- Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March, 2001 (as a member of Steely Dan).
- At first, he played bass guitar for Steely Dan (as well as being the co-founder/co-songwriter with Donald Fagen) but, then, after a few years, he played regular guitar (providing the solos on several tracks) along with studio musicians such as Larry Carlton, Jeff Baxter (aka Jeff "Skunk" Baxter) and Rick Derringer.
- In 2000, released "Two Against Nature", Steely Dan's first album of new material in 20 years, which garnered 4 Grammy awards. In June, 2003, released Steely Dan's latest, "Everything Must Go". (January 2004)
- Steely Dan, named after a William Burroughs term for a marital aid in his book "Naked Lunch," was formed in the early '70s, years after Becker and Fagen met at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. . The act was known for heady songs full of unexpected sonic detours and the band's ornately and painstakingly produced albums, such as 1974's "Pretzel Logic" and 1977's "Aja," are today considered signature works of the decade. "Pretzel Logic" became the band's first album to reach the top 10 in the U.S., its success fueled heavily by the single "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," a tune that documents an overly confident, arguably delusional and likely ill-advised romantic pursuit. The song broadcast Steely Dan's love of jazz, as it pulled its riff from pianist Horace Silver's light-stepping, Brazilian-tinged staple "Song for My Father." Becker and Fagen were essentially the only constants of Steely Dan, which by the mid-'70s had ceased touring and increasingly relied upon a revolving cast of ace musicians. For 1975's "Katy Lied," for instance, the act underwent significant lineup shifts and the work was the first to high-light Michael McDonald, who would later go on to fame with the Doobie Brothers, as a vocalist on a Steely Dan album. Becker and Fagen were often a study in contrasts themselves. "Fagen," wrote former Times music writer Richard Cromelin, "always seemed the more human half of Steely Dan - his sarcasm was downright benign next to Walter Becker, a baby-faced sadist who delighted in turning interviews into whimpering wrecks." The Steely Dan creation myth often notes that Becker and Fagen were drawn to each other via a mutual disdain of hippie culture as well as an adoration for jazz, comedy, science fiction and writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Kurt Vonnegut. In the late '60s, the two worked with pop act "Jay and the Americans" before heading to Los Angeles to work as song-writers and eventually embarking on a career with themselves as the forefront as Steely Dan. Early on, Becker largely played bass, and he said he was encouraged to focus on the guitar by Fagen. In time, Becker developed a languid and loose style that could seamlessly drift among jazz, blues and rock - a proficient and reassuring sound that tempered his off-stage or between song satirical incisiveness. "Donald wanted me to play guitar because he felt that we'd end up with some-thing weirder and more interesting if I did it," Becker told The L. A. Times in 1994. "A lot of times, we'd get somebody to come in and try something and we'd listen to it, and it would be too ordinary or (the guitarist) wouldn't understand it in any unusual tonal way. That was the problem we had a lot of the time back then." The band drifted after the release of 1980's "Gaucho," regularly citing fatigue, personal disagreements and drug abuse, but reunited in 1993. In 2000, the band act released its first studio album in two decades with "Two Against Nature." The albums would win the Grammy Award for album of the year and help Steely Dan remain a touring force well into its fifth decade.
- He started out playing saxophone, and took up guitar in his teens. He attended Bard College, where he met his future partner Donald Fagen while playing a gig at a local club.
- Member of the band Steely Dan.
- Walter Becker was born February 20th, 1950, in Queens, N.Y., and in the early '80s he retreated to Hawaii to focus on living a cleaner lifestyle. During Steely Dan's hiatus, Becker stayed out of the spotlight, occasionally working as a producer for such artists as Rickie Lee Jones and China Crisis, but not releasing his debut solo album until 1994 with "11 Tracks of Whack." Though the album leaned, albeit slightly, a little more rock'n'roll than some of Steely Dan's material, it showed Becker hadn't lost his edge. "I came up with that title when I realized that a lot of the songs I wrote were not motivated by my love of my fellow man," he once told The L.A. Times. "As much as anything else, they rank on people or are lashing out, or, in some cases, are about people who are dead." Yet Becker and Fagen proved far more potent together than separate, and after returning as a touring entity in 1993, Steely Dan slowly returned to active recording duty. In 2003, the band released its second album since reuniting, "Everything Must Go," and in 2015 Steely Dan represented the classic rock set at the youth-focused Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Shortly after that appearance, Becker spoke to The Times about the balance of staying artistically challenged while recognizing the audience's penchant for nostalgia. "I don't think we deny it," Becker said of respecting the crowd's desire to reminisce. "We don't go out of our way to make a big deal out of it or to put it at the forefront of what's happening. But it's there; it can't - not - be there. And to the extent that it is there, I think it's satisfying for the audience - and it's satisfying for us too," he said. "It's satisfying to make the connection with people, especially given that we may not be the most socially affiliating people in the world".
- Walter Becker (b: 02/20/1950, d: 09/03/2017, age 67), co-founder of the band "Steely Dan" who was known for his acerbic wit and proficient work with the guitar, as one of the key architects of Steely Dan, was a longtime musical partner with Donald Fagen (b: 01/10/1948); they were responsible for numerous hit songs and albums throughout the band's 1970's heyday. Often low-key and influenced by jazz or R&B, Steely Dan's patiently calm arrangements contrasted with the band's dark sense of humor and heavily poetic lyrics - word puzzles that were often caked in cynicism and subtle perversity. Donald Fagen praised his collaborator as "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".
- A New York Queens native who started out playing the saxophone and eventually picked up the guitar, Becker met Fagen as a student 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 moldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm," Fagen recalled. "We liked a lot of the same things: jazz from the twenties through the mid-sixties, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago Blues." They played with the 1960's pop group Jay and the Americans and penned the song "I Mean to Shine," performed by Barbara Striesand, in 1971, before moving to California and founding their band, which they named after a sex toy in William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel "Naked Lunch." Like a lot of kids from fractured families, Becker had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people's hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art. Their first album as Steely Dan, "Can't Buy Me a Thrill" was released in 1972, and featured both "Do It Again" and "Reelin' in the Years." A lukewarm Rolling Stone review from the time said the album contained "three top level cuts and scattered moments of Inspiration." The band continued producing albums throughout the 1970's, boasting songs penned by Fagen and Becker and music provided by some of the best studio session musicians in the music business. "It wouldn't bother me at all," Becker said in an interview, "not to play on my own album".
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