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Walter Becker performing with Steely Dan in 1973.
Walter Becker performing with Steely Dan in 1973. Photograph: ABC/Getty Images
Walter Becker performing with Steely Dan in 1973. Photograph: ABC/Getty Images

Walter Becker obituary

This article is more than 6 years old
Superbly talented guitarist, singer and songwriter who co-founded Steely Dan

Steely Dan, the American jazz-rock band formed by the multi-instrumentalists and songwriters Donald Fagen and Walter Becker in 1972, marked the high point of the music industry’s most profligate period. Young, ruthless and supremely intellectual, the two musicians gained a lifelong reputation for obsessive recording methods in the studio, forcing session musicians to record dozens of takes in search of the perfect sound – at a cost that would be impossible to consider nowadays.

The results justified this approach, at least on paper. Steely Dan sold more than 40m copies of nine studio albums, won four Grammy awards and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. Their music – slick and catchy, with wry, observational lyrics - was all-pervasive for much of the group’s first period of activity, between 1972 and 1981, and the clarity and depth of the albums’ production has made them popular reference points for studio engineers. However, Steely Dan’s huge success proved difficult to handle for Becker, who became addicted to drugs, endured a series of crises and withdrew from the band to regain his sanity.

Walter Becker with Donald Fagen, right, in 1977. Photograph: Nick Ut/AP

Becker, who has died at the age of 67 from an undisclosed illness, was born in the New York borough of Queens. His early life was troubled, according to Fagen: “Walter had a very rough childhood – I’ll spare you the details ... 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.”

Walter went to Stuyvesant high school, Manhattan, started on the saxophone, turned to the guitar and was taught to play the blues by Randy Wolfe, later famous as Randy California from the band Spirit. He met Fagen at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and the two played in a series of unsuccessful bands including the Leather Canary. This group’s drummer was Chevy Chase, later a comic actor.

Quitting Bard in 1969 without gaining a degree, Becker moved with Fagen to New York, where they attempted to find employment as musicians. A stint with the pop group Jay and the Americans, with whom Becker performed under the stage name Gus Mahler, eventually led to a position as in-house songwriters at the ABC label in Los Angeles. This was followed by a deal for their band, Steely Dan, named after a dildo in William Burroughs’ 1959 novel Naked Lunch. The guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter rounded out the band’s first line-up, alongside the drummer Jim Hodder.

Three years of touring to support the albums Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972), Countdown to Ecstasy (1973) and Pretzel Logic (1974) proved too exhausting to follow up, despite the acclaim that Becker and Fagen received, and Steely Dan became a studio-only project for the remainder of the 1970s. This benefited their albums, with their most successful LP, Aja (1977), boasting a glittering, widescreen sound that greatly impressed critics. Becker was one of the most accomplished guitar and bass players of his generation, co-writing songs on Aja such as Peg, Josie and Deacon Blues, the last of which inspired the title of the Scottish band Deacon Blue in the following decade.

By 1980 Becker was in crisis. In January that year, his girlfriend Karen Stanley died following a drug overdose in his apartment on the Upper West Side. The following year Stanley’s mother attempted to sue Becker for $17m, claiming that he had introduced her daughter to cocaine, morphine, heroin and barbiturates. A judge found in his favour and the case was settled. “I could barely understand what was going with her, really,” recalled Becker. “If you’ve ever known anyone that’s chronically depressed like that, it’s hard to appreciate what’s going on: you’re looking straight at it and you still don’t get it, because you’ve never gone through that.”

A month after Stanley’s death, Becker was seriously injured when a taxi drove into him in Central Park. “We were quantum criminals,” he joked of the accident, in which his right leg was fractured in several places. “The car and I were attempting to occupy the same place at the same time.” Compelled to use a wheelchair for the completion of Steely Dan’s album Gaucho (1980), their seventh and the last released in their first decade, Becker was also struggling with drug addiction. In June 1981 he and Fagen went their separate ways. “I was busy dissolving everything else about myself,” Becker said, “so it seemed the logical extension.”

Moving to Hawaii and recovering from his addiction, Becker embarked on building a family. He married Elinor, a yoga teacher, with whom he had a son, Kawai; the couple also adopted a daughter, Sayan. They lived on a cattle ranch equipped with a recording studio, where Becker launched a second career as a producer. He recorded albums by artists including Rickie Lee Jones, Michael Franks and China Crisis.

The occasional collaboration aside, Becker and Fagen did not reunite until 1993, when they toured again as Steely Dan and produced solo albums for each other (Becker’s 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994, was his first). The duo continued to perform and record on a sporadic basis after that, receiving particular recognition for their album Two Against Nature (2000). It was followed by Everything Must Go (2003), and the band were still touring this year, though Becker had to miss concerts in July.

Outside Steely Dan, Becker recorded and performed in recent years with the singer-songwriters Krishna Das, Rebecca Pidgeon and Madeleine Peyroux. His second solo album, Circus Money, was released in 2008.

He and Elinor divorced in 1997.

Walter Carl Becker, singer, songwriter and instrumentalist, born 20 February 1950; died 3 September 2017

  • This article was amended on 12 September 2017. It originally said that Walter Becker and Fagen produced each other’s first solo albums. However, Fagen’s Kamakiriad (1993), produced by Becker, was preceded as a solo album by The Nightfly (1982), produced by Gary Katz.

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