One member of the band Steely Dan is no longer with us. Guitarist Walter Becker reportedly passed away earlier today at the age of 67. The news was confirmed by Becker’s official website and longtime friend and band mate Donald Fagen, who shared an open letter in tribute. Like many other bands and groups who’ve lost members along the way, such as The Doors, AC/DC, Queen, TLC, and Mobb Deep, the band Steely Dan will continue with the music and find their new normal.
Read the full open letter below.
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
The surviving member of Steely Dan had already been playing shows without Becker, including a recent performance at Classic West this summer. However, it will be interesting to see how the Steely Dan sound evolves when the first new material without the band’s co-founder is released.
Photo Credit: Owen Ela
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