Musician co-creator of Steely Dan
‘I can start songs and Walter can finish them’
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, has died at age 67.
His death on Sept. 3 was announced on his website, which gave no details. He lived in Maui, Hawaii.
Becker was unable to perform with Steely Dan this summer at the Classic West and Classic East festivals in Los Angeles and New York City. Last month, Fagen told Billboard, “Walter’s recovering from a procedure and hopefully he’ll be fine very soon.”
Walter Becker was born in Forest Hills, Queens, on Feb. 20, 1950, and studied saxophone and guitar in his teens. He met Fagen in 1967 when they were students at Bard College.
As Steely Dan, Becker and 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. Becker and 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,” Fagen said in 1977.
Steely Dan’s musical surfaces were sleek and understated, smooth enough to almost be mistaken for easylistening pop, and polished through countless takes that earned Becker and Fagen a daunting reputation as studio perfectionists.
However Steely Dan — named after a dildo in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch — dissolved after the 1980 album Gaucho. The album’s recording had been plagued by problems. Becker had become a heroin user. The master tape of an entire, nearly finished song, The Second Arrangement, was accidentally erased. Early in 1980, Becker’s girlfriend died of a drug overdose. Weeks later, Becker was hit by a taxi, fracturing his leg.
The musician moved to Maui, where he detoxed and became an avocado farmer.
Becker and Fagen remained in touch, and in 1993, they re- emerged as Steely Dan, leading a band that would tour frequently well into 2017. Steely Dan 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.