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Steely Dan Co-Founder Walter Becker Dies at 67

Walter Becker of Steely Dan performs at Coachella in 2015.

Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Coachella

Walter Becker, the songwriter and musician who co-founded jazz-influenced rock band Steely Dan, died Sunday at the age of 67, Variety reports. Becker’s death was announced on his website and then confirmed in a statement by his Steely Dan bandmate Donald Fagen. No cause of death was given, but Becker was unable to make several concert appearances this summer due to illness, leaving Fagen to perform alone.

Becker, a native of Queens, New York, met Fagen at Bard College in 1967, where they played together in a number of bands, including one in which classmate Chevy Chase was the drummer. Becker and Fagen ended up in New York City, where they joined the studio band for Jay and the Americans. In 1971, they were hired as house songwriters for ABC-Dunhill record label and relocated to Los Angeles. That job got them their own record deal, and with a bevy of studio musicians backing them (including future Doobie Brother Jeff “Skunk” Baxter) they created Steely Dan.

The band’s name was lifted from a sex toy mentioned in William S. Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, and their sound borrowed freely from jazz, pop, and rock and roll. Their 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, had hit singles in “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years”; “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” Steely Dan’s biggest hit, came with 1974’s Pretzel Logic, their third outing. Steely Dan stopped touring after Pretzel Logic as the band’s initial lineup was replaced by a rotating cast of session musicians, but Becker and Fagen released four more studio albums together as the 1970s rolled on, including audiophile-favorite Aja.

The prolonged and difficult production process behind 1980’s Gaucho, combined with Becker’s battle with substance abuse and the death-by-overdose of Becker’s girlfriend Karen Stanley led to Steely Dan’s breakup, as Becker detoxed and regrouped on Maui. In the 1980s, Becker worked as a record producer, occasionally collaborating with Fagen on other projects. In 1993, Steely Dan reunited to tour in support of their box set, Citizen Steely Dan, but their real return came in 2000 with the release of Two Against Nature, their first studio recording in two decades. Two Against Nature was a critical and commercial success, going platinum and winning the Album of the Year Grammy. In 2001, they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the capstone to what even the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame website called “an improbably successful year for a band that had been largely dormant for the previous 20.” Their final album, 2003’s Everything Must Go, marked the first time Becker sang lead vocals on a Steely Dan song.

Donald Fagen released a heartfelt statement recounting his friendship and collaboration with Becker, vowing “to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band.” Here’s his complete statement:

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