Read Donald Fagen’s Moving Tribute to Steely Dan Partner Walter Becker
“I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band,” Fagen promises of Becker’s legacy
Following the death of Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker, Donald Fagen penned a tribute to his longtime collaborator and bandmate. Photo: David Pomponio/Film Magic
Following the death of Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker, his longtime collaborator and bandmate Donald Fagen penned a tribute to the guitarist/bassist who died at the age of 67.
In the tribute, Fagen reminisces about their time as college students and how a “very rough childhood” in part molded Becker into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted artist he became. Fagen also promises to “keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band.”
Read Fagen’s remembrance of Becker in full 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
