Walter Becker — R.I.P.

[Ron Thorne]

Walter Becker, Co-Founder of Steely Dan, Dies at 67

By JON PARELES | SEPT. 3, 2017


Walter Becker, left, and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan in 2008 at a cancer benefit concert in New York.
Credit Evan Agostini/Associated Press

Walter Becker, the guitarist and songwriter who made suavely subversive pop hits out of slippery jazz harmonies and verbal enigmas in Steely Dan, his partnership with Donald Fagen, died on Sunday. He was 67.

His death was announced on his official website, which gave no other details. He lived in Maui, Hawaii.

Mr. Becker was unable to perform with Steely Dan this summer at Classic West and Classic East in Los Angeles and New York City, two stadium-size festivals of 1970s bands. Last month, Mr. Fagen told Billboard, “Walter’s recovering from a procedure and hopefully he’ll be fine very soon.”

As Steely Dan, Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen changed the vocabulary of pop in the 1970s with songs like “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and “Peg.” Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen were close collaborators on every element of a song: words, music, arrangement. “We think very much the same musically. I can start songs and Walter can finish them,” Mr. Fagen said in a 1977 interview.

Steely Dan’s musical surfaces were sleek and understated, smooth enough to almost be mistaken for easy-listening pop, and polished through countless takes that earned Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen a daunting reputation as studio perfectionists.

Their songs were catchy and insinuating enough to infiltrate pop radio in the 1970s. “That’s sort of what we wanted to do, conquer from the margins,” Mr. Becker told Time Out New York in 2011. “Find our place in the middle based on the fact that we were creatures of the margin and of alienation.”

Steely Dan’s lyrics were far from straightforward, depicting cryptic situations and sketching characters like addicts, suicidal fugitives and dirty old men. “You can infer certain things about the lives of people who would write these songs. This we cannot and do not deny,” Mr. Becker deadpanned in an online interview with the BBC in 2000.

Meanwhile, the music used richly ambiguous harmonies rooted in Debussy, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, giving the songs a sophisticated core that would be widely influential across jazz and pop.


Mr. Becker, left, and Mr. Fagen in Los Angeles in 1977. Credit Nick Ut/Associated Press

Although Steely Dan arrived as a full band on its 1972 debut album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” it soon recast itself as the Becker-Fagen songwriting team, backed by select session musicians. In its 1970s hitmaking heyday, Steely Dan rarely toured, preferring to work in the studio.

Steely Dan — named after a dildo in the William Burroughs novel “Naked Lunch” — dissolved after its 1980 album, “Gaucho,” though Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen stayed in contact.

In 1993, Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen re-emerged as Steely Dan, leading a band that would tour frequently well into 2017. Steely Dan’s songwriting and recording process remained painstaking; it released only two more studio albums, “Two Against Nature” in 2000 (which won the Grammy as Album of the Year) and “Everything Must Go” in 2003. But unlike its 1970s incarnation, Steely Dan thrived onstage.

In a statement released Sunday, Mr. Fagen wrote that Mr. Becker “was cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny. Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art.”

Walter Becker was born in Forest Hills, Queens, on Feb. 20, 1950, and studied saxophone and guitar in his teens. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

He met Mr. Fagen in 1967 when they were students at Bard College, a place they would sardonically recall in Steely Dan’s “My Old School.”

“We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a moldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm,” Mr. Fagen wrote. With Mr. Fagen on keyboards and Mr. Becker on guitar or bass, they formed bands there and began to write songs together.

Once Mr. Fagen graduated in 1969, Mr. Becker dropped out and both moved to New York City, where they were noticed by Kenny Vance of the Top 40 band Jay and the Americans. They played in the touring band for Jay and the Americans and wrote the soundtrack for a 1971 Richard Pryor movie, “You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It.” The producer Gary Katz got them jobs as staff songwriters for ABC Records, and Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen moved to Los Angeles in 1971. Barbra Streisand recorded one of their songs, “I Mean to Shine.”

They assembled Steely Dan in Los Angeles with Mr. Fagen on keyboards and lead vocals, Mr. Becker on bass, Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter on guitars, Jim Hodder on drums and a second vocalist, David Palmer. “Do It Again” from Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” reached the Top 10.

The group quickly recorded two more albums, “Countdown to Ecstasy” in 1973 and “Pretzel Logic” in 1974, which included its biggest Top 10 hit, “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number.” In mid-1974, Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen decided that they no longer wanted to tour. “It seemed like the more complex the music we were playing, the less able we were to guarantee its consistency,” Mr. Becker recalled in a 1996 interview with The Toronto Star.

Steely Dan reached its pinnacle as a studio duo. Its lyrics took on ambitious themes: a stock-market crash in “Black Friday,” Puerto Rican immigration in “The Royal Scam,” the jazz life in “Deacon Blues.” And its music grew both more subtle and more magisterial, with intricate horn arrangements and pristine sound.

On its 1977 album, “Aja,” Steely Dan brought in celebrated jazz musicians including Wayne Shorter, who plays on the title track, along with studio musicians like the guitarist Larry Carlton, the drummer Steve Gadd and the keyboardist Victor Feldman. “Aja” became Steely Dan’s first certified million-seller in the United States and its best-selling album.

But the recording of its successor, “Gaucho,” was plagued by problems. Mr. Becker had become a heroin user. The master tape of an entire nearly finished song, “The Second Arrangement,” was accidentally erased. Early in 1980, Mr. Becker’s girlfriend died of a drug overdose in his apartment. Weeks later, Mr. Becker was hit by a taxi, fracturing his leg. “We were quantum criminals,” Mr. Becker told The Independent in 1994. “The car and I were attempting to occupy the same place at the same time.”

In 1981, Steely Dan quietly disbanded. According to Mr. Fagen’s statement, Mr. Becker’s “habits got the better of him by the end of the ’70s, and we lost touch for a while.” Mr. Becker moved to Maui, where he detoxed and became an avocado farmer.

In the second half of the 1980s he returned to music. He was a producer, and was credited as a band member, on “Flaunt the Imperfection” by the Scottish band China Crisis in 1985, and he went on to produce Rickie Lee Jones’s 1989 album, “Flying Cowboys.”

In 1991, Mr. Becker began sitting in with Mr. Fagen’s New York Rock and Soul Revue. The duo also produced solo albums for each other: Mr. Fagen’s 1993 album, “Kamakiriad,” and Mr. Becker’s 1994 album, “11 Tracks of Whack” (which had 12 tracks). And in 1993, Steely Dan decisively re-emerged as a touring band.

Songwriting and recording remained a painstaking process for Steely Dan; it didn’t release another studio album, “Two Against Nature,” until 2000, 20 years after “Gaucho.” But “Two Against Nature” sold a million copies in the United States and won the Grammy Award as Album of the Year; Steely Dan was also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Its final album, “Everything Must Go,” was released in 2003; for the first time on a Steely Dan studio album, Mr. Becker sang lead vocals, on “Slang of Ages.” Mr. Becker released a second solo album, “Circus Money,” in 2008.

Steely Dan toured regularly until well into 2017, settling in for long residencies at places like the Beacon Theater in New York City and performing entire albums from its catalog.

The band that once shunned touring had grown to enjoy it. “We’ve been lucky,” Mr. Becker said in 2011. “We’ve stretched our audience’s indulgence and fondness for us to the point that it can still be fun for us.”

Correction: September 3, 2017

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year the album “Two Against Nature” was released. It was 2000, not 1993.

[Ron Thorne]

Marc JazzWax Myers



RIP Walter Becker, co-founder of Steely Dan. Read my recent WSJ interview with co-founder Donald Fagen... http://on.wsj.com/2eNtt1i ...my 2011 Q&A with Donald http://on.wsj.com/2evxOTq ... and my "Anatomy of a Song" interview with Donald and Walter on the making of "Deacon Blues"... http://on.wsj.com/2lHs6Pz

[Ron Thorne]

[Ron Thorne]

Read Rickie Lee Jones' Poignant Tribute to Steely Dan's Walter Becker


Rickie Lee Jones remembers Steely Dan's Walter Becker, who produced the singer's 1989 album 'Flying Cowboys.'
Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images Entertainment

By Rickie Lee Jones
1 day ago

Singer Rickie Lee Jones is a longtime Steely Dan fan who collaborated with the late Walter Becker on her 1989 album Flying Cowboys. In recent years, Jones was asked to serve as opener during Steely Dan's Carnegie Hall residencies in New York, where she joined the band onstage during their set. Following Becker's death September 3rd, Jones penned a tribute to her friend and producer, which you can read below:

I first heard Steely Dan back in Kansas City, Missouri, where I ended up living with my dad after running away from home a second summer in a row. It was 1970 and I was just 15 years old. "Do It Again" was playing on the radio that summer night. I had just dropped some acid and I was on my way to see Led Zeppelin for their KC concert on their first USA tour. My date was a fat guy I had just met – him driving by and said, "Hey you wanna go to a concert?" He had high hopes I guess, and I just wanted to get out of the house. What I remember more than Led Zeppelin though is "Do It Again" drumming through the twilight heat, and the joy of all that Victor Feldman percussion.

Sexy. Contained. Because what "the Dan" accomplished was this: They introduced a new idea into the musical conversation of the time. It was the idea that intelligent music was cool. In a year where drum solos lasted minutes, quarter hours even, and singers screamed – a lot. Steely Dan made it cool to be educated. It is safe to say that they are the beginning of college rock.

There, right there, that's where that idea begins. Two homely guys who write with a fortitude that no one else processed. None of this emotional crap. They were all business. Which led to sophistication. Which is how they are categorized by punk rockers today. Which is kind of funny, because they loved the simplicity of the blues and 12 bar rock & roll. Yes, they were, more or less, responsible for the drum machine (built by their engineer Roger Nichols). But I like to think that was some kind of punishment for being so exacting from every player they worked with.

By the time I started college, 1973, "Reelin' in the Years" had become a college anthem. And now with the release of Countdown to Ecstasy, kids were bringing the record just to stare at the cover. It was holy ground; it was biblical. It was also cynical and kind of... well... women-hating. They seemed to really be obsessed with women they did not really like. I would come to understand some of how that came about, personal information I am not prepared to share, even though Walter has died. Those heartaches go with him to his grave.

Steely Dan became a part of my life in a much more personal basis in the next few years. That boyfriend from "Living It Up" he practiced Steely Dan solos nonstop. I can sing most of the solo from "Kid Charlemagne." But... I think they were part of my life long before they formed their dildo-named duo. (In case you don't know by now, Steely Dan is a dildo in the book Naked Lunch, by the famous drug addict William Burroughs.) I read that book, too, but I don't really remember the dildo passage.

The duo's first success was as songwriters. Sixties rock "band" Jay and the Americans hired Fagen and Becker as their back-up band. I believe the rest of the group became an early incarnation of Steely Dan. In case you don't remember Jay, he was a handsome all-American guy along the lines of Paul Revere and the Raiders. At least to my 13-year-old brain they were about the same. He sang songs like "Only in America" and "Come a Little Bit Closer," one of those rather dubious lyrics about the morality of certain women.

I moved back to Santa Monica College. We were four of us, hanging on the lawn during breaks, going to clubs on Main Street some nights – Pink Elephant, a newly discovered gay bar, we'd go dance to "I Will Survive" on the jukebox. Turned out one of us had not yet come out of the closet, but that's another story. The best musician of our group loved his Steely Dan, and that was how I came to hear "Bodhisattva," "My Old School," "Pearl of the Quarter." Lines about Annandale and oleanders with pesky stomping bass and drums. I mean these guys knew how to make music. They had a hit on every record – I mean a thing that was played on the radio over and over – that became part of how we saw our collective selves.

I was brought up, you might say, on writing thick with imagery and subtle implication and I loved it. I loved the innuendo, the humor, the sting. The genius was as much in the part we filled in, the lines they didn't write. That was where the sticky stuff of memory made their music a part of our own personal history. I knew about hiding behind the oleanders, heck I grew up in Arizona. (In case the Orb forgot to tell you) It wasn't the specific line, it was the sorrow and fury of the melody, "Bring back the Boston rag. Tell all your buddies that it ain't no drag."

I was only 19, and I wanted it to come back and I didn't even know what it was. I felt the melody, you get me? "Johnny swept the playroom and he swallowed up all he found. It was 48 hours till Lonnie came around." I have often said that so much of what we write seems to be prophetic. Walter lost too many people to drugs. He found too many people laying on the floor. The bed. Too many heartbreaks.

Walter and Donald. Walter Becker, the quiet half, the straight man to Donald Fagen's main man. Donald the Voice, and... Walter. Walter wrote much of the music than the public realizes. As much as Donald. A true partnership. "Done up in blue print blue... It sure looks good on you… Peg."

"What's blue print blue? Like, blue-print paper an architect uses?" – Rickie Lee
"I don't know. I just felt like writing it that way." – Walter B.

I met Donald Fagan when I was working on my second record, I think. He did some synth stuff one of the tracks. It was so cool to meet him, late one night in New York City at a studio where his producer kept their stuff. But Walter wasn't there. I was kind of glad because Walter scared me. His pictures scared me. I often said he looks like the ugliest guy I ever saw. He looks so mean. Really mean.

So, fate arranged that I should learn a lesson about my presumptions, and the terrible things I might say to nobody in particular. My career in 1989 was… how shall I say… unsure of itself. In search of a lost chord. Waiting in a room with a number. Walter was on a list of potential producers. I came back from living in France, pregnant, moved to the L.A. area. I met Walter there one afternoon; he drove all the way up to Ojai (60 miles) after flying all from Maui, just for the meeting with me. And as it turned out, he was not so ugly after all. He was rather delicate looking. And he had a soft energy, nothing like what I thought I saw in the pictures. A softy. A recovering addict. Hey, me, too. He knew more about music right off the bat than anyone I had met in a long time. He didn't patronize, he didn't condescend, not even a tiny bit, not for one moment.

He respected what I had written, he had listened carefully to everything. He had ideas. He didn't say, "Let's do a Marvin Gaye kind of thing on this." Like the previous ridiculous producer candidate had said. If you don't know what's wrong with saying that, then maybe you should never produce a record. Although nowadays that would be a moot point I guess.

I hired him, and we agreed to start working in September. My previous two records had also begun in September. Hmm. I had to quit nursing my daughter. I spent August readjusting my life, an apartment in town, getting ready to leave my infant and make a different kind of child.

When the record was released, he did all manner of promotion for it. I was sorry for that. This red-headed DJ in Austin, he just wanted to touch the purple of the royal Steely Dan. Walter called him personally. But that DJ had no intention of playing the record for that or any favor. And making artists prostitute themselves to get heard, at that point in his "important" career, it felt so dirty to me. I was sorry he was trying so hard to help me.

Our fight was about producer credit. I wanted credit. I guess I felt like I was contributing in a way that I did not get credit for. Walter came to my room at the Chateau Marmont and said this:

"Rickie, what is a producer? Because whatever it is, you have hired me to be that. That is my title. If you put your name there, what is it that I did? You see, you are the artist. As creative as you are. You do a lot; you do nothing; I am still the producer of that effort. That is my job. Please, don't do this. Don't dilute my title."

I was ashamed. Suddenly I understood how much he had at stake, trying to build a career of his own after Steely Dan. He had crashed and burned from on high. Like me. Me, I wanted some credit from a larger audience, who would never ever give me that credit no matter what I did. What sleazy DJ made a great man dial his number. Well, It had nothing to do with Walter really.

We finished the record [Flying Cowboys] with Walter's favorite engineer, the exasperating Roger [Nichols], a genius who was always making bad jokes. It was a great record. Perhaps still ahead of its time. Too many great songs. Too much pop from a wild outlaw. The theme, a kind of western supernatural... Maybe it went over a few heads. It spawned two hits – "The Horses" and "Satellites" – but not real hits. Just kind of hits. Geffen was disappointed and pulled the plug suddenly in the middle of promoting the record. It was almost gold within six months, but they expected so much more. They didn't even get me a Grammy nod. I mean, really. Mystically it stopped selling about 30,000 short of a retroactive bump. And did not sell another 30,000 for a couple years.

I didn't see Walter again until Steely Dan went on tour for the first time. There he was at the Hollywood Bowl with all the big name cats from the record. I was so proud of them. It was a house full of agents who were there to be seen. No one seemed to give a shit about "The Boston Rag" or "The Royal Scam."

Suddenly, last year, I get a request to open for Steely Dan during their run in New York City. They play at the Beacon Theater every year, a week long. Hit after hit after hit. Played perfectly. I played for 30 minutes. I was fine, not bad, good enough. My friend and virtuoso Mike Dillon played his wild vibraphone with me. And we came off feeling OK.

Mostly, we were walk-in music. That's hard. But backstage Walter and Donald were sweet. Donald was actually friendly. I felt comfortable. I was glad I came.

Next night they invited me to sing some of their songs with them. I sang "Showbiz Kids" with Steely Dan. And they wanted to do "The Horses," but I said no, I can't quit hit those notes in the key change anymore. Walter said no problem. Another time.

As I left Walter hugged me. "We will be playing down your way in the fall, maybe you can come and open for us some more."

"I'd love that."

It is September now. That fall will never come. I cannot tell you why his death has hit me so hard. I have seen a few friends go, but they are not close. People I go to see often. Something about this passing hurts.

They brought an education and precision to a conversation taking place in the late Sixties of mostly long drum solos and jams. They brought jazz solos to rock, they made being funny in lyrics cool, and they made being cool more important than being handsome. They were the first college band. That's for sure. And I am nostalgic today for that feeling of all the life being before us, and not behind. All things possible, and not relinquishing to inevitability.

I am Rickie Lee Jones. And I was one of the women Walter Becker took such good care of in his short life. I would want you to know that. He was so funny. And no, I didn't like the soprano sax on "Satellites," but that sound ended up... well, listen to Dave Mathews, for one. Walter knew what he was doing. He planted music. It grows all around us now.

Rickie Lee Jones resides in New Orleans. "On the water down in New Orleans, red beans and rice for a quarter. You can hear her almost any day singing voulez vous." "Pearl of the Quarter," Steely Dan, circa 1970…