Walter Becker, guitarist and co-founder of the American jazz rock band Steely Dan, unexpectedly passed away yesterday, his official site announced.So far, the website has not released any further information concerning the cause of death. Becker was 67 years old.
The news of Becker’s passing comes on the heels of a recent internet celebrity death hoax targeting fellow Steely Dan co-founder and lead singer Donald Fagen. According to the unfounded rumours, Fagen died in an auto accident this past Saturday, 1 September.
Last month, Fagen revealed that Becker had been “recovering from a procedure,” after the guitarist missed two scheduled performances billed as the band’s Classic West and Classic East concerts.
Fagen released a statement on Sunday praising his longtime partner. In it, he said: “Walter Becker was my friend, my writing partner and my bandmate since we met as students 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.
“We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties), 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.
“Walter had a very rough childhood - I’ll spare you the details. Luckily, he was smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter. He 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. He used to write letters (never meant to be sent) in my wife Libby’s singular voice that made the three of us collapse with laughter.
“His habits got the best of him by the end of the seventies, and we lost touch for a while. In the eighties, when I was putting together the NY Rock and Soul Review with Libby, we hooked up again, revived the Steely Dan concept and developed another terrific band.
“I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band.” Becker and Fagen founded Steely Dan in the early 1970’s, shortly after meeting at Bard College in Upstate New York in 1967. The pair played together in numerous groups before striking out on their own calling themselves Steely Dan after a strapped-on dildo referred to in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch.
The band initially featured a revolving door of singers and support musicians before eventually morphing into the core duo of Becker and Fagen. Merging elements of Jazz, Rock, Pop, and R&B, the pair created a distinctive and eclectic body of work that owed its influences to Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and Sonny Rollins. At the same time, the band’s albums went on to become both critical and commercial successes, with many of their singles -- 'Do It Again,' 'Reelin’ in the Years', 'Show Biz Kids', 'Rikki Don’t Lose That Number', 'My Old School' and 'Hey Nineteen', among them -- finding immediate success on pop radio, resulting in ongoing airplay that continues even today. The band’s early success was ultimately derailed as a result of legal troubles, coupled with Becker’s personal issues stemming from the death of his then girlfriend from a drug overdose.
The pair reunited in 1993 while working together on Fagen’s second solo album Kamakiriad. Despite the record’s modest sales, a subsequent tour and the release of a comprehensive box set anthology paved the way for a permanent reunion. A new album, Two Against Nature, the band’s first new release in 20 years, won four Grammy Awards, including “Album of the Year” even despite fierce competition from such worthy contenders as Radiohead’s Kid A and Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP. The band was eventually inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in March 2001, with a final album, Everything Must Go, released two years later.
Becker himself released two individual efforts, 11 Tracks of Whack (1994) and Circus Money (2008).
Steely Dan’s final shows with Becker took place this past April, but illness forced him to bow out of subsequent performances. The band’s remaining performances are scheduled for late October as part of Blues Fest 2017.
