WALTER BECKER
Steely Dan co-founder (1950—2017)
“Ican never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas,” remarked Walter Becker in 2008. “and not even different ones – the stolen horrible ideas or stale horrible ideas or so on and so forth. It’s just a remarkable thing. and it’s very, very funny.”
That quote (which was prompted by an interviewer’s question about Hollywood) takes us through several stages of Becker. First: the superior, seen-it-all hypercritic. Second: the man of taste and refinement who deplores unoriginality in the arts. Third: the sardonic observer of humanity who’s secretly pleased that, with so many venal dollar-eyed incompetents around, he’ll never run short of material. Los angeles was where Becker had been a spectacular success – the pale new Yorker who, with his heliophobic partner Donald Fagen, made a series of albums that set new benchmarks for sophisticated rock on the West coast, while somehow articulating an unscratchable existential itch to hunker down among the losers and skyscrapers back east.
When he gave that interview to Time Out New York in 2008, Becker was a considerably more amiable character – a long-established resident of Paia in Hawaii; a man with nothing to prove to anyone – than the 1970s Becker had been. a railthin verbal assassin, he’d snickered at the world behind a curtain of waist-length hair and aviator sunglasses. “Extremely cynical and hard to get a reading on,” was how Steely Dan’s biographer Brian Sweet portrayed him, adding that if session musicians found Fagen a taciturn personality in the studio, they hardly even saw Becker, who sat inscrutably in the control room and seldom let a word of approval utter from his lips.
When the 67-year-old Becker’s death was announced on September 3, Fagen paid tribute within hours, describing his friend as “smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter… and hysterically funny”. They’d known each other for 50 years – longer than Ellington and Strayhorn; longer than Rodgers’ partnerships with Hart and Hammerstein combined – having met as teenagers in 1967 at Bard college in new York State, where Fagen was studying English literature and Becker was taking languages. Thinking back to those Bard days in 1973 (“My Old School”, on Countdown To Ecstasy), they recalled their alma mater as a hotbed of intrigue, espionage, police informers and drug busts. The dean must have been appalled. One imagines it was Becker, an adept judge of a word’s precise ironic value, who lovingly finessed the song’s best line – about the father being “quite surprised” to find his daughter with “the working girls in the county jail”.
Though you’re never far away in a Steely Dan song from a charismatic underdog with a glorious name (“Jive Miguel”, “Snake Mary”, “Babs” and “clean Willy”, “Hoops Mccann”), Becker and Fagen in person made for a tight-lipped, anonymous pair, often mistaken for each other in mid-’70s photo captions. a casual music fan hearing “Do It again” or “Rikki Don’t Lose That number” on the radio would have had little idea, or even none at all, of who Walter Becker was. On the first three Steely Dan albums he was the bassist, but he began moving across to guitar on the third (Pretzel Logic). He played impressive solos on two tracks on the fourth (Katy Lied), and by the sixth (Aja) he was every bit as masterful as the a-list cast of session guitarists (Randall, Derringer, carlton) that he and Fagen famously loved to hire. Becker’s three solos on Aja are teeming with blue notes, but they have a spring in their step like a streetwise Steely Dan character who’s just extricated himself from a tight spot. They exemplify what Ian Dury, an Aja fan, meant when he talked of “a sound that lifts your heart up”. More of Becker’s solos can be heard on “The Fez”, “Gaucho” and “FM (no Static at all)”.
as the non-singing half of the team, Becker’s exact role in the songwriting process was not always easy to define. Many Steely Dan songs originated with the germ of a Fagen idea, but Becker was absolutely essential to what happened next. He would edit, embellish and subvert, adding musical elements from blues and jazz, and bringing in obscure references from cinema and literature. He would also, it’s said, provide the authentic sleaze and drug-speak (“Tonight when I chase the dragon…”), which came to reflect his own addictive lifestyle in the late ’70s. When we know that Fagen wrote one or two songs on his own – “Barrytown” on Pretzel Logic, for example – Becker’s non-involvement seems obvious, hanging in the air like a question mark. Would he have made Fagen change “I just read the Daily News” to a raunchier or more esoteric publication? Would he have flown in a chord from a 1954 Prestige LP for the bridge?
What Fagen calls Becker’s “knack of creative mimicry” was presumably an asset from the start, a password to their exclusive humour, a kind of instant linguistic facility that enabled them to visualise absurd scenarios and run with them. They could be close relatives of Woody allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, giggling together on a bench as they make hilarious comments about the inner lives of the other park-goers. “Much of our work process is sort of tending to a series of running gags that we’ve been working with over a period of 30 years,” suggested Becker in a BBc Online webchat some years ago, after an eagleeyed fan spotted that the sleeve credits for Fagen’s 1993 album Kamakiriad (which Becker produced) contained phrases that reappeared as lyrics on Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature seven years later.
Like a lot of double acts, their work was often about double acts. In “Gaucho”, a gay couple argue indignantly about a handsome young man whom one of them has invited in as a house-guest. In “charlie Freak”, a thief with a conscience pays a posthumous act of kindness to his departed friend. In “chain Lighting”, which Becker and Fagen approached as a song so abstruse that it could never be deciphered, two ex-nazis relive old times by revisiting the site of a Hitler rally. When a song’s premise and text was deemed water-tight (and several witness accounts point to Becker having the final say on this), it was handed over to La’s top session players and turned into the four or five minutes of audiophile bliss that made a Steely Dan record an apotheosis of its craft. But even when Becker and Fagen lingered over nuances in the mix, they still rocked with laughter when they heard their lyrics sung back at them.
Had Becker been a contemporary of Woody allen’s, rather than a baby boomer, who knows, he might have sent jokes to Sid caesar as a precocious adolescent. Instead his highbrow humour found a kindred spirit in Fagen, a fellow enthusiast of bebop and the Beat Generation, and the 1970s california rock scene was to prove their unlikely stage. Having faced prospects as bleak as charlie Freak’s in turn-of-the-’70s Manhattan, they became the toast of La by 1974’75: the stubborn twosome who dissolved their own band and yet went from strength to strength; the stylish, sophisticated auteurs that everyone wanted to work for. Fagen’s memoir, Eminent Hipsters, disappointingly sidestepped this part of their lives – indeed, it had little to say about his pal Becker in general. Becker’s own autobiography would surely have been one of the all-time classics; but he would have known that he could never write it. Quite apart from having to confront a painful childhood, there was the horrible black cloud of his girlfriend Karen Stanley’s fatal overdose in his Upper West Side apartment in 1980. Her mother launched a $17m wrongful death lawsuit against Becker, claiming he’d introduced her daughter to heroin and cocaine. The case was settled out of court.
It was a substantially less troubled Becker who resurfaced in Hawaii later that decade. He embarked on a successful career producing other artists – Rickie Lee Jones, china crisis – before reuniting with Fagen for a new phase of Steely
His highbrow humour found a kindred spirit in Donald Fagen
Dan. He also released two well-regarded solo albums, 11 Tracks Of Whack (1994) and Circus
Money (2008). The first of these, in just about the most atypical move that Becker-the-songwriter ever made, included an irony-free love song to his young son (“Little Kawaii”). He also went a small way towards renouncing the notoriously fastidious attention to detail that he’d practised throughout the first phase of Steely Dan.
“My attention span is not that good any more,” he confessed in 2008, “and I sort of believe… that the perfect is the enemy of the good. One of the real dangers of doing the kind of thing that we do, where people let you do whatever you want and you have money, is burnout. You go too far. There’s no-one there to stop you, so you keep going.”
a Steely Dan fan doesn’t have to delve too deep into the catalogue to find games of excess, decadence and risk. Becker had the skill, and maybe he acquired it from personal experience, to write in the voice of the high rollers and lowlifes alike, getting to the heart of their daily dramas, drawing out the humour like blood in a dropper. an impenetrable composite of his talents and demons, he remains one of the most fascinating individuals in post-war american music.