Walter Becker, guitarist, bassist and co-founder of the influential band Steely Dan, died on Sunday aged 67, which did not disclose the cause of death.
Becker was lead guitarist of the Hal of Fame jazz rock band, which he formed with Donald Fagen, the keyboardist and lead vocalist, when the pair were at Bard College in New York. Becker recently missed the two Classic shows due to him undergoing an undisclosed procedure, with former Steely Dan studio ace Larry Carlton filling in. The band recently had a series of October shows go on sale and its assumed the dates will remain. Although Fagen sang almost all the material, Becker played an important role in the Steely Dan live show as guitarist and almost De facto band leader.
Fagen had the following to say about Becker:
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.
Donald Fagen
September 3 2017
