Walter Becker, Steely Dan co-founder
Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist and co-founder of rock duo Steely Dan, one of the most successful and adventurous groups of the 1970s and early ’80s, has died at 67.
LOS ANGELES — A rock and roll fan with a penchant for harmony and obtuse references, Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist and co-founder of the 1970s rock group Steely Dan, which sold more than 40 million albums and produced such hit singles as “Reelin’ In the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” and “Deacon Blues,” has died at age 67.
His official website announced his death Sunday with no further details.
Donald Fagen said in a statement that his Steely Dan bandmate was not only “an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter” but also “smart as a whip,” “hysterically funny” and “cynical about human nature, including his own.”
“I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band,” Fagen wrote.
Started on saxophone
A New York City native who started out playing the saxophone and eventually picked up the guitar, Becker met Fagen as a student at Bard College in 1967.
“We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a mouldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm,” Fagen recalled. “We liked a lot of the same things: jazz, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago blues.”
They played with the 1960s pop group Jay and the Americans before moving to California and founding the band, which they named after a sex toy in William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel “Naked Lunch.”
“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,” Fagen said. Their first album as Steely Dan, “Can’t Buy a Thrill” was released in 1972 and featured classics “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In the Years.”
‘Musical antiheroes’
In their music, Steely Dan offered an idiosyncratic combination of rock and jazz, backed with subversive and literary lyrics that neither expected many fans to understand — and which they themselves sometimes claimed to not understand. They scored a hit with “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” in 1974 before hitting a high point in 1977 with the album “Aja.”
“What underlies Steely Dan’s music — and may, with this album, be showing its limitations — is its extreme intellectual selfconsciousness, both in music and lyrics,” wrote critic Michael Duffy in Rolling Stone in 1977. “Given the nature of these times, this may be precisely the quality that makes Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.”
But it wasn’t quite enough to sustain Steely Dan past their next studio album, “Gaucho.” They broke up in 1981 after the album’s release.
Becker had suffered some personal hardships during this time, including addiction, his girlfriend’s death by overdose and a resulting lawsuit, and a serious injury he sustained after being struck by a cab. When Steely Dan disbanded, Becker retreated to Maui and began growing avocados, while Fagen attempted a solo career.
Becker reunited with Fagen and, after a nearly 20-year hiatus, released two albums: “Two Against Nature,” which won four Grammys, including album of the year in 2001, and “Everything Must Go.”
They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.