The Steely Dan concerts at 3Arena, Dublin will go ahead as scheduled on Saturday October 28 (sold out) with an extra concert date on Monday October 30. The band's co-founder, song-writer and guitarist, Walter Becker died on Sunday, aged 67.
"I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band," declared Becker's partner Donald Fagen, in a statement released on Sunday last.
He continued: "Walter Becker was my friend, my writing partner and my band-mate 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.
Fagen described Becker as "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."
The musician continued: "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 (Fagen's wife) we hooked up again, revived the Steely Dan concept and developed another terrific band."
