With the passing of Walter Becker, the music world lost a phenomenal talent and personality. Any time an artist of Becker’s status is taken from us, it’s important to retain the lessons he taught and examples he set.
On and off stage, Walter Becker was the perfect counter to Donald Fagen’s borderline sarcastic, aggressive performances. Becker smoothed Fagen’s urban vision of hustlers, gamblers, and all-night parties with a sleek, almost lounge-style sound. The result was a discography loaded with songs that lived in your head until they were evicted by the next Steely Dan song. Here, let’s plant one right now — we bet you’re still humming this hours after you finish reading this.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=49dI_V7Has8
Becker’s guitar education was informal, to say the least. “I’m a self-taught musician,” he admitted. “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.”
Becker also drew from other artists. “My primary influences were the best jazz players from the ’50s and ’60s and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians,” Becker said. His listening habits gave him an equally diverse palette of influences. “I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends,” he once said.
With such a deep roster of styles and genres to choose from, you would think that Becker’s music would’ve been all over the road. But Becker excelled at economy. He always considered playing guitar and bass as a part of the songwriting process. As a result, Becker’s music was subtle, nuanced. Rather than shred at center stage, Steely Dan tunes all worked together to deliver a sound that goes down like Cuervo Gold and the fine Colombian. Listen to his masterfully understated, earworm-planting guitar work on the megahit, “Hey Nineteen.”
When the music called for it, Becker was more than capable of stepping into the spotlight and cutting loose, like his solo work on “Black Friday.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHRBi7RtZro
From his subtle mastery of bass and rhythm guitar to his magical lead guitar work, Walter Becker was the definition of “less is more.” Thank you, Walter, for decades of amazing music.