — backing vocals.
Venetta Fields — backing vocals.
Bernard Purdie — drums

A2. “The Caves of Altamira” (3:34) | Becker/Fagen | vocals: Fagen

This track turns from the opener’s street pressure toward a brighter horn-led surface. Tenor saxophones, trumpet, and trombone give the song a broad brass lift, while Marotta’s drumming strikes with clean force under Fagen’s measured vocal line. Becker and Fagen said the lyric turns on loss of innocence as a visitor confronts the cave paintings at Altamira, and the arrangement supports that sense of wonder through rising horn lines and open harmonic space.

I recall when I was small
How I spent my days alone
The busy world was not for me
So I went and found my own
I would climb the garden wall
With a candle in my hand
I’d hide inside a hall of rock and sand
On the stone an ancient hand
In a faded yellow-green
Made alive a worldly wonder
Often told but never seen
Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I

The narrator opens in childhood solitude, remembering how he withdrew from the ordinary world and built a private one through imagination and discovery. The cave-like setting, the ancient handprint, and the painted figures turn the past into a living revelation, where human beings and animals seem present, real, and companionable across vast stretches of time.

Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn’t even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood

The chorus widens that memory into a vision of primal art and shared human expression before modern spectacle and mass culture existed. The cave painters answer some deep impulse to leave meaning behind, and the last line suggests that the narrator feels a direct bond with them across history.

Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same
A wooly man without a face
And a beast without a name
Nothin’ here but history
Can you see what has been done
Memory rush over me
Now I step into the sun

He closes by wondering whether the old markings and figures still carry the same force in the present, even in damaged or half-lost form. History presses in as an emotional flood, and the final step into the sun feels like a return from buried memory into open daylight, changed by what he has seen.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals, keyboards.
Walter Becker — electric guitar.
John Klemmer — tenor saxophone.
Plas Johnson — tenor saxophone.
Chuck Findley — trumpet.
Dick Hyde — trombone.
Rick Marotta — drums.

A3. “Don’t Take Me Alive” (4:16) | Becker/Fagen | vocals: Fagen

Carlton throws the song open with one of the album’s sharpest guitar entries, then Fagen rides a terse keyboard bed and a clipped drum part that never loosens its grip. The lyric speaks in the voice of a cornered gunman, and the arrangement answers with blunt force, narrow harmonic rooms, and a hard forward strike from first bar to last.

Agents of the law
Luckless pedestrian
I know you’re out there
With rage in your eyes and your megaphones
Saying all is forgiven
Mad Dog surrender
How can I answer
A man of my mind can do anything

He opens inside a standoff, surrounded by police and by the public voice of authority calling for surrender. The plea that “all is forgiven” meets a mind already locked into defiance, and the last line turns the scene toward danger by stressing his volatility, pride, and belief in his own capacity for extreme action.

I’m a bookkeeper’s son
I don’t want to shoot no one
Well I crossed my old man back in Oregon
Don’t take me alive
Got a case of dynamite
I could hold out here all night
Yes I crossed my old man back in Oregon
Don’t take me alive

The chorus mixes ordinary background with outlaw resolve. He insists he is not eager to kill, but some break with his past has pushed him into a corner, and now he would rather die in armed resistance than let the law take him alive.

Can you hear the evil crowd
The lies and the laughter
I hear my inside
The mechanized hum of another world
Where no sun is shining
No red light flashing
Here in this darkness
I know what I’ve done
I know all at once who I am

He turns inward as the siege closes around him, shutting out the crowd and listening instead to the cold machinery of his own mind. In that darkness he stops denying the truth, and the stanza ends with a moment of stark self-recognition: he finally understands both his crime and the person he has become.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals, keyboards.
Larry Carlton — electric guitar.
Rick Marotta — drums.

“Sign In Stranger” leans on Paul Griffin’s piano and Randall’s guitar, both of which cut the song into crisp blocks. Purdie gives the beat a light snap that suits the lyric’s crooked hospitality and deadpan suspicion. Fagen never overstates the vocal. He lets the lines sit inside the arrangement’s dry wit and piano-led swing.

Have you heard about the boom on Mizar Five
People got to shout to stay alive
They don’t even have policeman one
Doesn’t matter where you been or what you’ve done
Do you have a dark spot on your past
Leave it to my man he’ll fix it fast
Pepe has a scar from ear to ear
He will make your mug shots disappear

The narrator opens by describing Mizar Five as a lawless boomtown where survival depends on noise, nerve, and reinvention. Its appeal lies in total escape: no police, no questions, and men like Pepe who can erase your criminal past and give you a fresh start.

You zombie
Be born again my friend
Won’t you sign in stranger

He turns the invitation into a mocking call for rebirth, addressing the listener as someone half-dead, anonymous, and ready to take on a new identity. The chorus presents Mizar Five as a place where outsiders can sign in and become someone else.

Do you like to take a yo-yo for a ride
Zombie I can see you’re qualified
Walk around collecting Turkish union dues
They will call you sir and shine your shoes
Or maybe you would like to see the show
You’ll enjoy the Cafe D’Escargot
Folks are in a line around the block
Just to see her do the can-can-Jacques

He widens the picture through absurd errands, cheap status, and nightlife spectacle, making the place feel both comic and corrupt. Everything runs on hustle, performance, and low glamour, and the listener is told he fits right in with this crooked little paradise.

You zombie
Be born again my friend
Won’t you sign in stranger

He repeats the sales pitch with the same taunting warmth. The promise still hinges on transformation, but it comes wrapped in a tone that makes the whole offer sound slippery and faintly disreputable.

Love or leave her, yellow fever
Sure, it’s all in the game
And who are you
Just another scurvy brother

He closes by stripping away any illusion of dignity or uniqueness. Desire, sickness, and opportunism all collapse into the same game, and the final line reduces the listener to one more shabby drifter in a world full of them.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals.
Elliott Randall — electric guitar.
Paul Griffin — piano.
Bernard Purdie — drums.

A5. “The Fez” (4:01) | Becker/Fagen/Griffin | vocals: Fagen

This cut runs on a repeated keyboard figure, Becker’s guitar lead, and a drum part that places every accent with exact control. Griffin shares the writing credit here, and the song’s hypnotic design reflects that keyboard idea from the first second onward. Fagen delivers the lyric in a flat unhurried line, which lets the joke and the pressure sit side by side without extra emphasis.

No I’m never gonna do it without the fez on
Oh no
No I’m never gonna do it without the fez on
Oh no
That’s what I am
Please understand
I wanna be your holy man

The narrator opens with a comic but insistent refusal, making the fez into a condition of identity, performance, and desire. The hat becomes part costume, part fetish object, and part symbol of the role he wants to play as he asks to be accepted as a kind of mock “holy man.”

No I’m never gonna do it without the fez on
Oh no
Ain’t never gonna do it without the fez on
Oh no
That’s what I am
Please understand
I wanna be your holy man

He repeats the demand with the same mix of humor, stubbornness, and theatrical self-definition. The fez now sounds less like an accessory than a ritual requirement, something he needs in order to inhabit the persona he presents.

No I’m never gonna do it without the fez on
Oh no
Don’t make me do it without the fez on
Oh no
That’s what I am please understand

He closes by turning the refrain into a final plea not to strip away the emblem that completes him. The joke remains intact, but beneath it sits a simple point: without the fez, the whole identity, fantasy, and performance fall apart.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals.
Walter Becker — electric guitar.
Paul Griffin — organ.
Bernard Purdie — drums.

B1. “Green Earrings” (4:05) | Becker/Fagen | vocals: Fagen

“Green Earrings” opens side two with clavinet, Fender Rhodes, bass, and drums locked into a tight clipped chassis. Fagen adds synthesizer touches across the top, Schmit widens the background line, and the guitar chair breaks open in two stages. Available credits agree on Elliott Randall’s main guitar role; solo attributions also name Denny Dias on the bridge passage.

Cold, daring
No flies on me
Sorry, angel
I must take what I see
Green earrings
I remember
The rings of rare design
I remember
The look in your eyes
I don’t mind

He opens in a mood of sharp attraction and self-justification, presenting himself as alert, opportunistic, and drawn to the woman’s striking details. The green earrings, unusual rings, and remembered look in her eyes fix the encounter in his mind as something sensual, vivid, and irresistible.

Greek medallion
Sparkles when you smile
Sorry, angel
I get hungry like a child
Green earrings
I remember
The rings of rare design
I remember
The look in your eyes
I don’t mind

He shifts from observation to confession, focusing on the medallion and her smile as further signs of the allure he cannot shake. The line about getting hungry like a child makes his desire sound immediate and impulsive, while the repeated memories confirm that her image still holds him.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals, synthesizer.
Elliott Randall — electric guitar.
Denny Dias — bridge guitar/solo attribution.
Chuck Rainey — bass.
Timothy B. Schmit — backing vocals.
Paul Griffin — clavinet.
Don Grolnick — Fender Rhodes.
Bernard Purdie — drums.

B2. “Haitian Divorce” (5:51) | Becker/Fagen | vocals: Fagen

“Haitian Divorce” spreads wider than anything on side one. Dean Parks lays down the talk-box guitar line, Becker alters that signal, and Purdie gives the whole track a sly unbroken roll under Fagen’s dry account of holiday sex and legal fallout. The talk-box solo gives the song its central sonic identity, and the long running time lets the arrangement settle into a deeper rhythmic pocket than most of the album.

Babs and Clean Willie were in love they said
So in love the preacher’s face turned red
Soon everybody knew the thing was dead
He shouts, she bites, they wrangle through the night
She go crazy
Got to make a getaway
Papa say

The song opens by introducing Babs and Clean Willie as a couple whose proclaimed love quickly collapses into public dysfunction. What begins as romance turns into scandal, fighting, and emotional chaos, until escape starts to look like the only answer.

Oh – no hesitation
No tears and no hearts breakin’
No remorse
Oh – congratulations
This is your Haitian Divorce

The chorus frames the split with bitter irony, treating the breakup like a ceremony or achievement instead of a tragedy. Its mock congratulations strip the divorce of sentiment and turn it into a cynical, almost festive transaction.

She takes the taxi to the good hotel
Bon marché as far as she can tell
She drinks the zombie from the cocoa shell
She feels alright, she get it on tonight
Mister driver
Take me where the music play
Papa say

She leaves the wreckage behind and heads into nightlife, pleasure, and intoxication. The hotel, the drink, and the request for music all mark a turn toward reinvention through desire, motion, and temporary release.

Oh – no hesitation
No tears and no hearts breakin’
No remorse
Oh – congratulations
This is your Haitian Divorce

The refrain returns with the same dry detachment, reinforcing the sense that this breakup now belongs to a world of appetite and spectacle. Any trace of heartbreak gets replaced by style, ritual, and sarcasm.

At the Grotto
In the greasy chair
Sits the Charlie with the lotion and the kinky hair
When she smiled, she said it all
The band was hot so
They danced the famous Merengue
Now we dolly back
Now we fade to black

The scene shifts into a vividly cinematic encounter, where the setting, the man, and the dance all suggest seduction unfolding under tropical heat and nightclub energy. The last two lines make the whole episode feel like a film sequence, as though the affair moves straight from flirtation into implied consummation.

Tearful reunion in the USA
Day by day those memories fade away
Some babies grow in a peculiar way
It changed, it grew, and everybody knew
Semi-mojo
Who’s this kinky so-and-so?
Papa go

He closes with the couple back in the United States, where the consequences of the Haitian escape emerge in unmistakable form. Memory fades, but the child exposes what happened abroad, turning the song’s joke into a lasting, awkward aftermath that everyone can see.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals.
Dean Parks — electric guitar.
Walter Becker — talk-box guitar treatment.
Bernard Purdie — drums.

B3. “Everything You Did” (3:56) | Becker/Fagen | vocals: Fagen

This song cuts a domestic argument into short jagged shapes. Fagen’s piano sets the harmonic bed, Carlton answers with a pointed lead line, and the drum part hits with a drier heavier snap than the Purdie tracks around it. The lyric’s most quoted line turns the Eagles into a piece of household spite, but the arrangement does not stop for a wink; it drives straight through the bitterness.

Where did the bastard run
Is he still around
Now you gotta tell me everything you did baby
I’m gonna get a gun
Shoot the lover down
Are you gonna tell me everything you did baby
Traces are everywhere
In our happy home
Now you better tell me everything you did baby
I jumped out of my easy chair
It was not my own
Now I want to hear about everything you did baby

He opens in shock, jealousy, and humiliation after discovering clear signs of an affair inside what he thought was a secure home. Rage drives the scene, but beneath the violent language sits a demand for confession, as he tries to force the whole hidden story into the open.

I never knew you
You were a roller skater
You gonna show me later
Turn up the Eagles the neighbors are listening

The mood turns more taunting and unstable, as though anger has slid into sarcasm, sexual resentment, and performative cool. The line about the neighbors suggests a household already on the verge of public exposure, where private betrayal bleeds into social embarrassment.

You know how people talk
I wonder what they say
I think you better tell me everything you did baby

His suspicion widens from the affair itself to gossip and reputation. What happened between two people now feels like something the whole outside world may already be discussing.

I never knew you
You were a roller skater
You gonna show me later

He repeats the phrase as a bitter admission that the woman he thought he knew now seems unfamiliar. The shortened refrain makes that sense of estrangement sound even more cutting.

You never came to me
When you were so inclined
Yes you could have told me everything you did baby
I know where baby’s at
I know your filthy mind
Now you’re gonna do me everything you did baby

He closes by shifting from accusation to possessive retaliation, mixing wounded pride with a desire to reclaim control. The final lines make the song’s emotional core plain: betrayal has turned intimacy into something coercive, bitter, and vengeful.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals, piano.
Larry Carlton — electric guitar.
Rick Marotta — drums.

B4. “The Royal Scam” (6:31) | Becker/Fagen | vocals: Fagen

The title track closes the album with its longest and heaviest structure. Fagen sets the vocal against piano and a slower harmonic drag, Rainey holds the bass line deep in the track, Chuck Findley drops trumpet figures into the open spaces, and Carlton drives the long guitar statements that carry the song across its full span. The lyric gives the album its darkest image of arrival, fraud, and urban ruin, while the arrangement answers with mass, tension, and a final extended burn.

And they wandered in
From the city of St. John
Without a dime
Wearing coats that shined
Both red and green
Colors from their sunny island
From their boats of iron
They looked upon the promised land
Where surely life was sweet
On the rising tide
To New York City
Did they ride into the street
See the glory
Of the royal scam

The song opens with poor arrivals from a Caribbean island reaching New York in hope of a better life. Their bright clothes and memories of home travel with them, but the “promised land” already carries irony, since the title phrase suggests that the dream they are chasing hides a larger fraud.

They are hounded down
To the bottom of a bad town
Amid the ruins
Where they learn to fear
An angry race of fallen kings
Their dark companions
While the memory of
Their southern sky was clouded by
A savage winter
Every patron saint
Hung on the wall, shared the room
With twenty sinners

He shows what happens after arrival: hope gives way to poverty, crowding, cold, and intimidation in the city’s underside. The immigrants are pushed into harsh living conditions among damaged, hostile people, and the remembered warmth of home fades under winter, fear, and spiritual exhaustion.

See the glory
Of the royal scam

The chorus turns bitter and sarcastic. The “glory” is false, because the whole system feeds on promises of prosperity while trapping the newcomers inside exploitation and decay.

By the blackened wall
He does it all
He thinks he’s died and gone to heaven
Now the tale is told
By the old man back home
He reads the letter
How they are paid in gold
Just to babble in the back room
All night and waste their time
And they wandered in
From the city of St. John without a dime

He closes by showing how the illusion survives even after the reality turns grim. One man convinces himself he has found success, and letters sent home turn hardship into fantasy, so the scam continues through false stories of gold and easy advancement, ready to lure the next penniless arrivals.

Donald Fagen — lead vocals, piano.
Larry Carlton — electric guitar.
Chuck Findley — trumpet.
Chuck Rainey — bass.
Bernard Purdie — drums.

Artwork and packaging

The cover shows a suited man asleep on a Boston bus-stop bench while monstrous animal-headed towers rise in his dream. Larry Zox created the skyscraper-beast painting for an unreleased Van Morrison project, and Ed Caraeff proposed combining it with Charlie Ganse’s photograph of the sleeping figure for this sleeve. Caraeff also handled the art direction and design, while Tom Nikosey supplied the typographic design.

Singles

ABC issued “Kid Charlemagne” in May 1976, and it reached No. 82 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July. “The Fez” followed in September 1976 in the US and reached No. 59 in October. “Haitian Divorce” came out in November 1976 in the UK and reached No. 17 on the UK Singles Chart in January 1977.

The Royal Scam reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200 and later received Platinum certification from the RIAA. Abroad, the album reached No. 3 in New Zealand, No. 11 in the UK, and No. 14 in the Netherlands. The album ranked No. 70 on the Billboard year-end chart of 1976.

Tracklist:
A1. “Kid Charlemagne” (4:38)
A2. “The Caves of Altamira” (3:33)
A3. “Don’t Take Me Alive” (4:19)
A4. “Sign In Stranger” (4:22)
A5. “The Fez” (3:59)
B1. “Green Earrings” (4:05)
B2. “Haitian Divorce” (5:50)
B3. “Everything You Did” (3:54)
B4. “The Royal Scam” (6:31)

Credits:
Donald Fagen – keyboards, vocals, background vocals
Walter Becker – bass, guitar

Paul Griffin – keyboards
Don Grolnick – keyboards
Denny Dias – guitar
Larry Carlton – guitar
Dean Parks – guitar
Elliott Randall – guitar
Mark Davis – bass
Jim Horn – saxophone
Plas Johnson – saxophone
John Klemmer – saxophone
Chuck Findley – trumpet
Bob Findley – horn
Dick “Slyde” Hyde – horn, trombone
Chuck Rainey – bass
Rick Marotta – drums (A3, B3)
Bernard “Pretty” Purdie – drums (all other tracks)
Gary Coleman – percussion
Victor Feldman – percussion, keyboards
Timothy B. Schmit – background vocals
Venetta Fields – background vocals
Clydie King – background vocals
Sherlie Matthews – background vocals
Michael McDonald – background vocals
Gary Katz – producer
Roger Nichols – engineer