It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
Really sad to hear Walter Becker has passed...
Steely Dan music touched me deep. My desert Island music.
RIP Walter.
Condolences Donald..
http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/7950045/musicians-react-steely-dan-walter-becker-death-social-media-donald-fagen
I think Larry Carlton summed it up when he politely said Walter was never a really good guitarist by his own admission he got by.
But if I could write songs as great as he did why would you bother.
Gods house band needs some decent tunes RIP
i played in brums tribute to SD , "the danny steel orchestra" it was tough to learn a 2hr set at short notice ( 2 weeks ) but mostly enjoyable except for the usuals ... i might treck up to stoke to see the nearly boys as tribute .....
goodbye major Dude ... x
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, both with the Steely Dan band. We’ll miss him forever.
Donald Fagen
September 3 2017
RIP Walter.
Anyone here like Becker's voice? That was a pleasant surprise when I first heard it.
It's so hard to pick a favourite track and where do you start with Hey Nineteen, Babylon Sisters, Haitian Divorce, Josie, Peg, Reelin' and Kid Charlemagne etc but today, "My Old School" really did it for me featuring lovely guitar work by Jeff "Skunk" Baxter who was also lucky enough to also play in The Doobies.
I often wonder if we would've had some of the artists that emerged and were inspired by them and there's 2 guitarists who I know love their work but never graced any of their albums - Steve Lukather and Robben Ford.