RIP Walter Becker

Walter Becker, Guitarist, Songwriter and Co-Founder of Steely Dan, Dies at 67
By JON PARELESSEPT. 3, 2017

Walter Becker, the guitarist and songwriter who made suavely subversive pop hits out of slippery jazz harmonies and verbal enigmas in Steely Dan, his partnership with Donald Fagen, died on Sunday. He was 67.

His death was announced on his official website, which gave no other details. He lived in Maui, Hawaii.

Mr. Becker was unable to perform with Steely Dan this summer at Classic West and Classic East in Los Angeles and New York City, two stadium-size festivals of 1970s bands. Last month, Mr. Fagen told Billboard, “Walter’s recovering from a procedure and hopefully he’ll be fine very soon.”

As Steely Dan, Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen changed the vocabulary of pop in the 1970s with songs like “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and “Peg.” Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen were close collaborators on every element of a song: words, music, arrangement. “We think very much the same musically. I can start songs and Walter can finish them,” Mr. Fagen said in a 1977 interview.

Steely Dan’s musical surfaces were sleek and understated, smooth enough to almost be mistaken for easy-listening pop, and polished through countless takes that earned Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen a daunting reputation as studio perfectionists.

Their songs were catchy and insinuating enough to infiltrate pop radio in the 1970s. “That’s sort of what we wanted to do, conquer from the margins,” Mr. Becker told Time Out New York in 2011. “Find our place in the middle based on the fact that we were creatures of the margin and of alienation.”

Steely Dan’s lyrics were far from straightforward, depicting cryptic situations and sketching characters like addicts, suicidal fugitives and dirty old men. “You can infer certain things about the lives of people who would write these songs. This we cannot and do not deny,” Mr. Becker deadpanned in an online interview with the BBC in 2000.

Meanwhile, the music used richly ambiguous harmonies rooted in Debussy, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, giving the songs a sophisticated core that would be widely influential across jazz and pop.

Although Steely Dan arrived as a full band on its 1972 debut album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” it soon recast itself as the Becker-Fagen songwriting team, backed by select session musicians. In its 1970s hitmaking heyday, Steely Dan rarely toured, preferring to work in the studio.

Steely Dan — named after a dildo in the William Burroughs novel “Naked Lunch” — dissolved after its 1980 album, “Gaucho,” though Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen stayed in contact.

In 1993, Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen re-emerged as Steely Dan, leading a band that would tour frequently well into 2017. Steely Dan’s songwriting and recording process remained painstaking; it released only two more studio albums, “Two Against Nature” in 2000 (which won the Grammy as Album of the Year) and “Everything Must Go” in 2003. But unlike its 1970s incarnation, Steely Dan thrived onstage.

In a statement released Sunday, Mr. Fagen wrote that Mr. Becker “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.”

Walter Becker was born in Forest Hills, Queens, on Feb. 20, 1950, and studied saxophone and guitar in his teens. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

He met Mr. Fagen in 1967 when they were students at Bard College, a place they would sardonically recall in Steely Dan’s “My Old School.”

“We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a moldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm,” Mr. Fagen wrote. With Mr. Fagen on keyboards and Mr. Becker on guitar or bass, they formed bands there and began to write songs together.

Once Mr. Fagen graduated in 1969, Mr. Becker dropped out and both moved to New York City, where they were noticed by Kenny Vance of the Top 40 band Jay and the Americans. They played in the touring band for Jay and the Americans and wrote the soundtrack for a 1971 Richard Pryor movie, “You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It.” The producer Gary Katz got them jobs as staff songwriters for ABC Records, and Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen moved to Los Angeles in 1971. Barbra Streisand recorded one of their songs, “I Mean to Shine.”

They assembled Steely Dan in Los Angeles with Mr. Fagen on keyboards and lead vocals, Mr. Becker on bass, Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter on guitars, Jim Hodder on drums and a second vocalist, David Palmer. “Do It Again” from Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” reached the Top 10.

The group quickly recorded two more albums, “Countdown to Ecstasy” in 1973 and “Pretzel Logic” in 1974, which included its biggest Top 10 hit, “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number.” In mid-1974, Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen decided that they no longer wanted to tour. “It seemed like the more complex the music we were playing, the less able we were to guarantee its consistency,” Mr. Becker recalled in a 1996 interview with The Toronto Star.

Steely Dan reached its pinnacle as a studio duo. Its lyrics took on ambitious themes: a stock-market crash in “Black Friday,” Puerto Rican migration in “The Royal Scam,” the jazz life in “Deacon Blues.” And its music grew both more subtle and more magisterial, with intricate horn arrangements and pristine sound.

On its 1977 album, “Aja,” Steely Dan brought in celebrated jazz musicians including Wayne Shorter, who plays on the title track, along with studio musicians like the guitarist Larry Carlton, the drummer Steve Gadd and the keyboardist Victor Feldman. “Aja” became Steely Dan’s first certified million-seller in the United States and its best-selling album.

But the recording of its successor, “Gaucho,” was plagued by problems. Mr. Becker had become a heroin user. The master tape of an entire nearly finished song, “The Second Arrangement,” was accidentally erased. Early in 1980, Mr. Becker’s girlfriend died of a drug overdose in his apartment. Weeks later, Mr. Becker was hit by a taxi, fracturing his leg. “We were quantum criminals,” Mr. Becker told The Independent in 1994. “The car and I were attempting to occupy the same place at the same time.”

In 1981, Steely Dan quietly disbanded. According to Mr. Fagen’s statement, Mr. Becker’s “habits got the better of him by the end of the ’70s, and we lost touch for a while.” Mr. Becker moved to Maui, where he detoxed and became an avocado farmer.

In the second half of the 1980s he returned to music. He was a producer, and was credited as a band member, on “Flaunt the Imperfection” by the Scottish band China Crisis in 1985, and he went on to produce Rickie Lee Jones’s 1989 album, “Flying Cowboys.”

In 1991, Mr. Becker began sitting in with Mr. Fagen’s New York Rock and Soul Revue. The duo also produced solo albums for each other: Mr. Fagen’s 1993 album, “Kamakiriad,” and Mr. Becker’s 1994 album, “11 Tracks of Whack” (which had 12 tracks). And in 1993, Steely Dan decisively re-emerged as a touring band.

Songwriting and recording remained a painstaking process for Steely Dan; it didn’t release another studio album, “Two Against Nature,” until 2000, 20 years after “Gaucho.” But “Two Against Nature” sold a million copies in the United States and won the Grammy Award as Album of the Year; Steely Dan was also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Its final album, “Everything Must Go,” was released in 2003; for the first time on a Steely Dan studio album, Mr. Becker sang lead vocals, on “Slang of Ages.” Mr. Becker released a second solo album, “Circus Money,” in 2008.

Steely Dan toured regularly until well into 2017, settling in for long residencies at places like the Beacon Theater in New York City and performing entire albums from its catalog.

The band that once shunned touring had grown to enjoy it. “We’ve been lucky,” Mr. Becker said in 2011. “We’ve stretched our audience’s indulgence and fondness for us to the point that it can still be fun for us.”

Mr. Fagen’s statement implied that Steely Dan would continue to perform live. “I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band,” he wrote.

Correction: September 3, 2017
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year the album “Two Against Nature” was released. It was 2000, not 1993.