Walter Becker, a guitarist, bassist, and co-founder of Steely Dan, passed away on Sunday morning. He was sixty-seven, and living in Maui. No official cause of death has been offered publicly, though earlier this year, after Becker skipped shows in New York and Los Angeles, Donald Fagen, his longtime partner in Steely Dan, told Billboard that Becker had been “recovering from a procedure.”
Becker was born in Queens, and he graduated from Stuyvesant, one of New York’s most selective public high schools, in 1968. He and Fagen met at Bard, a liberal-arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, and started playing together as undergraduates. (At one point, they formed a group called the Leather Canary, which also featured the comedian Chevy Chase, on drums). Steely Dan coalesced in 1971, after Becker dropped out of Bard, and he and Fagen moved west, to California.
The band’s début LP, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” was released in 1972, producing two charting singles, “Do It Again,” and “Reelin’ in the Years.” Becker was just twenty-two at the time, but—and I say this lovingly, admiringly—the band’s early hits are suffused with midlife yearning. It’s as if they instinctively took to a kind of premature, pansophical adulthood. “Reelin’ in the Years,” especially, is a wise and wistful accounting of how time goes by: “Your everlasting summer / You can see it fading fast / So you grab a piece of something / That you think is gonna last,” Fagen chastises. That these songs were written and sung convincingly by very young men on the loose in Los Angeles is extraordinary.
When Steely Dan first appeared on “American Bandstand,” in 1973, Dick Clark adopted a solemn, nearly professorial keen before describing the band as “thinking person’s music.” The implication was: if you want to party, keep moving along. Fagen and Becker had a reputation for being cerebral, meticulous, and high-minded. Their songs are terrifically complex, structurally—mapping one harmonically could take days. The transitions between phases are so expert as to feel invisible, yet the cumulative effect is nonetheless transporting: when a person reappears on the other side of a Steely Dan song, she feels as if she’s been floated somewhere different. It’s disorienting in the way that waking up to a new season is disorienting. It’s not uncommon to look back and think, Wait, what day is it?
Which is all to say that Clark wasn’t wrong in his characterization, exactly. Along with a handful of other genres (R. & B., Chicago blues, various strains of Latin music), Fagen and Becker incorporated elements of jazz into their songwriting; for listeners who might’ve been unfamiliar with the particulars of what this meant, especially in a seventies-rock context, “elements of jazz” surely felt like pretentious shorthand for “nerd stuff.” Mostly, Fagen and Becker were dissatisfied by rock and roll’s more boorish, wrecking-ball tendencies, and thought that they could do better (an early, winking iteration of the group was called Bad Rock Band). The idea was simply to make something richer and less rote—something more spiritually akin to the novels of Phillip Roth, Terry Southern, or Kurt Vonnegut, less skronking and absurdist than Frank Zappa but just as ambitious. Fagen and Becker admired musicians like Sonny Rollins and Charles Mingus—determined, driving players who blithely disregarded or subverted other people’s expectations of their work.
Of course, it is difficult to be extremely serious for long without also being funny. From the start, Steely Dan lampooned itself, taking its name from a masturbatory device (the imposing, strap-on rubber dildo in William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”). Though critics will—and should—cite and celebrate Becker and Fagen’s chops as musicians and arrangers, I’ve always most admired their circuitous, clever lyrics. There are rambling, playful songs about gamblers, financial markets, space aliens, and the strange consolations of the recently dumped (“I kinda like frying up / My sad cuisine / Getting in bed / Curling up with a girlie magazine”). The band could be poignant, too. “Dirty Work,” from “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” is a part-resigned, part-indignant ode to being used, mercilessly, by someone you love. “Deacon Blues,” from the band’s 1977 album, “Aja,” is sort of about college football and sort of about jazz, but mostly about reckoning with your own failures:
The band went on hiatus from 1981 until 1993, when they reunited to tour in support of “Kamakiriad,” Fagen’s second solo album, which Becker produced. This led to more tours, and eventually, in 2000, a new album: “Two Against Nature,” the band’s eighth record, and its first since 1980. In 2001, “Two Against Nature” won the Grammy for Album of the Year, in a contentious upset, beating Beck’s “Midnite Vultures,” Paul Simon’s “You’re the One,” Radiohead’s “Kid A,” and Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP,” a murderer’s row of significant releases. (Newsweek, among other outlets, later called this one of “the most ridiculous” Album of the Year pronouncements ever, which is probably true, though I am oddly fond of the album’s particular slinkiness—the unapologetic way it slithers into a room.)
I could spend all day trying to figure out how to describe my favorite Steely Dan song—“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” from “Pretzel Logic,” the band’s third record—but it’s too wild and multitudinous to heel to written characterizations. I can’t get there. When I close my eyes and reach for metaphors, I see only Becker, his hair long and shiny, wearing sunglasses and the spectacularly wide-collared shirt from the band’s appearance on the TV show “The Midnight Special,” wagging a finger at me. “Good luck, friend,” is what I think he’s saying.
