Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker died on Sunday, aged 67. Paddy Kehoe looks at the musical trajectory of the visionary guitarist and songwriter.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's first meeting at New York's Bard College was wittilly recalled in Fagen's amusingly acerbic memoir, Eminent Hipsters. In time the idiosyncratic pair, who never looked like people bound to be future rock stars, would go on to sell in excess of 40 million copies of their albums.
They wrote I Mean to Shine for Barbra Streisand, and performed together as members of Jay and the Americans' backing band, before moving to California in the early '70s to form Steely Dan, itself a daring move which took them out of their East Coast comfort zone.
The band got its unusual name from a sex toy in William S. Burroughs' novel, Naked Lunch. Their fellow band members in Steely Dan (Mark 1, of many) were guitarists Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter and Denny Dias, drummer Jim Hodder and singer David Palmer - the latter provides the sweet baritone on the stirring balled Dirty Work, from their 1972 debut album, Can't Buy A Thrill.
Reelin' in the Years - which gave a title and a guitar riff to one of RTÉ's most popular TV shows - also featured on that startling debut, which won the band legions of fans who remained keenly interested in Steely Dan throughout five decades.
Becker's was somehow a more muted, less quantifiable contribution in the Steely Dan two-hander, whose sound was characterised by Fagen's moodily baleful keyboard constructions and sassy, streetwise vocal. Yet Becker was the bassist, co-producer and co-writer of many of their great songs - he also produced Donald Fagen's solo album Kamkiriad, as well as Rickie Lee Jones' album Flying Cowboys.
Steely Dan's lyrics were enigmatic, sphinx-like, surely key to their late-Beat charm. Fagen was an explainer too, when he wanted to be, with crystal-clear elucidation of the band's musical processes in TV series such as Classic Albums, which put their masterpiece Aja under the spotlight. Becker radiated equal intelligence but tended to be quieter, more self-effacing, yet his air of bemusement at life was generally apparent.
The brand of earnest chutzpah that many bands starting out cannot help but radiate would have been alien to both players. The reason for this is that both Fagen and Becker were more keenly aware than most of the towering legacy of people who went before them, from Sam Cooke to Duke Ellington, to modern jazzers like Horace Silver - from whom they borrowed the opening notes of Song for My Father for the signature chords of Rikki Don't Lose That Number.
A keen sense of music history tends to make decent musicians relatively modest, aware of the correct calibration of self-esteem in the greater scheme of things. It doesn't square well with shallow celebrity values, and one could imagine Becker and Fagen shrugging their shoulders at the announcement that they were to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame (as they were in 2001.) In a certain way, they were old before their time, yet the best of their music has a youthful vitality to match the best of the Beach Boys.
