Walter Becker, guitarist and co-founder of Steely Dan, has died aged 67.
The news was announced on Becker’s website. Prior to his death he had been off the road after undergoing surgery, according to a Billboard interview with his Steely Dan bandmate Donald Fagen.
The duo founded the band in 1972, releasing their debut LP, ‘Can't Buy a Thrill’ later that year. Steely Dan disbanded in 1981, following the release of ‘Gaucho’, and reformed as a touring and recording concern in 1993.
In a statement, Fagen paid tribute to Becker and promised to keep touring with Steely Dan. Their upcoming dates include several in the UK and Ireland as part of BluesFest.
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, both with the Steely Dan band. We’ll miss him forever.
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