Steely Dan guitarist and songwriter Walter Becker, who died earlier this month, once told a friend that he grew up believing his English mother had died, but he later tracked her down in England.
"His relationships were difficult, and his relationship with life was difficult," his friend, American-born Hindu devotional singer Krishna Das declares, as reported by Rolling Stone. "But music was always there for him. It was the most dependable source of beauty he had in his life."
Although he had been battling with health issues for ten years, the reasons for his death have still not been made public. However, sources close to Steely Dan reveals that he struggled with hepatitis C and may have developed cancer.
Born in New York in 1950, Becker grew up in a broken home in the Forest Hills area of Queens, New York. When his parents separated, his mother moved back to England. Becker was subsequently reared by his father and his father's mother. His father - a vendor of paper-shredding equipment - had a heart attack when Becker was 16 and later died from another heart attack on a plane following a business trip in Germany. He had been on the way home to New York.
"I reacted badly to it in a number of ways," Becker told Rolling Stone in 2000, "and nothing captured my imagination again for a while."
"His family situation was really rough early on," says Joni Mitchell (and indeed Mary Black) producer Larry Klein. Klein, a bass guitarist as Becker also was, befriended Becker 20 years ago and helped the musician make his 2008 solo album, Circus Money.
"He lost his dad early and he had a troubled relationship with his mother, and that was a source of pain for him. That has a tendency to form a dark sense of humor. You're either going to laugh or cry all the time."
"I understand Walter was ill," Chevy Chase told the music magazine. Chase met Fagen (co-founder of Steely Dan) and Becker during their Bard College days in New York and remained in contact, "but I had no idea how sick (he, Becker, was)."
Steely Dan are scheduled to play two dates at 3Arena at the end of October.
