Steely Dan Co-Founder Walter Becker Dies

Guitarist, bassist and co-founder of Steely Dan Walter Becker has died at the age of 67.

The announcement was made on his official website with no further detail on his death.

Becker was born in 1950 and grew up in Queens, New York, where he began as a saxophone player then switched to guitar as a teenager. 

Steely Dan bandmate Donald Fagen released a statement in Becker's memory.

“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...

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."

After the duo's success in the 1970s, they took a 20-year hiatus, where Becker released a solo album called "11 Tracks of Whack" in 1994.

Eventually the two reunited for another album called "Two Against Nature" in 2000 which won a Grammy for Album of the Year. 

Their last album together was 2003's "Everything Must Go," and Becker's last solo album was  "Circus Money" released in 2008.


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