Rock & Roll in the NEWS:..September 5, 2017 (Steely Dan - Walter Becker)

Steely Dan's Donald Fagen Remembers Walter Becker in Thoughtful Note

 

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan pose for a portrait in April 1978.

Steely Dan's Donald Fagen shared a thoughtful note following the death of his bandmate Walter Becker.

Becker, who had been suffering from an unspecified illness, passed away Sunday (Sept. 3) at the age of 67. 

After becoming musical collaborators as students at New York's Bard College in 1967, Becker and Fagen went on to turn out hit songs during the 1970s, including "Rikki Don't Lose that Number," "Deacon Blues," "Kid Charlemagne," "Hey Nineteen," and “My Old School."

The Grammy-winning band split up in 1981 but reformed in the 1990s, releasing a handful of successful albums. Steely Dan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Read Fagen's full statement below.

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.