Read Donald Fagen’s Touching Statement About the Late Walter Becker

"I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band."

By Matthew Oshinsky  |  September 5, 2017 | 11:47am
Music Features Steely Dan
Read Donald Fagen’s Touching Statement About the Late Walter Becker

Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen (pictured above left) has released a statement on the passing of his longtime collaborator and friend Walter Becker, who died Sunday at the age of 67.

Fagen recalls meeting Becker at Bard College and spending the following decades crafting some of the finest pop music of the late 20th century. He also vows to keep Steely Dan on the road “to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can.”

You can read the entire statement below. Also, check out this exclusive recording of what is probably the greatest Steely Dan show ever, recorded exclusively on May 20, 1974.

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

 
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