Walter Becker - RIP

Walter Becker died on Sunday.  He was 67.  If you don’t know who he is, stop reading now.

Becker’s partner in Steely Dan [Donald Fagen] wrote this about him today:  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. 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 Becker started out as a guitar player, but when Steely Dan formed, he switched to bass.  When you have two guitarists with the caliber of Denny Dias and Skunk Baxter, your guitar services become somewhat redundant, hence the switch to bass.  Steely Dan stopped touring after Pretzel Logic and became a studio concern.  The composition of Steely Dan varied from album to album.  It even varied from song to song.  If Becker needed to play guitar, he’d play it.  If he needed to play bass, he’d play it, though that became a lesser need once Becker and Fagen met Chuck Rainey.  What was Walter Becker’s role in Steely Dan?  Did he write the music, or did he write the words?  In an interview I read from nine years ago, Walter Becker was asked about the division of labor between himself and Donald Fagen:

Can you give a nutshell breakdown of the division of labor in Steely Dan? It’s hard for an outsider to know who’s responsible for what.

Yeah, I think that with most partnerships that run for a certain amount of time—and ours has run for a pretty long time—the division of labor is very ad hoc. So whatever needs to be done, sometimes I’ve got something to start with, sometimes Donald’s got something to start with. Sometimes we really work very closely, collaboratively on every little silly millimeter on the writing of the song and certainly of the records, and sometimes less so. And so over the course of the partnership, I think we’ve done all sorts of different things different ways, and probably that still is changing in a way, because if I can speculate on Donald’s behalf, I think there is a level of perfection, polish, sophistication, and abundance of detail and structural stuff that he wants to hear in his music that I sort of ran out of patience to do. My attention span is not that good anymore, and I sort of believe—and maybe the lyrics somewhere say this—that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Steely Dan’s music was different.  While many a group from the 1970s went for high volume and was for the most part in 4/4 time, Steely Dan took the jazz route.  In 1993, Walter Becker said “we thought superimposing jazz harmonies on pop songs was subversive.”  Fagen and Becker are somewhat like Tom Waits in the themes they write about.  They look at humanity’s dark side, and sang anything but love songs.  Kid Charlemagne was based on LSD chemist Owsley Stanley, Cousin Dupree is somewhat incestuous [the dude loves his cousin], Rikki Don’t Lose the Number and Everything You Did are about infidelity, Everyone’s Gone to the Movies is an ode to pornography, Hey Nineteen addresses cradle-robbing, and so on.  It’s sex, drugs and jazz for these guys.

Why would a band name themselves after a dildo from a William Burroughs novel?  I’m not a big Steely Dan fan – I won’t pretend that I was/am.  .  She Who Must Be Obeyed especially doesn’t like them.  I can take Donald Fagen’s vocals in small doses only.  But [and there is always a ‘but’], I like Aja, a lot [The Royal Scam is a close second].  A friend from the old Ohio neighborhood, whose parents didn’t think much of public school education [and these days with mandatory testing, teaching to the test and federal funding that is dependent on test scores, can you blame them?], went to prep school in Connecticut.  When he returned for summer break, he introduced me to Steely Dan.  More specifically, he introduced me to Aja.  It’s one of those albums [like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon] that you can ‘test drive’ a stereo you might want to buy.  It sounded so good you could play it on a shitty portable eight-track player [how’s THAT for dating one’s self?] and it would sound ok.  That came in very handy, for when I moved to Colorado in July 1978, all I had to listen to was a few eight-track tapes [one of which was Aja] and that shitty portable eight-track player. 

Until we finally moved into our little house on the prairie in March 1979, that’s all I had.  I still like Aja a lot.  After Aja came the song for a film called FM.  The song – FM [No Static At All] – that I thought was very cool [I still do].  Walter Becker didn’t play much lead guitar because he chose not to.  He and Donald Fagen were perfectionists, almost to a fault.  They hired the best players of any instrument in the business, and such was Becker and Fagen’s reputation for being stern taskmasters that these seasoned studio pros craved their approval.  They didn’t always get it.  Walter Becker was the EF Hutton of guitar players.  When he played, people listened. He played lead guitar on FM – I noticed.  It wasn’t until years later that I found out that FM was an outtake from Aja.  No wonder I liked it…  I eagerly awaited their follow-up, and it came in 1980 with Gaucho.  I heard Hey Nineteen on the radio, and I absolutely hated it [and still do to this day].  Gaucho was for Steely Dan what The Long Run was for The Eagles – it was boring, it took too long to make, and it was the album that killed the group [Third World Man is ok].  And like The Long Run, Gaucho killed my interest in Steely Dan.  It also killed Donald Fagen’s and Walter Becker’s interest in each other, so it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one who felt that way about that album.

Awhile back a Facebook friend of mine asked me what I thought about Steely Dan.  My answer was dismissive – “I liked them when I was a kid, then I grew up.”  But I’ve been doing a re-assessment over the last year.  Over time I grew to realize these guys were as crabby as I am.  And in this age where all music sounds the same, and everything is Unicorns and rainbows [cue the “millennial whoops” now], “different” from two old crabby, grouchy guys who write their own stuff, and who play real instruments with real musicians is just fine with me.

There isn’t much to add here.  In announcing his death, Walter Becker’s website simply read the following:

w a l t e r   b e c k e r              f e b .   2 0   1 9 5 0   —  s e p t .   0 3   2 0 1 7. 

I’ll keep it equally as simple – RIP Walter Becker.

Songs for the iPod:

Do It Again [Can't Buy a Thrill, 1972]

Showbiz Kids [Countdown to Ecstasy, 1973]

Rikki Don't Lose That Number [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

Pretzel Logic [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

With a Gun [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

Charlie Freak [Pretzel Logic, 1974]
Black Friday [Katy Lied, 1975]

Doctor Wu [Katy Lied, 1975]

Kid Charlemagne [The Royal Scam, 1976]

The Caves of Altamira [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Don't Take Me Alive [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Sign in Stranger [The Royal Scam, 1976]
Haitian Divorce [The Royal Scam, 1976]

The Royal Scam [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Deacon Blues [Aja, 1977]

Aja [Aja, 1977]

Peg [Aja, 1977]

Josie [Aja, 1977]

Black Cow [Aja, 1977]

Home at Last [Aja, 1977]

FM [No Static At All] [FM original soundtrack, 1978]

Down in the Bottom [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]

Junkie Girl [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]

Cousin Dupree [Two Against Nature, 2000]

Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore [Walter Becker - Circus Money, 2008]

Circus Money [Walter Becker - Circus Money, 2008]
Lucky Henry [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]
Janie Runaway [Two Against Nature, 2000]
Third World Man [Gaucho, 1980]