Tributes flow for Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker

Fellow musicians were quick to pay tribute to Walter Becker, the guitarist and bassist of Steely Dan who passed away at his home in Maui, Hawaii, on the weekend aged 67 after a lengthy illness.

Mark Ronson called him “one half of the team I aspire to every time I sit down at a piano.”

Ryan Adams wrote, “‪Walter Becker, you changed my life with your mystical music and guitar playing,”

Questlove remembered Becker as “possibly one of my favorite architects of the 70s ‘FM’ smooth sound.”

William “Bootsy” Collins bid farewell: “Another one of the greats from our era has transferred his presence to another frequency. Mr. Walter Becker may u [sic] R.I.P. brother..”

Walter Becker grew up in Queens, New York, first playing sax before picking up the guitar.

He met Donald Fagen at college. They worked as songwriters (Barbra Streisand’s I Mean to Shine) and members of Jay and the Americans’ backing band before finding themselves in California and founding Steely Dan in 1972,

Right from the start, Steely Dan’s approach was to create a musical universe where jazz and rock met with meticulous arrangements and musical performances, and quirky unexpected twists.

“I’m not interested in a rock/jazz fusion,” Becker told Rolling Stone in 1974. “That kind of marriage has so far only come up with ponderous results.

“We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.”

He added, “I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords.

“From that, and from the Harvard Dictionary of Music, I learned everything I wanted to know.”

When he inducted Steely Dan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, Moby said, “Although they always seemed to approach popular culture with a certain sense of irony and distaste, they also clearly have a love for beauty and beautiful music.”

Naming themselves after the dildo in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, they had a series of hit singles as Do It Again, Reelin’ In the Years, Rikki Don’t Lose That Number and Deacon Blues.

Albums as Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho were critically acclaimed and sold 40 million copies.

They toured Australia a number of times, the last time in 2011 where they were simply exhilarating and ground breaking

On the weekend, Donald Fagen posted: 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.”