R.I.P.: Walter Becker of Steely Dan

Walter Becker

Steely Dan guitarist and co-founder Walter Becker died Sunday at the age of 67.

News of Becker’s death was announced on his official website. Further details of his passing were not revealed.

Becker was absent at both of Steely Dan's performances during July’s Classic West and Classic East concerts due to an unspecified illness. In August, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen told Billboard that his bandmate was “recovering from a procedure,” but didn’t elaborate further.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Fagen in 2001; with typical dry humor, the pair tersely solicited questions from the star-filled audience during one of the shortest acceptance speeches on record.

Variety reports Becker was born Feb. 20, 1950 in Queens, N.Y., and was raised in the borough community. Initially a saxophonist, he took up the guitar as a teen.

He encountered his future partner Fagen as a student at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, while playing a gig at the local club the Red Balloon. In his 2013 memoir “Eminent Hipsters,” Fagen – who studied music and English at the school — recalled, “His amp was tweaked to produce a fat, mellow sound, and turned up loud enough to generate a healthy Albert King-like sustain.”

Dubbed Steely Dan after a like-named sex toy in William S. Burroughs’ black-hearted novel “Naked Lunch,” the unit debuted in 1972 with the LP “Can’t Buy a Thrill.” Produced by Gary Katz (who shepherded all the act’s ‘70s releases), it spawned the massive radio hit “Do It Again,” which climbed to No. 6; the follow-up single “Reeling in the Years” peaked at No. 11.

The sophomore set “Countdown to Ecstasy” (1973) – which included “My Old School,” a backhanded tribute to Fagen and Becker’s alma mater Bard – was perhaps too bitter for most listeners and failed to produce any hits.

However, album rockers lofted the 1974 collection “Pretzel Logic” to No. 8. Driven mainly by the work of such jazz-bred sidemen as saxophonists Jerome Richardson and Ernie Watts and bassist Wilton Felder of the Crusaders, the album included the No. 4 single “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” which baldly lifted the keyboard hook of jazz keyboardist Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father.”



Growing tension within the band and Fagen and Becker’s antipathy for touring led to the dissolution of the touring Steely Dan configuration in 1974, and the duo would thereafter perform with a succession of studio musicians