STEELY DAN CO- FOUNDER, GUITARIST, WALTER BECKER DIES AT 67
||| WALTER BECKER | 1950- 2017
LOS ANGELES— Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist and co- founder of the 1970s rock group Steely Dan, which sold more than 40million albums and produced such hit singles as “Reelin’ In the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” and “Deacon Blues,” has died. He was 67.
His official website announced his death Sunday with no further details.
Donald Fagen said in a statement Sunday 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.
Although Steely Dan had been touring recently, Mr. Becker had missed performances earlier in the summer in Los Angeles and New York. Fagen later told Billboard that Mr. Becker was recovering from a procedure. Fagen said at the time he hoped that Mr. Becker would be fine soon.
A Queens native who started out playing the saxophone and eventually picked up the guitar, Mr. 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 in his statement. “We liked a lot of the same things: jazz ( from the twenties through the mid- sixties), W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, ( Vladimir) 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 and penned the song “I Mean to Shine,” performed by Barbra Streisand in 1971 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 recalled.
Their first album as Steely Dan, “Can’t Buy Me a Thrill” was released in 1972, and featured both “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In the Years.” A lukewarm Rolling Stone review said it contained “three top- level cuts and scattered moments of inspiration.”
The band continued producing albums throughout the 1970s, Boasting songs penned by Fagen and Becker and music provided by some of the best session musicians in the business.
“It wouldn’t bother me at all,” Becker said in an interview, “not to play onmy own album.”
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.
From 1972 to about 1980, the band enjoyed critical and commercial successes with seven studio albums, including “Pretzel Logic” and the seminal “Aja,” from 1977, but broke up in 1981 after the release of “Gaucho.”
Mr. Becker suffered personal hardships during this time, including his girlfriend’s death by overdose and a resulting lawsuit, and an injury he sustained after being struck by a cab. When Steely Dan disbanded, Mr. Becker retreated to Maui and began growing avocados.
Mr. Becker eventually 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 “EverythingMust Go.”
They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.