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.
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